Stick to baseball, 11/7/26.

I had one post this week at the Athletic, ranking the top 40 free agents in this winter’s class. It’s a bad group, with exactly one star and then a whole lot of (throws hands up in abject despair).

I’ve been sick all week, so while I did get some work calls in I’ve been doing a lot less writing/reading, with the result that the majority of these links are from the Times and the Guardian. That’s also meant no videos since Monday on Instagram and TikTok, but I’ll get back to those next week.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: Seven Times writers collaborated on a story about how Trump is dismantling America’s science research engine. This won’t end in January just because Democrats will take control of Congress – unless they make an active move to stop it.

• Elie Mystal had one of the best takes on the blue-nami this week: Democrats do not, in fact, have throw trans people or immigrants or any group of people under the bus to win.

• The day before the election, Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic about Republicans’ lurch towards (more) racism as their closing argument. Unfortunately, Atlantic writer James Kirchick decided to make a gross Islamophobic comment about Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, and as of Saturday morning the publication hasn’t done jack shit about it.

• Online misinformation has convinced many gullible parents to skip the vitamin K shot for their newborns. A study found a 347% increase in cases of infant bleeding, because the shot helps babies form clots.

• That same online misinformation has led to the first measles death in New York state in 30 years, as vaccination levels have dropped well below herd immunity. Wisconsin also had its first measles death in 36 years, an infant like in NY.

• Jess Grose wrote in the Times before the election that the wave of doctors running for office – many of whom won on Tuesday – signal the beginning of the end of MAHA.

• Anna Merlan wrote in the Times about the ongoing fallout from the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, as these rabbit holes are just a part of the online dialogue at this point, and then spill over into real-life incidents.

• Republicans’ anti-immigrant sentiment led to more discrimination against south Asians in Texas, so they mobilized and helped turn the state blue.

• Trump toady Laura Loomer was paid at least $60,000 to make political tweets and, of course, disclosed none of this.  

• Salon shut down this week, thirty-one years after the site became one of the original online magazines.

• Sludge reports on the money from AIPAC, military contractor Palantir, and crypto firms that are funding Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who is trying to become Speaker of the House.

• Clay Travis is the wrongest man in sports, consistently, and he was also wildly and hilariously wrong about the elections this week too.

• Finland’s tourism board is holding a fun promotion: they’re going to bring sixteen singles from around the world for an all-expenses paid food-tourism trip to Finland, to be split into two groups, with a mixer with Finnish singles at the end.

• An Ethiopian-born American contractor pled guilty to giving military secrets to the Ethiopian government so they could kill more Tigrayan fighters.

• It wasn’t all good news this week: Marshall Rawson marched with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, has spoken positively about slavery, and has said queer people should be executed. Florida elected him to their state legislature this week. (I’ve corrected this as I’d previously written that they elected him to Congress.)

• Did Haley Stevens use AI to write her post about endorsing Republican xenophobe Mike Rogers? I’m not sure it matters; she should be finished in the public sphere regardless.

• Conrad Lant, better known by his stage name Cronos, died in early October. His band Venom’s album Black Metal was hugely influential on the subsequent rise of thrash (good) and gave its name to the satanic strain of extreme metal that followed (bad, even in Cronos’ view). I never liked Venom’s music, but I can’t deny their importance in the last forty years of metal.

• Television guitarist Richard Lloyd died this morning at age 75 of bile duct cancer; Tom Verlaine died in 2023 and bassist Fred Smith died earlier this year. Richard Hell is probably the most famous member from Television still alive, although he left the band before Marquee Moon, forming Richard Hell and the Voidoids and recording “Blank Generation.”

• A rare bit of positive news in science: construction on the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) detector in South Dakota began on Monday.