My only piece at Athletic this week was a contribution to this news story on Kade Anderon’s imminent promotion, although I did get to some games and will be back to writing scouting notebooks next week when I get to at least one more.
I appeared on NBC News to talk about Tommy John’s legacy, and on Bleed Dodger Blue to talk about the Dodgers’ farm system and recent trade for Tarik Skubal.
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And now, the links…
- The New Yorker looks at the legacy of Nobel Prize winner Carleton Gadjusek, who won the award in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the brain-wasting prion disease kuru, but also used his research trips to find young boys to bring back to the U.S. so he could molest them.
- Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré explains the growing problem of teenaged boys using pervert glasses like Meta’s to film themselves harassing classmates without consent.
- The Trump Administration is planning to add new concentration camps to hold up to 3000 immigrant children. Meanwhile, the hostages at one ICE camp in Tacoma are on another hunger strike to protest the inhumane conditions there.
- ICE agents are asking airline employees to help them kidnap people. Some of those employees are fighting back. You have no obligation to help ICE.
- ICE agents also detained the Padres’ minor-league catching coordinator, claiming he had remained in the country illegally after his work visa expired. I’ll be very curious to see how MLB responds to this, given their obeisance to this Administration and its ideas on many other fronts.
- Israel’s National Security Minister said that the country should be killing 30 to 40 Palestinians every night in Gaza.
- Israel finally admitted that they killed 5-year-old Hind Rajab and the emergency responders trying to save her from the car where she was trapped with her dead family members, as they opened an investigation into the killings. However, Israel refuses to open a similar investigation into the IDF’s killing of a World Central Kitchen aid worker in 2024.
- Iowa State Rep. Shannon Lundgren (R) used her official stationery to write a letter vouching for the character of a man convicted for at least the second time of sexually abusing a minor.
- Noted Islamophobe Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) was caught on camera going through the mailbox of a voter in his district, a violation of federal law.
- In a debate ahead of a runoff election for the Republican nomination, Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC) couldn’t answer a basic question about Taiwan and China.
- The debunked lab-leak hypothesis is making the rounds yet again. Dr. Philip Markolin wrote about the harm mainstream media do by platforming it. This came the same week a preprint – a paper that has not been peer-reviewed, so keep in mind it is merely preliminary – appeared that showed that coronaviruses can naturally evolve furin cleavage sites like the one that made SARS-CoV-2 so dangerous.
- 404 Media dropped a tracker in shipment of rare books to see which AI company bought it. The answer was Amazon, which then destroyed the books after scanning them.
- Also from 404 Media, a new study shows Twitter’s algorithm feeds you more ragebait and impacts Democrats more than Republicans, although I think the latter is just a function of the former – the current Republican platform is very driven by the politics of rage.
- Delaware’s Kent County, the purple county between New Castle (blue) and Sussex (red, except for the beaches), has a measles outbreak with at least six cases already. Measles is entirely preventable with the safe MMR vaccine, no matter what the White House claims.
- And Arizona parents are skipping vaccinations for their kids at a record rate, even as measles surges there too. In eight to ten years, we’re going to have a slew of deaths from SSPE that would never have happened had the anti-vaccine movement not gotten into this position of power.
- Scientific American dives into what really happened to the indigenous people of Easter Island, questioning a long-held hypothesis that they died out because they didn’t manage their limited natural resources prudently.
- I have only the faintest sense of who Hasan Piker is, other than that he has a scary-sounding name that right-wing outlets are trying to wield against Democrats, but it sounds like he might sue Scott Jennings and Salem Media for defamation.
- Some board game kickstarters of note: Whisperwood is a sprawling bag-building game that can take up to 3.5 hours, to be published by Cardboard Alchemy (Flamecraft).
- A new-to-me publisher called Play for Keeps has a Kickstarter effort up for new editions of three games: Mexica, Bridges of Shangri-La, and Reel Rivals (fka El Caballero).