Over at the Athletic, I revealed and explained my NL Rookie of the Year ballot – which brought out a lot of RBI-loving boomers, both in the comments there and especially on (duh) Facebook – and wrote some thoughts on Boston signing Jake Bauers.
I only posted one video this week as I’m still getting over a bad respiratory infection, with a cough that makes it sound like I’m dying of consumption. Anyway, you can still find me on Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky. You should also sign up for my free email newsletter.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The New Yorker has the story of former NBA player Jontay Parker, now permanently banned for giving information to bettors after he got in way over his head in betting on sports himself.
- The Lancet studied the effects of Elon Musk’s cuts to USAID and forecasts more than 14 million preventable deaths by 2035 as a result. You read that right: Elon Musk may be responsible for more deaths than the Holocaust, and more deaths than there were from World War I.
- The New York Times profiled Lori Huang, who has been largely overlooked in all of the stories about her husband’s serial infidelity. She gave up her own promising career to support his, and this is how he repays her. Well, he’s going to repay her in a bigger way soon…
- The United States has lost its measles elimination status. It took less than two years for Trump and RFK Jr. to bring a deadly, preventable disease back from eradication. Everyone involved should face impeachment or criminal charges for their roles in this.
- ICE is disappearing people, hiding their location from a database that lawyers could otherwise use to find their clients. This is dictator shit.
- You probably haven’t seen much about the runoffs in Louisiana, with Democrats still in the races in two Congressional districts. That’s probably because they have both voted against abortion rights and LGBTQ+ protections.
- The Volokh Conspiracy lays out the argument for impeaching Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
- Writing in Fast Company, Joe Berkowitz points out that the so-called liberal bubble of Bluesky was right all along.
- Maureen Ryan asks “what do we do about the new Harry Potter show?” I agree with her conclusion: We don’t watch it. No more money for Harry Potter anything, since the author of the books has decided to devote her life to destroying trans people.
- A corporal in the sheriff’s office in Cherokee County, Georgia, is on leave after he made a Facebook page to harass a woman he’d arrested, including posting explicit deepfakes with her image. Charles Mills entered the victim’s house without a warrant, and when she called 911 to report him for doing so, he arrested her for obstruction of justice. The story here implies that the targeted harassment was retribution for her reporting him and exercising her Fourth Amendment rights.
- An employee in the substance abuse and mental health services agency (SAMHSA) at HHS killed themselves in their office last week, the latest tragedy to afflict HHS employees after another suicide last March and the antivax shooter in Atlanta last August.
- OpenAI claims to have proven the exponential time hypothesis, which is a key step towards solving the P versus NP problem, one of the most important unsolved problems in computer science. The P versus NP question asks whether any problem whose solution can be verified in polynomial time can thus be solved in polynomial time; if that’s true, it has huge implications for cryptography, drug design, and more, but for many years the prevailing belief has been that it’s probably false.
- Philippe Jaenada won this year’s Prix Goncourt for his novel L’inconnu du quai du Javel, and then revealed that he’d used ChatGPT while writing it, including two bits of LLM-generated text in the book. It’s controversial because the committee overseeing the prize disqualified a book from the longlist after a journalist ran it through an AI-detection program that said the book was AI-generated – without further proof. The eliminated book’s author is Black, while Jaenada is white.
- The incoming minority whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) demanded on Thursday that the House sergeant-at-arms remove Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the House floor, launching into a racist tirade on serial plagiarist Benny Johnson’s podcast.
- White nationalist J6er Jake Lang disrupted a Diwali celebration with a sign that used a racial slur against south Asians before crashing a cat convention because he thought it was for furries. Lang is one of the ringleaders attempting to start another January 6th; it would be a shame if he were indisposed on that date.
- Right-wing astroturf group Turning Point is behind a new group, American Ascent, that aims to further radicalize young Americans and recruit anti-immigration candidates to run in 2028.
- Christian “apologist” and grifter Wes Huff appears to have plagiarized large parts of a paper he submitted for his master’s degree, and appears to have plagiarized in other instances as well. He is, of course, lashing out at his critics, who are endangering his lucrative speaking career. I’d love for someone to dive into his claims of a ‘miraculous’ recovery from paralysis, too.