At the Athletic, I had three posts recapping my week covering the Arizona Fall League, one on the AL prospects of note I saw, one on the NL, and one on the silly rule experiment that requires the corner outfielders to stand somewhere in Siberia.
Here on the dish, I reviewed the Nebula-winning novel A Time of Changes, the mystery Murder in the Crooked House, and the game Wingspan Pocket. I also wrote up the new restaurants I tried in Arizona.
I did send out a new edition of my free email newsletter this week, finally. I also posted two new videos to Instagram and Tiktok, while I’m most frequently on Bluesky.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The best thing I read this week was this New York story about boomers turning into “screenagers” and how my generation has to learn to manage our parents’ algorithms.
- Vanity Fair exposes what should be a massive corruption scandal, as Jared Kushner appears to have controlled a slush fund of $750 million provided by Middle Easte dictators. If he did anything at all for those dictators, like advocating for them with his father-in-law, then this is bribery.
- For Marie Claire, author Nina Strochlic writes about the school for Afghan girls that has relocated to Kigali, Rwanda, providing the only current place those girls can receive a proper education due to the theocratic regime ruling their home country.
- The New York Times investigates the global trade in illegally mined gold, which includes significant use of child labor.
- Texas Monthly looks at the conservative takeover of the University of Texas, once considered among the best public universities in the country.
- The Delaware News-Journal has run a four-part series on sex trafficking and the state’s ‘massage parlors.’ Here’s part three, about the buyers who fuel the industry.
- A personalized mRNA-based skin cancer vaccine for people who’ve already had melanoma reduced the risk of death by 42% in a phase III trial. I wonder what all of the “I’ll never put mRNA in my body” dimwits will say when they have this option.
- Mississippi Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Lynn Fitch (R), an election denier and opponent of women’s rights, ruled that the police murder of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley was justified. The officer who killed the boy, Hunter Foster, resigned after bodycam footage became public.
- You’ve probably heard all about Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad attacking Amy Acton by using her estranged mother (and cat killer) to claim Acton lied about being raped by her stepfather, even though he was convicted of the crime. A reader wrote to The Columbus-Dispatch that the ad put “foulness” into Ohioans’ living rooms.
- RFK Jr. was sending U.S. taxpayer funds to a “study” in Guinea-Bissau that would have denied the hepatitis B vaccine to infants for six weeks, in a country where over 12% of adults have the virus. The study is a dream of anti-vaxxers, who are looking for any evidence to support their delusions.
- Billionaire Julio Herrera Velutini was facing felony bribery charges. He gave a $50 million deal to Trump lawyer and DOJ adviser Alina Habba, giving her a job at a fictitious company, and got a pardon a few months later.
- Iowa Attorney General Breanna Bird abused the power of her office in her failed prosecution of an elections board member who just happened to be a Democrat.
- Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) published a list of 11 Democratic sheriffs who he said endorsed him. Three have already said he’s lying.
- Definitely the craziest story I read this week: A Florida cop found a dead man during a wellness check, and promptly assumed the man’s identity, stealing his house and even renovating it, getting away with it for three years. When a real estate firm bought the house from the dead man’s heirs, they found the cop, Brian Sguros, living there, and he demanded that they repay him for the cost of the renovations.
- Business school professor Chris Marquis wrote an op ed in the Times arguing that business schools shouldn’t exist. I agree with his general premise, that what these schools are teaching at a general level is not what society needs or what (many) students want. That also says to me that there’s an opportunity for some of these schools to meet the underserved demand.
- Writing in Racket, Keith Harris describes his experiences at a MAHA Summit in Minneapolis, and why “it scared the hell” out of him. These people aren’t just anti-vaxxers, but full-on anti-science cultists, mostly spurred by religion.
- While walking to his helicopter, Trump stopped and waved to … nobody, as if there were a crowd there. Why isn’t this major news?
- Archaeologists working in Russia unearthed what they believe was a thousand-year-old bread peel with a board for playing the game merels carved into the back of it.
- An ICE agent entered a middle school campus in Delaware without authorization, according to school officials. School security approached the agent, and he left.
- ICE held a 78-year-old Ugandan priest in a concentration camp in Colorado for over a year, and even though he was walking on his own when he was abducted, his health deteriorated to the point that he had to be carried out – and the ICE agents wouldn’t allow him to use his wheelchair to get to the car waiting for him.
- Board game news: Osprey Games has let go of its entire staff a few months after owner Bloomsbury Publishing put the unit up for sale. Osprey’s catalog includes the tremendous deduction game Cryptid and the Undaunted series of military-themed games.
- Pandasaurus has a Kickstarter up for Echoes of the Apostate Crown, a worker-placement and route-building game with some impressive miniatures and artwork.
- I’m not familiar with this publisher, but there’s a Kickstarter for a very interesting-looking game called Sky Bloom.