colleges

Stick to baseball, 4/20/24.

I updated my ranking of the top prospects for this year’s draft, going to 50 names but not without some difficulty; and posted a scouting notebook covering a half-dozen prospects in the class I saw over the previous ten days. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

As I mentioned in my chat the other day, the Athletic spiked my podcast and cut the daily baseball show to three a week, so I’m no longer doing any regular podcasts for them. I did make a guest appearance on the Windup on Friday, talking draft and prospect stuff.

I am now appearing weekly on the Stadium streaming channel, on the 2 pm show Diamond Dreams, which is entirely about prospects, with occasional appearances on their roundup show The Rally. You can get the app here. Right now, it doesn’t appear that shows are archived, but I’m looking into it.

Once this is done, I’m hoping to get another edition of my free email newsletter out this weekend, before I head back to Chicago for the next show.

Taylor Swift is on Threads now – but I was there first. I’m on Bluesky, too. I ended up re-verified on Twitter, which makes me eligible for a cut of ad revenues around my tweets; I’m going to donate all of it to the Trevor Project. My first and only payout so far was $16.64, which I’ve already donated.

And now, pop an edible (if it’s legal where you are) and enjoy the links…

Before I get to the longreads, this seems like the story of the week: The Supreme Court has declined to hear the appeal in McKesson v. Doe, which held that authorities may hold a protest’s organizer(s) liable if any attendee of the protest commits an illegal act. The decision effectively ends the right to assembly in at least three states. This should have been front-page news across the country.
An editorial in Haaretz argues that Netanyahu’s policies, from his brutal assault on Gaza and assassination of Iranian leaders, are endangering the long-term survival of Israel.
The billionaire co-founder of Cloudflare wanted to build an 11,000 square foot mansion in Park City over the opposition of residents. First he tried to slip a bill through the state legislature to allow the construction, but it failed. When the local paper ran stories critical of him, he bought it and installed his buddy as editor in chief.
Brandy Zarozny of NBC News reported from the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association conference, where speakers urged attendees to seize voting machines and investigate absurd conspiracy theories.
The New York Times reports on how Senate candidate Dave McCormick, a Republican running against Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey (D), appears to have fabricated details of his upbringing to downplay his privileged upbringing.
PressWatchers interviewed Chris Quinn of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, who has made waves for his willingness to cover former President Trump accurately and for calling out the blatant bothsidesism happening across so-called mainstream media.
Candace Buckner of the Washington Post had a measured take on the outrage over Gregg Doyel’s odd treatment of Caitlin Clark. I’m with her: the story isn’t a non-troversy, but the level of vitriol here is out of proportion to the infraction.
Former federal prosecutor Terra Morehead will be disbarred in the wake of revelations that she helped a Kansas City cop frame an innocent man who then served 23 years in prison. Morehead was also a Wyandotte County prosecutor, and has been implicated in numerous incidents of prosecutorial misconduct.
USC announced that their valedictorian will not be allowed to speak at commencement this year as the university caved to anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian sentiment, including threats against the ceremony and school.
A St. Louis cop who was working undercover among protesters in the city in 2017 was badly beaten by his own colleagues; a judge just awarded him $23.5 million in compensation, which, ultimately, will be covered by taxpayers.
More fallout from Uri Berliner’s unverified column attacking NPR: The network suspended him, after which he resigned, presumably to start a Substack where he’ll rail against DEI and vaccines; while NPR’s Steve Inskeep wrote a detailed takedown of Berliner’s column, pointing out just how little fire there was behind the smoke. I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: Berliner’s argument that NPR didn’t give enough credence to the failed lab-leak hypothesis was a tell. Slate’s Alicia Montgomery, a former NPR staffer herself, has a much stronger critique of the problems at the network.
Louisiana Republicans voted to end mandatory lunch breaks for child workers, cut unemployment benefits, and reduce worker’s compensation.
Ocean acidification and climate change are causing a fourth mass bleaching episode in the world’s coral reefs. Coral reefs are essential to the marine ecosystem – including a lot of the fish we eat.
There are 806 billionaires in the United States. Their wealth exceeds that of the lower half of Americans’ total wealth combined, by a lot.
The great Phil Plait wrote about the declining odds that there is a ninth planet in our solar system, given how much of space we’ve checked without finding it. This is the subject of the fantastic deduction board game The Search for Planet X.
The Sundance Film Festival’s organizers are playing the sports stadium handout game, courting bids from cities to host the influential festival starting in 2027.
Kari Lake (R ), running for Senate in Arizona after voters there rejected her in the race for Governor in 2022, called on sheriffs to enforce the state’s 1864 abortion ban. That same territorial law also banned interracial marriage and set the age of consent for girls at 10.
Tennessee Rep. Scott Cepicky (R) confessed in a leaked conversation that his aim with a school-voucher bill is to “throw the whole freaking (public education) system in the trash.”
Dr. Allison Neitzel has become a target of anti-vaxx trolls for her pro-vaccine and pro-science activism; she responded on her newsletter with the wonderfully titled missive “I Will Continue to Piss Off Men.” If you want to read more about what amounts to harassment campaign against her from the soi-disant “journalist” Paul Thacker, you can go here. Thacker seems to focus on women in the pro-science movement, and I think it’s fair to ask if he’s really just a misogynist.

Stick to baseball, 3/30/24.

I had two new posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week, my annual season predictions post and scouting notes on the Nationals’ Futures Game at Nats Park. I wanted to do a chat, but about 20 minutes before I was going to do it, our Internet went down for four hours. Good times.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Wyrmspan, the new standalone sequel/spinoff to Wingspan, adding a few rules changes to make it more complex while also replacing the birds with dragons.

I spoke to my friend Tim Grierson this week for RogerEbert.com about baseball movies, good, bad, and horrendous. I also appeared on WGN-TV to talk Cubs/White Sox.

I did indeed send around another issue of my free email newsletter, which you should definitely subscribe to if you enjoy my ramblings.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This Atlantic piece on the campus climate shift around the Israel-Hamas war by Stanford student Theo Baker, who wrote the story on former Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s role in faked research that led to his resignation, is one of the best things I’ve read this year. Baker takes a stance while maintaining balance throughout the piece, and this quote sums up the situation in Palo Alto and many other campuses that are caught between protecting freedom of expression and ensuring a safe environment for students: “The real story at Stanford is not about the malicious actors who endorse sexual assault and murder as forms of resistance, but about those who passively enable them because they believe their side can do no wrong.”
New York looks at the toxic personal history of pop-neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who seems to have a history of psychological manipulation of the women in his life.
New York also has a story from John Herrman on how the pornbots all over Twitter actually try to scam users.
The American Prospect’s Maureen Tkacik looks at how Boeing drove its best engineers out of the company, leading to the small problem of its planes falling apart or crashing. They had the help of the federal government, which has increasingly outsourced regulation of private companies to the companies themselves. It’s wrapped within the story of longtime Boeing employee turned whistleblower John Barnett, who was found dead recently of a gunshot wound to the temple – between days of his deposition in his case against Boeing.
Washington, D.C., Attorney General Brian Schwalb has been investigating whether Leonard Leo’s nonprofits violated their tax status by paying his for-profit companies for various services. Republicans aligned with Leo, who helped Trump pack the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary with extreme conservatives, are now attacking Schwalb for doing his job.
The same is happening to people trying to combat online disinformation around vaccines and COVID-19, as this Atlantic story on the mostly futile efforts to get state medical boards to sanction doctors who spread false information explains.
Billionaire Republican donor Jeff Yass now owns a sizable share of Donald Trump’s Truth Social after it merged with a shell company in which Yass’s investment firm owned about 2%.
Remember how a number of kids who caught COVID-19 pre-vaccines ended up near death with MIS-C, a major inflammatory reaction to the virus? Vaccination significantly reduces the risk that kids will get it.
Long COVID is becoming less common thanks to the vaccines, but many people are still dealing with its long-term effects.
Police in Raleigh, North Carolina, raided the wrong house in April 2021, confusing one Arab family with another in the same neighborhood. Now the cops are refusing to share bodycam footage in the family’s lawsuit, claiming it might “damage officers’ reputations.” Duh.
Author Vernor Vinge, who won three Hugo Awards for Best Novel, died this week at 79. I didn’t love his writing, but he ranks among the best sci-fi authors for his ability to foresee the growth of technology and its rising role in the social order.
Elon Musk tried to use the Center for Countering Digital Hate for reporting fairly on Twitter’s failure to police antisemitic content, and he lost the case in embarrassing fashion. This wasn’t the only bad news for Twitter, as the site has seen its user base collapse in the last six months.
New research found increasing numbers of Americans leaving their religions and citing anti-LGBTQ+ policies and doctrines as well as the endless cycle of sex-abuse scandals in churches as the main reasons.
A study published in JAMA says that Texas leads the U.S. in rapes and rape-related pregnancies in the wake of the overturning of Roe and that state’s mad rush to ~~control women~~ enact an abortion ban.
The wife of the judge in the mifepristone case now before the Supreme Court was herself paid by the anti-abortion group suing to subvert the FDA’s authority.
New Hampshire Public Radio spoke to a 15-year-old trans girl in New Hampshire whose ability to play soccer is now under attack, as House Republicans in the Live Free or Die state just passed a bill to ban trans girls from playing middle or high school sports. These bills & laws “solve” a problem that doesn’t exist while ruining the lives of a very small number of vulnerable children.
The Republican assault on higher education continues in red states across the south and west: Tennessee Republicans wiped out the HBCU Tennessee State’s board so the Governor can stock it with his appointees, over the objections of Black legislators. South Carolina Republicans passed a ban on DEI initiatives at public universities. The University of Kentucky’s President is moving to dissolve the faculty senate and move its policy-making power to the Board of Trustees. Meanwhile, the NAACP’s CEO Derrick Johnson is urging Black student-athletes to reconsider their college choices in the face of these attacks on higher ed, explicitly targeting Florida schools in a statement earlier this month.
Tabletopper Games has a crowdfunding effort for a new semi-cooperative game, Under Our Sun, with an interesting world-building theme.

Stick to baseball, 4/20/24.

Stick to baseball, 3/30/24.

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