Stick to baseball, 9/26/26.

One column at The Athletic this week, my hypothetical award ballots for the five major player awards other than NL Rookie of the Year, for which I actually voted this year. My minor-league player of the year column will run tomorrow (Sunday).

Plans for my free email newsletter this past week were derailed by a few things, not least of which was me losing a day and a half to getting my flu & COVID shots. For socials, I’m still mostly on Bluesky, Instagram, and TikTok. I’ve noticed an uptick in folks trying to reach me via DMs with baseball questions – I can’t possibly answer all of the individual questions I get, but I do answer the majority of questions I get in public spaces, like the comments under my Athletic stories or on Bluesky.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Vulture has an excerpt from an upcoming book about Beck that explains how his album Sea Change came as he withdrew from his friends and his romantic partner and fell into the cult of Scientology.

• Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate for the open Senate seat from Michigan, claims he worked on an auto-plant assembly line helping build Chrysler LeBarons, using that as a way to position himself as someone who understands Michigan workers. The UAW says he’s lying: He worked at an aftermarket facility that modified cars, never worked at any Chrysler factory, and was never a UAW member.

• WIRED profiles the 28-year-old Heritage Foundation analyst who is trying to destroy fertility treatments in the U.S. because Jesus said so. I can not view people like this, who try to force the strictures of their personal superstitions on the entire country through anti-democratic means, as anything less than evil.

• The Guardian’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed argues that the Democrats’ centrist, establishment wing is losing elections because they have spent the last three years denying Palestinians and their supporters a voice.

• A building damaged by Israel’s assault on Gaza collapsed about ten days ago, killing 21 people, including eight children.

• A new UN report says that women in Gaza are facing heightened risks of sexual violence as a result of the war, due to the breakdown in the societal order. The Jerusalem Post story I linked noted that the UN report doesn’t mention Hamas’ role, which seems like a large omission for reasons they explain in the article.

• Some Trump advisers are trying to get Trump to declare martial law ahead of the midterms. It’s terrifying because it’s plausible that he’d do it.

• Utah Republicans are subverting democracy there, overruling the voters and setting up extralegal courts to avoid giving Democrats a single Congressional seat from the Mormon-run state. Some LDS women are fighting back.

• A group of researchers are suing NIH over the blatantly political policy of screening grants for anything that hints of DEI or woke or whatever bogeymen scare the Trump Administration.

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT helped the Tumbler Ridge school shooter plan his massacre. I do not understand why there’s so little push to hold the developers of such software responsible for this kind of foreseeable use.

• A former Cornell student is suing the school and seven current and former students, all members of the Chi Pi fraternity, alleging that she was drugged and raped at a frat party and that the school did next to nothing after she reported it. Cornell refused to name the accused, but the school newspaper, The Cornell Sun, was willing to do so.

• Dartmouth Provost Santiago Schnell may have used AI to write academic articles and editorials – and his emailed reply to The Dartmouth when they asked him about it.

• The same AI-detection tool, Pangram, has also ruled that an acclaimed novel by Haitian-Canadian author Thélyson Orélien was likely AI-written, causing the Prix Goncourt committee to remove the novel from its shortlist. The case is more complicated, in part because the author writes in French while Pangram was trained on English texts, and because of subsequent discoveries that Orélien plagiarized content in articles he wrote over a decade ago.

• DoorDash spent $1.4 million in the NYC mayoral race last year, most of it to a super PAC that ran disgusting anti-Islam ads targeting Zohran Mamdani. Turns out they did it to try to avoid consequences for wage theft, as Mamdani’s office just settled with the company for $131.5 million.

• The University of Texas has removed all women’s and gender studies classes from its core curriculum, further debasing one of the country’s best public universities just to bend the knee to the Administration.

• Gavin Newsom continues to push himself to the right, vetoing a bill that would have protected health care workers, helpers, and patients there from prosecution by other states for abortions and gender-affirming care. Eighteen other states have such laws in place. Whoever’s advising him on his obvious plans to run for President is doing a shit job.

• Maine Congressional candidate Paul LePage (R) may actually live in Florida if you believe his wife’s tax returns, where she claims a Florida home as their primary residence.

• My former colleague Zach Buchanan, now writing for Axios, has the scoop that Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) left positive comments about xenophobic and Islamophobic books on Goodreads.

• A measles outbreak that began earlier this year in Bangladesh has killed over 1000 children since the spring. This outbreak isn’t due to anti-vax propaganda, but due to poverty, where malnutrition weakens the immune responses even of vaccinated people, and the country’s extreme population density, which helps the highly contagious virus spread.

• A Massachusetts couple making the rounds on right-wing media, claiming their kid was turned trans by their local school, actually lost custody of them earlier this year for physical abuse and witness intimidation, which led their child to get a lifetime restraining order against their parents.

• Amazon made a back-room deal with Ridgeland, Mississippi, to access huge amounts of water from the city’s supply for a new data center, in exchange for what appear to be one-time upgrades to the local water infrastructure – without guardrails on usage or outflow, or protections for neighboring Jackson’s water supply.

• What came before the Big Bang? We’ll never know, of course, but Scientific American talks about how physicists come up with theories about it.

• A rare win for science over religion in the judiciary: A Connecticut court upheld that state’s ban on religious exemptions for schoolchild vaccinations. No actual religion prohibits vaccinations – it’s all made up.

• The mother in that viral clip at a Giants game, where she was carrying her baby and a substantial amount of food while no one appears to be helping her, wrote a response to the online reaction, where she defends her husband and explains that they’ve even received death threats over the video.

• New Order/Joy Division drummer Stephen Morris spoke to Vulture about the best songs by those two bands to help promote the release of the 16-CD Eternal (Live) box set of previously unreleased live Joy Division concerts.

• The New York Times covers two men in England who are doing a podcast about their efforts to learn and play a board game called The Campaign for North Africa, which is known for being abstruse, extremely detailed (Italian units get a “pasta ration”), and long enough that few, if any, have ever finished it. There is at least one user on BGG who says he has finished the game, and I see no reason to doubt him.

• Two pretty big Board Game Kickstarters this week: John D. Clair’s Electrify, co-designed with Ian Hutchinson, has some shared DNA with Clair’s Space Base. They’re both engine-builders, but this game has less luck than Space Base, at least in the base game.

• And a new printing/second edition of City of the Great Machine, with a new expansion, a one-versus-many game set in a steampunk world, with hidden movement and resource management mechanics, along with variants for solo and co-op play.