This week at the Athletic, I did my annual column on players I was wrong about, previewed the Arizona Fall League rosters, and held a live Q&A on Thursday.
I’m due for another issue my free email newsletter this week. For socials, I’m still mostly on Bluesky, Instagram, and TikTok. I’d love to hear any feedback on my videos on the latter two so far, particularly around their length.
And now, the links…
- One of the best and most horrifying longreads of the year comes from WIRED as they explain the “burnerverse,” where anonymous accounts on X trade nonconsensual intimate videos and images, and then try to ruin the subjects’ lives by doxing them and contacting family and friends. The story centers on University of Florida student Maddie Kowalski, who is fighting back with lawsuits even in the face of a tepid police response (two of her accused tormentors remain on campus). One of the other burner accounts unveiled here was of Jacob Gomberg, a pitcher at Indiana University; I reached out to their Athletics Department and received this comment: “Yesterday we were made aware of charges filed against Jacob Gomberg in Alachua County, Florida. We take these allegations very seriously and promptly turned the matter over to the University’s Office of Civil Rights Compliance who will continue to gather information, assess the matter, and determine any next steps.”
- Bloomberg exposes how multiple intelligence and human failures led the United States to bomb an Iranian school for girls, killing 123 children and at least 27 more people. One of the many errors came from overreliance on Palantir’s Maven AI system. This all comes days after a United Nations committee found evidence that the U.S. committed a war crime in doing so.
- Futurism investigates an AI slop empire that buys up established blogs, fires everyone, and posts AI-generated content, often under fraudulent bios of fake authors, gaming search engine results to crowd out actual human-written content.
- Robert Kraft claims his donations have helped the Palestinian people, but he’s actually donated to AIPAC and Friends of the IDF.
- Hackers stole a Flock camera, extracted its software, and revealed how it collects data on cars and people.
- Four measles deaths so far in Pennsylvania, while the vaccine-denial crowd is busy trying to claim that none of those were actually due to measles. That’s four preventable deaths due entirely to the efforts of the misinformation crowd that has also seized power in the Republican Party.
- Sen. Katie Britt praised Trump’s tariffs in public, but The Wall Street Journal reveals that she worked to secure exemptions for constituents in private.
- Nate Hochman lost his job on the DeSantis campaign in 2023 when he shared a video showing a sonnenrad, a Nazi symbol containing a swastika. Now he’s deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning office.
- Michael Rawson marched with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, called for gay people to be put to death, and worked with the bigoted secessionist group the League of the South. He’s also set to win Florida’s 10th district for the State House, given how conservative the district is. Here’s his Democratic opponent’s site.
- Meanwhile, Thomas Ross, the Republican candidate for MO-161, was arrested and charged with attempting to plant drugs on his primary opponent. He won the primary by 31 votes, but has since withdrawn, allowing the party to replace him with Louise Secker, the woman he tried to frame.
- Scientist Bob Garry fought lab-leak conspiracy theorists and put himself at risk working on some of the world’s deadliest virus, but the Trump Administration wants to shut him and similar research efforts down. It’s fine, I’m sure there isn’t another potential pandemic around the corner.
- The Institute for Middle East Understanding posted this video explaining the apartheid highway system in Palestine, where Israel limits who can use what roads based on ethnic origin and legal status.
- It looks like Tampa and the Rays did something very sketchy about a $22 million fund that should have gone to community improvement projects.
- Trump’s plan to ban media outlets he doesn’t like from the White House led to criticism from some of his own more ardent supporters.
- Three new board game Kickstarters this week: Perennial, the latest game from Flatout Games, by the designer of Knitting Circle and Pirates of the High Teas.
- Kart, a tabletop racing game from Leder Games, publishers of Root, Fort, and Oath.
- Caravanserai, a family-level resource management game, which first came out in 2024 from a Hungarian publisher and will get its first full English-language release next year.