Stick to baseball, 10/17/26.

The first of three posts from my trip to the Arizona Fall League is now up, examining and excoriating the ridiculous outfield-positioning experiment happening in games at Salt River Fields. My notes on players I saw will run Sunday and Monday in two posts, split up by league. I’ll also work up a post on the five new restaurants I tried on this trip.

I have a newsletter written but have been holding it until the AFL posts were up, so I’ll probably send it on Monday. In the meantime, you can sign up for the newsletter (it’s free) or follow me on Bluesky, Instagram, TikTok, or Threads.

And now, the links…

• A video first, from The New York Times: In the first episode of a new show called “Sound Off,” former Chicago Tribune editor Marc Jacob explains how he thinks the Times is failing readers by whitewashing the lies and corruption of the Trump Administration.

• On to the longreads first … also from the Times, a look at the increase in threats and incidents of political violence aimed at elected officials in the United States. Yes, right-wing elements are pushing some of this, but as someone who’s received such threats, I think it’s also a result of the increasing isolation and depersonalization that come from people who are too online.

• ProPublica’s investigations have found 506 U.S. citizens detained by ICE and DHS under Trump, contrary to the Administration’s lies that say this isn’t happening.

• The deeply unethical vaccine trial in Guinea-Bissau championed by RFK Jr. – where some children will be denied the hepatitis B vaccine for six weeks – will go ahead after all, with U.S. taxpayer funding. A hepatitis B infection in an infant can cause lifelong health problems. The study is pushed by anti-vaxxers hoping to find support for their claims that vaccines are harmful. The New York Times also has a story up on how much RFK Jr. is advancing anti-vaxxers’ goals (polies that are already killing Americans).

• Also from ProPublica, Ken Paxton, the Republican candidate for Senate in Texas, has spent millions of taxpayer dollars on junkets around the world, to at least 17 countries, with no business justification for the expense.

• Science details the results of a study looking at why attrition rates are higher for women faculty than men.

• A 19-year-old white man, radicalized by right-wing content online, planned to shoot up a Hindu temple in the Chicago area, and only a jammed gun and a co-worker who thought to call the police stopped a massacre.

• Zeteo reports on how Mike Huckabee, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, is selling trips to Israel with the promise of access to top Israeli officials, and is still raising money for the PAC he pledged to dissolve when he got the job.

• A couple of tech writers announced that they’re going back to X in the last week, despite, you know, all the Nazis, the hate speech, the false information, and the way the owner is trying to undermine our democracy. Another tech writer lists eleven reasons why Elon sucks, using that as his argument to avoid X.

• Mother Jones explains how that Ukraine drone strike on a data center didn’t wipe out a bunch of Russian bots, but people believed it anyway.

• Israel “settlers” attacked Palestinian olive farmers and a Washington Post journalist in the West Bank, part of their annual effort to wreck the olive harvest. These people are not “settling” anything.

• A study from Norway found that wealth taxes did not lead to the affected taxpayers fleeing the country.

• The Times looks at the upheaval in mathematics after the release of hundreds of new proofs and findings generated by OpenAI, including a proof of the quasi-Riemann hypothesis, which may get mathematicians (or AI) closer to solving maybe the most famous currently unsolved problem in math.

• Yet another sexual assault at a frat party, this one at the University of Chicago.

• Singer/guitarist Geordie Greep, formerly lead singer of black midi, was accused of sexual assault by a woman after a show earlier this month in Vancouver. The accusation was followed by a flyer, not written by the accuser, that claimed he’d raped her, a claim she flatly denies.

• Two women have filed a lawsuit accusing disgraced former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) of sex trafficking, after which he attempted to dox them.

• A 20-year-old woman in Milwaukee called the police to ask for protection from her 39-year-old boyfriend; he killed her hours later.

• Bestselling author Sally Rooney (Normal People) has supported the group Palestine Action, which the UK has branded as a terrorist organization, meaning under UK law her publisher could not pay her royalties for her books sold in the country. As a result, Faber will no longer supply her books to stores in Britain, a move she supports. We aren’t the only western country rolling back civil rights.

• Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) holds millions of dollars’ worth of shares in data center companies, so of course he’s pushing legislation that will make it harder for states to regulate their activities.

• Cranio Creations has a Gamefound page up for a new edition of Lorenzo il Magnifico.

• Eagle-Gryphon has a Kickstarter page up for a new edition of Empire: Age of Discovery (previously published as Age of Empires III).