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Stick to baseball, 7/6/24.

One piece for subscribers to the Athletic this past week, wrapping up some minor league games I went to over the past week, including notes on Orioles, Rangers, Phillies, and Pirates prospects. Oddly enough, there’s nothing worth going to this holiday weekend, even though I’m home and available. I’m working up the top 100 draft prospects instead, and then will write my next mock, both to run in the Tuesday-Thursday window. I’ll also try to work in a Klawchat this week – the holiday messed up my schedule this past week. I also owe you a newsletter, which is somewhere on the to-do list.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New Yorker has the story of a murder in Queen Creek, Arizona, the work of a gang of affluent teenagers who called themselves “the Gilbert Goons,” in an it-can’t-happen-here sort of story that comes down to parents not parenting and community officials prioritizing economic boom times over prosecuting violent offenders.

While working up my post with my top ten albums of 2024 so far, I was listening again to the new High on Fire record, which didn’t make the cut. That sent me down a rabbit hole that led me to this 2022 NPR piece on HoF’s Matt Pike, and his embrace of some insane conspiracy theories – and the antisemitic wack job David Icke. It’s a fantastic piece of writing.

Harvard Magazine asked several professors at the law school there to weigh in on the recent spate of decisions from the Supreme Court.

A network of Russian-based websites that appear to be American newspapers is spreading fake news with the help of AI, according to a BBC investigation. They have names like the “Houston Post” and the “Boston Times.” Careful what you read and believe.

The Guardian ran an excellent interview with the Libertines’ two main songwriters, Pete Doherty and Carl Barât, in February, before their superb fourth album, All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade, was released.

The head of the right-wing, astroturfing ‘think tank’ the Heritage Foundation, the group responsible for Project 2025, is promising violence if Trump/the GOP win and anyone opposes them. This should be on the front page of every newspaper and leading every news program.

A Christian summer camp in Missouri stands accused of ignoring and covering up decades of sexual abuse allegations and of threatening one of the alleged victims if he chose to come forward. The Hunt family, owners of the Kansas City Chiefs, are not just big supporters of Kanakuk camps, but Clark Hunt’s wife Tavia is harassing family members of abuse victims online. No drag queens or trans people were involved in any of this.

The Guardian’s Marina Hyde turns her wicked wit on the morbid Tories in the wake of their electoral defeat. Few writers are as deft with the language, or as willing to deploy their extensive vocabularies, as Hyde is: “Farage is the horror version of Inside Out, where Mendacity is only just holding off Racism at the control console.”

Meanwhile, the Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum looks at Labour’s win and how Democrats here can learn from their successful fight against populism. She’s not wrong: Culture-war battles aren’t going to win elections for the Democrats.

The Tories’ loss might be good news for higher education in Britain, as their tenure has pushed universities there to the edge of bankruptcy.

Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for Governor in North Carolina and a Holocaust denier, gave a long, rambling speech where he said “some folks need killing!” and appeared to include “socialists and communists” in that category.

Meanwhile, the majority-Republican North Carolina Supreme Court decided not to discipline two Republican judges who violated the state’s judicial code of conduct, with one of those cases leading to the death of a defendant.

On SCOTUS’s dismantling of our system of government: The BBC explains what the Chevron deference meant and why the recent decision is disastrous for all sorts of policies, and for the executive branch in general; Elie Mystal writes that the President can now assassinate you, officially, and claim immunity. He could do it on live TV, call it an official act, and be immune from prosecution for the crime, even after he left office. Great system we have here.

Why did Justice Clarence Thomas switch his position on the Chevron deference? It might have something to do with all the gifts he received from conservative benefactors.

After the Grey Lady called for Biden to end his campaign for President for the good of the country, the Philadelphia Inquirer had the proper response, calling for Donald Trump to end his campaign for President for the good of the country. It’s a good dose of perspective.
A letter to the editor in Science notes that academic freedom is under attack by right-wing politicians and provocateurs, notably the attempt to monitor and rebut online misinformation.

Should parents praise each other more in front of their kids? I think this is an obvious yes.

This CNN story on Bhutan’s attempts to balance its high levels of happiness with a young population that wants more modernization is a reminder that even that often useless site publishes some good journalism, here covering a country that I would wager most Americans don’t know exists.

Closer to home here in Delaware, New Castle County (where I and most residents of the state live) released body-cam footage that shows police officers beating a woman in the head when she was already on the ground after a traffic stop.

Stick to baseball, 12/5/20.

I had two pieces this week for subscribers to The Athletic, one on six non-tendered players who would make my rankings of the top free agents, and another on what this week’s news of realignment and contraction in the minors might mean. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the unique new game Pendulum, which is turnless – players move simultaneously, but when and where you can move, and what you can do, is dictated by three sand timers, each of which has a different duration.

I have two books out for the readers on your holiday shopping lists. The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, available in hardcover; and Smart Baseball, available in paperback.

My podcast will return on Monday, with two episodes scheduled before we break for the holidays. You can also get more of me by subscribing to my free email newsletter.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: It’s the 19^th century in Kansas, where debtor’s prison is still a thing. In Coffeyville, a judge without a law degree issues bench warrants for a debt-collecting attorney who gets a cut of bail payments. In the backwater swirling, there are some things that will never change.
Outside looks at plant-based imitation fish, and why it could be a game-changer for our depleted oceans.
I reviewed the new documentary The Donut King here earlier this week, and the BBC has a longread on the same man, Cambodian refugee turned donut-shop entrepreneur Ted Ngoy.
In 2018, Gatwick Airport had to close for two days after multiple people reported seeing a drone flying in its airspace. Yet a long police investigation has found no evidence any drone was ever there.
This 2018 piece from the Washington Post is a strange sort of apologia for Chevy Chase, a white man who’s said and done some lousy things, and made some bad choices, and doesn’t seem to understand why nobody wants to work with him.
Stereogum explains why an obscure Pavement song became their most-streamed track on Spotify, and how the service is trying to convince artists to take an even lower royalty rate than they already do.
One of Joe Biden’s top advisers lobbied for the 2017 GOP tax cut, which also gave a boon to MLB owners by allowing them to continue to pay minor leaguers less than minimum wage. Cynthia Hogan also lobbied for the NFL while the league was dealing with bad publicity after several domestic violence incidents, and played a pivotal role in Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings in 1991.
Anti-vax communities have proliferated on social media for years, despite the evidence harm they cause, but now they’ve become recruiting grounds for people pushing the bullshit conspiracy theory known as QAnon.
A new article published in Microbes and Infection looks at how anti-vaccine activists are courting people thirsty for information on COVID-19, identifying six specific tactics one such show has been using to convince people that the virus is a hoax and the vaccines won’t be safe.
The media needs to stop reporting on people’s intent to get (or not get) a COVID-19 vaccine, because it’s helping erode already shaky public trust.
The English rapper Digga D has to notify police any time he uploads or releases new material, potentially giving them the chance to censor him, as part of the terms of his probation for a conviction for conspiracy to commit violent disorder.
The editors at the National Review called Trump’s ongoing attempts to claim widespread election fraud cost him the Presidency a “disgraceful endgame.”
Trump’s ‘vaccine czar’ Moncef Slaoui owns $10 million in stock in GlaxoSmithKline, one of the companies that has worked with the Administration’s Warp Speed effort to develop a vaccine, and refuses to sell it. The Administration’s position is that Slaoui is technically a contractor and thus isn’t bound by the same ethics rules as employees.
Jess Grose, the New York Times‘ parenting editor, writes about why most kids hate to lose and what parents can do about it.
A school superintendent in Weatherford, in North Texas, refuses to enforce a state mask mandate … and nobody is stopping him.
Mental Floss gives us the controversial history of fry bread, sometimes called Indian fry bread, a traditional food borne out of the oppression of Native Americans by white authorities.
NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen writes about how an obsession with “smart politics” left the press unprepared to do its job when Donald Trump began his run for President.
Tweet of the week:

Cartoon repost. And edited. #CovidVaccine #COVID #covid19 pic.twitter.com/Fpcm8W4xKm
— Michael de Adder (@deAdder) November 29, 2020

Stick to baseball, 7/6/24.

Stick to baseball, 12/5/20.

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