I’ve been traveling like mad lately; this is the first weekend I’ve been home both Friday and Saturday nights since the Super Bowl. That’s put a damper on any posting here, and of course makes me a little anxious about getting started again because doing so seems overwhelming. Some of the links below are as much as a month old.

Here are some of my most recent posts at the Athletic: I interviewed Bill White on his career and the announcement that he’s the latest Buck O’Neil Award recipient; I wrote up a draft scouting notebook on a bunch of mostly high school players I saw in mid- to late March, as well as USC lefty Mason Edwards; I did my annual predictions posts, including the full standings and the player awards; and I wrote up what I saw at the Arizona Breakout Games, including Brewers-A’s, White Sox-Dodgers (with 27 walks), Mariners-Brewers, Reds-Giants, and Guardians-Angels (plus some Rockies back fields notes). The record-setting heat in Arizona pushed some game times around, so I ended up seeing one fewer game than expected, missing Padres-Cubs from my original plan. I appeared on The Athletic Show to kick off the MLB season.

At AV Club, I reviewed the worker-placement game Skara Brae (no relation to The Bard’s Tale series); the polyomino tile placement game Wispwood; and the light set-collection game Sanibel, from the designer of Wingspan.

My newsletter is next up on my to-do list, followed by a new music playlist.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: You probably saw McKay Coppins’ piece in The Atlantic (not my employer) on his year as a ‘degenerate’ gambler, where the magazine gave him $10,000 to bet on sports and write a story about it. He’s a Mormon and even sort-of-kind-of got permission from one of their leaders. My one quibble with the piece, which is very good, is that it’s very different when it’s not your money.
• A writer for the Times of Israel wrote about how gamblers on Polymarket were sending him death threats if he didn’t change the facts in a story he published on an Iranian missile strike.
• Marco Rubio’s college chum and longtime associate David Rivera, a former Congressman himself, is now on trial for lobbying for Nicholas Maduro’s Venezuelan government. Rubio testified last week against his “former” friend.
• The Guardian spoke to Iranians after the US bombed oil depots, filling the air there with toxic fumes and blotting out the sun in the middle of the day.
• A Project 2025 offshoot laid out plans for Trump to use the U.S. military on our own soil to create a new, shadow law-enforcement regime reporting directly to the lawless president.  
• WIRED has the story of two crypto bros hatched a scheme to allow people to buy shares of homes, but then left the houses they bought to fall apart, leading to a lawsuit from the city of Detroit.
• ProPublica explains how RFK Jr. and his fellow vaccine denialists are ushering in a new era of (preventable) plagues. Many, many children are going to die horrible deaths because of that man, and by extension because of Trump. And our hospitals aren’t ready for even the rising tide of measles cases, let alone, say, a diphtheria epidemic.
• The Frontier, in a joint effort with ProPublica, exposes how Oklahoma regulators found hundreds of oil wells that were violating state laws on disposing of the toxic byproducts of drilling – and then they did absolutely nothing about it. Oklahoma might be the worst state to live in right now, given what they’re doing to the environment, their educational system, and the rights of anyone who’s not a white Christian man.
• I stay off Twitter except to post links, but when I was still somewhat active there, one of the most prominent and vile anti-vaxxers and misinformation purveyors was William Makis, a former doctor in Canada who has been accused of sexual harassment, animal abuse, threatening co-workers, and … well, you can see for yourself. He’s currently making over a half a million dollars a year via his Substack, selling bogus cancer treatments to desperate people, and is currently under a civil contempt order in Canada for providing medications like ivermectin and fenbendazole, both of which are primarily for animal use and do not treat cancer, without a license.
• The Administration blamed AI for the fact that we bombed a school in Iran, but the truth is that this was the outcome of years of human decisions, including the choice to move targeting decisions from a team of experts to a handful of humans using software the working of which they didn’t understand.
• A Texas librarian writes about her fight against the book-banning lunatics of Moms for Liberty.
• A rare feel-good story around these parts: A woman who was abandoned as an infant in a parking lot in the Cleveland area reunited with the two women who found her.
• Guards at the largest ICE concentration camp took bets on which prisoner would be the next to commit suicide.
• And a measles outbreak at an ICE concentration camp in Texas has now spilled over into the surrounding community.
• An NIH whistleblower wrote in STAT News that scientists need to step up their activism, not reduce it.
• Grammarly added a “feature” that used the names and identities of living writers, including several writers at The Verge, to provide AI-generated advice to users – but without those writers’ permission. Grammarly removed the feature pretty quickly, and their CEO ended up talking to The Verge about the whole thing, somewhat combatively.
• More in “AI sucks” news: Police in North Dakota used an AI facial recognition app to arrest a woman from Tennessee and put her in jail for five months even though she had never set foot in North Dakota or committed the crimes of which she was accused. She had to prove she’d been elsewhere at the time – the onus was on her, not the garbage AI app, not the police department that used it.
• Even more “AI sucks” news: AI-driven lawsuits are clogging up the courts, especially suits where people represent themselves and use LLMs to write their legal arguments.
• The final “AI sucks” story of this week is actually a longread: The Guardian talks to several people who ruined their lives – marriages, careers, finances – because they started talking to an AI chatbot and became deluded that it was real.
• Several Republican members of Congress have made virulent anti-Muslim comments, including Randy Fine (FL, where else) and Andy Ogles (TN), but Mike Johnson couldn’t even bring himself to condemn the statements. Absolute moral bankruptcy, to say nothing of his vacuous Christianity.
• Speaking of fake Christians, Pete Hegseth’s pastor – his fucking pastor – said he wants Texas state Rep. James Talarico to die. I may not be a Christian any more, but I grew up one, and I’ve read that book. This ain’t in it.
• Trump pardoned a man now sentenced to prison for an “enormous child pornography collection.” Daniel Tocci was a January 6^th insurrectionist, pardoned by Trump, and now heading back to jail on the CSAM charges.
• Covered up by the U.S. war on Iran and other conflicts is the increase in Israeli colonizer violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
• Israel passed a law mandating the death penalty for people convicted of lethal acts of terrorism … oh, no, it only applies to Palestinians. What is the word for a legal system that has different laws for different ethnic groups?
• WIRED also has a story from a Gaza hospital, Al-Shifa, where doctors are still begging and smuggling in medical supplies while trying to treat old and new victims of Israel’s war.
• Cheaper, easier-to-use solar panels are coming soon, so of course U.S. utility companies are fighting to delay laws making this possible.
• A Belgian diplomat may go on trial for his role in the U.S.-backed assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has been plagued by instability, dictatorships, and both civil and regional wars since the death of its only truly freely elected leader.
• ICE dumped a blind Rohingya refugee on the streets of Buffalo without contacting his family or his lawyer. He later froze to death, and the county has ruled it a homicide.
• Both Politico (unsurprising) and the NY Times laundered misinformation from a right-wing fake-news site called the Midwesterner. This type of outlet is often called ‘pink slime,’ and it’s been around at least since 2020, with websites that look and sound like legitimate newspapers but are in fact astroturfed and nearly always far-right ops.
• InfoWars, the conspiracy-spouting site owned by Alex Jones, is shutting down, but its legacy won’t die until Trump and his movement are finished.
• Buried by (waves hands frantically) everything is the news of a woman from South Carolina who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her in 1984. The Post and Courier looked at public records to verify some aspects of her story, although none relating to the specific claim about the president.
• Also forgotten already is that claim that there’s a ranch in New Mexico where Epstein and his allies buried the bodies of two sex-trafficking victims.
• A trans man in Idaho wrote about how the state’s new law banning trans people from using the correct bathrooms forces him to choose between the threat of jail or the threat of violence.
• Meanwhile, the IOS just caved to the trans panic with a new rule that isn’t based in sound science and will unfairly target intersex people too.
• A federal judge in Texas ruled that nine protestors who were demonstrating outside an ICE facility were guilty of “providing material support for terrorism” – even though they did nothing but protest.
• Activists with the group Dare to Struggle say that L.A. police broke a teenaged protestor’s shin during the No Kings protests last weekend.
• You’ll find a god in every golden oyster … except that these golden oyster mushrooms are crowding out native species in North American forests.
• Mathematicians may have partially answered a 2000-year-old question about how many rational points a single curve can contain, as a new preprint puts an upper limit on the number of these points, where both x and y are rational numbers, that any curve can have.
• The crowdfunding effort for the two-player game The Glasgow Train Robbery has just a few days left. It’s a cooperative game, and one of the two designers was a co-designer of the amazing Lacrimosa, along with two games currently on my shelf of shame (The Battle of Versailles, Take a Seat).
• Awaken Realms is putting out a new special edition of Concordia, a top 50 all-time game for me and on BGG, but after early images showing AI art led to review-bombing on that site, the publisher announced they won’t use AI art in the final product.