Over on the Athletic this week, I looked at nine September(ish) callups of note; posted a minor-league scouting notebook on Jarlin Susana, Joseph Dzierwa, and other O’s and Nats prospects; and posted a draft scouting notebook covering both the PG All-American and Under Armour games.
I sent out a new issue of my free email newsletter this week. For socials, I’m still mostly on Bluesky, Instagram, and TikTok, and posted a new video to the latter two sites this week about the top three prospects recalled in the last week.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Texas Monthly goes very long on the war over the Rio Grande River’s water, with the potential for taps to run dry as early as next year. This is Pulitzer-worthy material.
- ProPublica exposes how Texas AG and Senate candidate Ken Paxton (R) may be violating federal ethics laws. It also sounds like he may be committing mortgage fraud, too?
- Semafor exposes the rise of paid actors using AI scripts in unlabeled and often misleading videos that push outrage bait, often targeted at specific Democratic politicians and candidates, across social media.
- The Trump Administration continues to weaponize the IRS to attack its enemies, threatening to revoke the tax-exempt status of six universities if they don’t bend the knee to his whites-first policies.
- ICE gave a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant and Wright State student, here legally, an ankle monitor. He killed himself a few days later. I’m unclear whose interests were served here.
- Texas Monthly also has the scoop on TCU revoking the Star-Telegram’s media credentials for (checks notes) reporting on something that happened in TCU’s locker room. I didn’t know frogs were that petty.
- Dan Ariely, the best-selling author of Predictably Irrational and the inspiration for the network procedural Irrational, is facing a new round of allegations of research fraud after a review of the data used for a major 2002 paper on procrastination found evidence of fabrication.
- A Yale study estimates that universal health care in the United States would save 114,000 lives and $1 trillion every year. So why is the mere suggestion of it supposed to be some sort of political poison?
- NPR asks what happened to the U.S. campaign to end child marriage? The answer is “Republicans.” And, more specifically, evangelical Christianity’s hold on the party.
- The University of Wisconsin-Madison forced out a professor who (allegedly) slept with and harassed some of his students, so of course Arizona State welcomed him with open arms.
- A German court has found that the AI music software Suno is basically a big plagiarism engine, and now Jason Isbell and other U.S. musicians have filed a suit of their own, this time charging Suno with unlicensed imitation of their voices rather than straight copyright infringement. And now the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada is suing Suno too.
- Bari Weiss’ CBS News pushed out a story that appeared to tie Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to the 9/11 attacks.
- California’s legislature passed a bill designed to support – or even save – community news outlets through public investment.
- The police chief in Senatobia, Mississippi, where an officer shot and killed a 1-year-old while pursuing a woman suspected of shoplifting, has been fired. Harold Vanderford had also used racist slurs about Black people in text messages, and tried to resign before he was fired. Maybe Arizona State will hire him?
- The widow of a U.S. airman killed in Trump’s illegal war on Iran had to go to social media to get death benefits because, in her words, the military claimed it wasn’t a war, so she wasn’t entitled to the benefits that accrue to the surviving spouse when a soldier is killed during a war.
- The United States was the only nation to vote against a UN resolution to change its official map to one that reflects Africa’s true size.