gaza — Page 2

September 20, 2025 · 19 comments

Stick to baseball, 9/20/25.

At the Athletic this week, I wrote my annual Prospect of the Year column, giving the nod to the Pirates’ Konnor Griffin and mentioning a handful of other prospects who had great years.

For Endless Mode, I reviewed the cooperative card game Beasts, another limited-communication game that I thought was perfectly fine, but not novel or interesting enough to unseat better games in this genre for me.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter on Friday. I feel like that’s going to be the best place for my thoughts on the state of things for now.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: WIRED’s Katie Drummond interviewed Cloudflare CEO Matt Prince, who has some wildly progressive views on content, AI, and the future of the Internet.

In Vanity Fair, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote how pundits and politicians are sanitizing the legacy of Charlie Kirk.

The Times reported on two deals that allowed the Trumps to pocket billions from their cryptocurrency while giving the U.A.E. access to computer chips.

Guardian columnist Helen Pidd attended the far-right rally in the UK led by white nationalist Tommy Robinson and wrote that this dangerous movement is only going to grow from here.

Quanta explains an unsolved problem in computer science for the longest-running six-rule computer program, known as the Busy Beaver Challenge.

Defector reports on the sketchy goings-on at the Savannah Bananas’ charity arm.

NY Times reporter Michael Wilson details how he nearly fell for a phone scam, where the caller purported to be from Wilson’s bank, spoofing the bank’s phone number, with other plausible details.

The Washington Post, formerly a great American newspaper, fired editor and columnist Karen Attiah for speaking out about gun violence in the wake of the shooting of Kirk.

Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, according to a UN Commission report released this week. Undeterred, Israel continued moving ground forces into Gaza City, displacing thousands more Palestinians.

Former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan was a Republican who refused to go along with Trump’s attempts to steal the 2020 election. He left the party entirely due to the harassment that ensued, and now he’s running for Governor as a Democrat.

Disney’s decision to bow to the Trump Administration and take Jimmy Kimmel off the air is further evidence of the assault on the First Amendment. So are the dozens of teachers and professors fired for their comments on Kirk and his death.

Meanwhile, even though Kirk’s (alleged) murderer was a white man, Black Americans are receiving death threats over it, writes Elie Mystal in The Nation.

Chicago Public Media’s WBEZ reached out to all 48 Illinois college instructors on Turning Point USA’s “watchlist” and detailed the harassment they’ve received as a result, including death threats.

The Department of Education is ending discretionary funding to multiple grant programs for colleges that primarily serve minority students, because DEI.

The attorneys general of nine blue states have joined the National Women’s Law Center to pledge to fight to protect the rights of trans students, just as the ultra-right Heritage Foundation wants the Administration to brand trans activistists as terrorists.

Physicists at the University of Colorado-Boulder published a paper about how they managed to create visible time crystals, a strange state of matter that was only proposed in 2012 and had never been seen at the macroscopic level until now.

Board game Kickstarters: Disco Heist Laundry is indeed a heist game, set in the early ‘80s; full disclosure: I know the publisher pretty well, as our kids go to the same school … Dinosaur Island: Fully Charged is an upgraded version of the 2017 tile & worker placement game, with better components and some rules tweaks to improve the game’s balance … I don’t know anything about this publisher but I’m intrigued by the game, Smallfolk, a “cozy” tableau-builder … I can’t remember if I linked this one before, but Bézier is publishing a new title called The Game Makers, featuring the images and names of 300 actual board games that you’ll compete to make.

Tagged artificial intelligence, board game news, disney, first amendment, frauds, gaza, georgia, great britain, links, longreads, physics, stick to baseball, the swamp, trans rights

September 14, 2025 · 21 comments

Stick to baseball, 9/14/25.

I had two articles for subscribers to The Athletic this week, my annual look at players I got wrong (which, of course, generated a bunch of comments from people who said I was wrong about players who had a decent half-season) plus a preview of the Arizona Fall League rosters (which seem to have changed already since I got the preliminary ones, alas).

And now, the links…

In The Atlantic – not my employer – Charlie Warzel writes that the Epstein birthday book is “a nightmare” and shows that the conspiracy theorists were at least partly right. It appears many, many of Epstein’s friends knew of his crimes against children and joked about it.

The Times ran an editorial by Ezra Klein with the headline that Charlie Kirk was “practicing politics the right way.” Here are some rejoinders to Klein’s take from 404 Media, from Mother Jones’ David Corn, from The Nation’s Elizabeth Spiers, and from the Times’ Jamelle Bouie.

Zeteo posted a story with 17 quotes from Kirk, with sources, but no additional commentary.

Also from Mother Jones, right-wing provocateurs immediately called for retribution against the left, including violence, after Kirk’s death, before any details about his alleged killer emerged.

They were also targeting and doxing people they thought were celebrating Kirk’s murder, including getting many people fired, including a professor at Austin Peay University who allegedly just posted a quote from Kirk.

A child in the Los Angeles area contracted measles as an infant, before they were old enough to receive the first dose of the MMR vaccine, some years ago, and died this month of the side effect known as SSPE, which can show up a decade after the measles infection and causes dementia, dystonia, and eventually cardiac or respiratory arrest. I wonder if 1) this child was infected during the 2014-15 epidemic and 2) if they got it from an unvaccinated person, which seems almost certain.

Texas A&M fired a professor and two administrators after the professor distributed materials that indicated recognition that there are more than two genders (which there are), claiming they were complying with Texas law (that does not exist) and President Trump’s executive order (which I don’t think binds them to do anything).

A Tacoma man who went to the house of a QAnon follower to serve her an order to leave the foreclosed house where she was living was cleared of wrongdoing after she shot at him and he returned fire, killing her.

The disposable face masks we all used during COVID-19 – and some of us still use – are leaching chemicals into the ground and oceans, as there is still no real process in place to capture and recycle them. I did buy masks several times from a company called VIDA that will take them back for recycling, although I don’t know what they actually do with them.

Massive protests in Nepal, including the burning of government buildings and the chase of a half-naked government minister into a river, led to the resignation of the Prime Minister and the appointment of Shushila Karki as the first woman to lead the landlocked Asian nation.

Israel continued its assault on Gaza City, striking a hospital and killing at least 12 children.

A rare happy story: A couple wondered for years who the awkward-looking guy in a bunch of their wedding photos was. They finally found him, and the reason why he was in the pictures is wonderful.

I really enjoyed the tiny-box game Soda Jerk when I played it at Gen Con; pre-orders just went up at Allplay. (I don’t get any commission from this.)

Tagged board game news, conspiracy theories, environment, first amendment, gaza, links, measles, stick to baseball, vaccines

September 6, 2025 · 2 comments

Stick to baseball, 9/6/25.

Over at The Athletic, I wrote some brief updates & outlooks for five prospects called up on August 31^st/September 1^st, and an in-person scouting notebook on Guardians pitcher Joey Oakie plus some other Guards, Orioles, Nats, and Phillies prospects.

At Endless Mode, I reviewed the one vs. many game 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the player who takes on the HAL role does indeed get to close the pod bay doors. It’s a good game, Dave.

I’ve moved my free email newsletter over to Kit, away from the place that proudly hosts white nationalist newsletters.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: This WIRED story on a venture capitalist, Cindy Bi, who hired a surrogate to carry her baby, and is now trying to destroy the woman’s life after she miscarried, is absolutely batshit. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know if Bi actually hurt her legal case, but she certainly tanked her own reputation by talking to writer Emi Nietfeld, who did a great job telling the story.
Maclean’s has a story from a former anti-vaxxer who now tries to convince the deluded and the ignorant that vaccines are, in fact, safe and effective.
Former Dodgers & Expos GM Kevin Malone, who called himself “Dodger Boy” and said “there’s a new sheriff in town” before spending several years as one of the worst GMs in Dodger history, is now an adviser to President Trump on human trafficking, because he became a religious nut and joined one of those activist groups that claims it’s fighting human trafficking (and actually isn’t helping at all).
The Trump Administration is trying to tag several politicians with mortgage fraud for allegedly claiming more than one primary residence on loan applicants. At least three Cabinet members have done the same thing, ProPublica found in an investigation. It’s almost like this isn’t actually about mortgage fraud!
ProPublica also wrote about how xenophobes and white nationalists are co-opting climate change as a justification for their proposed policies.
Yale epidemiology professor Gregg Gonsalves writes in The Nation that RFK Jr. needs to resign or be forced out immediately as head of Health & Human Services.
Benny Johnson was fired for multiple acts of plagiarism. He became a right-wing podcaster and charlatan, posting lie after lie on social media, and took money from the Russian government to do so. He’s now a darling of the Trump White House.
A reserve captain in the Israel Defense Forces who served in Gaza wrote in the New York Times that fellow reservists should refuse to fight in this unjust war. His words: “With over 60,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, dead, according to Gazan health authorities, and growing starvation in the territory, with Israeli hostages languishing for nearly two years, this war has crossed every boundary. There is no longer any goal worth achieving by prolonging the war.”
Reps. James Comer (R-KY) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) are demanding that Wikipedia dox its own editors because of some bullshit claim about editorial bias. Where are the free speech absolutists now?
The matcha drink craze has led to a shortage of the green tea product, which has cultural significance in Japan, as influencers need their grass-flavored iced milk beverages.
Harvard won the latest round in its legal battles against the Trump Administration, as a judge ordered the White House to restore funding it had cut, but my alma mater continues to comply in small but meaningful ways with the fascists, this time removing designated spaces for the women’s center and the office for LGBTQ+ students.
Yahoo! sportswriter Matt Ufford writes that Bluesky has plenty of users, and the complaints to the contrary seem to miss the point or stem from individuals’ bad experiences with, well, getting called out for their bullshit.
The great Elie Mystal writes about the power of small acts of noncompliance, and the overemphasis on “big” acts of resistance.
Allplay has a Kickstarter for a new edition of the grail game Container, which runs $100+ for a used copy. It’s an economic simulation game about shipping containers, which sounds dry as hell, but people love this game. It’s been out of print since the 2018 tenth anniversary edition.

Tagged board game news, gaza, harvard, links, longreads, social media, stick to baseball, tea, the swamp, vaccines, white nationalism

August 30, 2025 · 6 comments

Stick to baseball, 8/30/25.

Over at Endless Mode, I wrote about how educators are using off-the-shelf board games in their classrooms for all sorts of didactic purposes.

I held a Klawchat on Thursday. I also appeared on The Menschwarmers podcast, which (obviously) is about the intersection of Judaism and sports, to talk about the Core Jackson story.

I moved my free email newsletter over to Kit this week, and the transition seems to have gone smoothly. If you were already signed up on Substack before Wednesday, you should have received the new edition. If you haven’t signed up, or signed up on Substack after that, you can sign up on my new site at Kit.

And now, the links…

Long(ish) reads first: A BBC investigation found that images and videos of child sexual abuse are easily found on X/Twitter, including those of a woman who is one of those victims and has directly asked Elon Musk to stop it. Third parties based overseas are using X to advertise the images for sale, then switching to other platforms to exchange them.

Bolts magazine looks at how two neighboring cities in Arizona have taken opposite approaches to tackling homelessness.

Israel struck Nasser Hospital in Gaza four times, killing at least 20 people, including 5 journalists. I’m really sick of western media blindly accepting the IDF’s claims that they’re not targeting civilians.

Taylor Lorenz wrote this investigative piece for WIRED about a dark-money group funding Democratic influencers to spread their messages on social media, although there’s already a correction and at least one of the people she named, Elizabeth Booker Houston, has pointed out what she believes are several errors in the story (example).

The Trump Administration is ending funding of a pediatric brain cancer treatment network dedicated to early trials of new medications.

Harvard has removed support titles for proctors and tutors who were designated as support specifically for LGBTQ+ or first-generation students.

Josephine Riesman ’08 wrote in the Harvard Independent, for which I wrote while I was there, that we should avoid the building that bears her family’s name, the Riesman Center for Harvard Hillel, because that organization has ignored the genocide happening in Gaza and said nothing about the Administration’s attacks against the university.

Anti-vaxx loons are making excuses for the CDC shooter while their idol RFK Jr. pours more gasoline on the fire.

The Philly Inquirer’s Will Bunch writes that a politician is finally doing what they promised: Trump is acting just like an authoritarian, raiding the house of critic John Bolton and using the military on his own people.

Political scientist Don Moynihan writes that the United States is no longer a functioning democracy.
A “voodoo plan” presented to Georgia’s Republican-dominated legislature claims, against pretty much all of economic history, that cutting 40% of the state’s revenues by ending its income tax will somehow make the state’s revenues grow. We’re on about year 45 of this experiment, and it doesn’t work. If you really want to cut taxes and grow an economy, raise the threshold below which people pay zero taxes. Those taxpayers are much more likely to put that money right back into the economy through consumption.

ICE detained a mother in Massachusetts for 10 days over a 2003 cannabis charge for which she’d been pardoned. The woman is here legally, and the offense is no longer even a crime in Massachusetts. She was released on August 20^th.

ICE also arrested two firefighters in Washington while the men were fighting an active wildfire.

The handpicked chairman of the Surry County (North Carolina) Board of Elections was arrested for putting drugs in his granddaughters’ ice cream. James Edwin Yokeley Jr., a Republican, resigned the day after his arrest.

A Republican candidate for Arizona Attorney General claimed that the Yuma sheriff endorsed him … and the sheriff says that’s not true.

Alderac’s Kickstarter for Into the Machine has a novel structure – there are all sorts of expansions for their other titles here as well, and the more items you pledge, the greater the discount you get.

I’m intrigued by the game Le Vent Rouge, with a relaunched Kickstarter up now, as it looks like a dice-rolling and bag-building game, but a heavier one, with a play time listed at 60-120 minutes.

Tagged anti-science, arizona, Economics, fascism, gaza, georgia, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, north carolina, social media, stick to baseball, vaccines

August 9, 2025 · 8 comments

Stick to baseball, 8/9/25.

At the trade deadline, I broke down the following trades for subscribers to The Athletic:

I also posted a midseason ranking of the top 60 prospects in the minors, held a Q&A about it, and wrote up a scouting notebook on Travis Bazzana, Braylon Doughty, and some other Cleveland and Baltimore prospects.

At Endless Mode, I ranked the ten best new games I saw at Gen Con and also ran through everything else I saw or played at the convention this year. Prior to that, I reviewed the game Big Sur, and wrote a feature story on the effects of the Trump tariffs and economic uncertainty on the board gaming space.

I appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition to discuss the brief callup of Jen Pawol to become the first woman to umpire an MLB game.

Now that this post is done, my next writing assignment is my free email newsletter, followed by a pair of reviews for this site.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: New York’s Intelligencer has the story of the one-man takeover of the Anti-Defamation League, where CEO Jonathan Greenblatt has hijacked the organization to back Donald Trump and attack anyone who criticizes Israel as antisemitic, while abandoning the organization’s storied history of standing up for the rights of all minorities and oppressed people.
Gizmodo wrote about the “end of work as we know it” due to the rising use of AI, even with serious deficiencies in the technology. Whether we’re ready or not, the workforce is about to be hit hard by the fever dreams of a small number of tech bros.
The Huffington Post spoke to Jerce Reyes Barrios about the abuse and torture he suffered in five months in El Salvador’s CECOT, where the U.S. is sending people suspected of entering the U.S. illegally. We are all complicit.
Guards at the ICE detention center in Miami made migrants there kneel like dogs to eat, with their hands shackled. Abu Ghraib taught us nothing.
Phil Williams of WTVF/NewsChannel 5, one of the best investigative reporters in the country, exposes the investors backing the construction of a Christian nationalist community near Gainesboro, Tennessee.
Remember all the stories last summer about Joe Biden’s mental status? Donald Trump “has trouble completing a thought” and has rambled on in nonsensical answers, often entirely off topic, reports Adam Gabbatt for the Guardian, quoting several experts who say the President is showing signs of dementia.
Brown caved to the Trump Administration, and now the university is “functionally inaccessible” to trans students.
NPR ran a series of stories on the problems posed by defunct oil wells across the southern and western United States, starting with one about how we don’t even know where they all are.
Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) introduced a measure to set cognitive standards for members of Congress, which, of course, was quickly rejected. There are more members of Congress aged 70 or older now than there have ever been.
The Forward explains that the starvation in Gaza is indeed Israel’s fault.
Some Senate Democrats finally took a stand by calling for the U.S. to stop supporting Israel’s ineffective Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which Israel created after kicking the UN out of Gaza, due to the mass starvation happening in the territory.
Israel is taking over Gaza City and has announced plans to occupy the entire Palestinian territory. It’s an invasion and an illegal annexation, no different than Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia invading Bosnia.
Meanwhile, the New York Times has devoted more articles to attacking mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani than it has to the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza, including the mass starvation and the war’s creation of over 5000 new child amputees in the territory.
An Israeli “settler” in the West Bank shot and killed a Palestinian activist who was involved in the production of last year’s film No Other Land. The Israeli military claims that the shooter was a civilian who responded with gunfire when a group of Palestinians threw rocks.
A far-right Israeli politician said Israel needed to take a cue from Adolf Hitler and wipe out all Gazans.
In June, the publisher of the Harvard Educational Review abruptly cancelled the release of an upcoming issue dedicated entirely to Palestine.
Israel has held an American teenager in prison for five months on charges he threw rocks.
The walkout by Texas Democrats isn’t going to work. It may pay some dividends for the party locally and nationally, but it’s not going to stop the gerrymandering.
Luzerne County, Pennsyltucky, cancelled the scheduled appearance of Philly band Low Cut Connie at a festival because they claimed the band’s music contained “politics and propaganda.” I thought cancel culture was bad?
Jess Grose writes in the New York Times about how social media has further corrupted the already commercialized American childhood, spurred by the Benson Boone Crumbl cookie, which is an actual phrase that unfortunately makes sense to me.
Jacksonville police used deadly force in a routine traffic stop of a Black man, including repeatedly punching him and smashing in his window, despite the fact that he never fought back in any way – and local prosecutors cleared the cops of wrongdoing.
The Spotify catalogs for some dead artists have seen “new” songs that are AI-generated added in recent months; the Futurism story blames Spotify for creating them although it’s unclear who’s actually doing it.
The President of the Utah Senate, Republican J. Stuart Adams, pushed fellow Republicans to lower the state’s age of consent to help out a family acquaintance charged with statutory rape. I don’t see why Democrats would ignore this: The Utah Republican Party is actively helping pedophiles evade punishment.
The wife of Rep. Gabe Evans (R-CO) wrote a racist romance novel. Apparently it’s quite bad, on multiple levels.
RFK Jr. cut a $500 million federal program to continue developing mRNA vaccines, the technology behind two of the main vaccines against COVID-19, offering the potential for vaccines against some cancers and many other diseases. His explanation was full of pseudoscientific bullshit.
Some countries still believe in science: Brazil is about to release swarms of mosquitos infected with a Wolbachia bacterium that prevents the virus that causes dengue fever from multiplying – and that then gets passed down to the mosquito’s offspring.
People who find their minds wander during simple tasks may be better at pattern recognition.
Misgendering and deadnaming are no longer considered hate or harassment on LinkedIn. Why would any site ever make an active choice to permit hateful behavior?
Philadelphia city schools found a way to keep students learning even when federal funding evaporated this summer.
Dan Pelzer kept a log of every book he read for over 60 years, and when he died last month at age 92, his tally was at least 3,599 books read in that span. For comparison’s sake, I’m 52, my list goes back at least to high school, and I’m at 1,988 books read. At my current pace, it’ll still take me at least 20 years to catch up to Pelzer’s total, assuming … a lot of things.
The India Board Game Designers Collective has a Kickstarter up where you can get three print-and-play games for $9, delivering in September. I backed it.

Tagged anti-semitism, artificial intelligence, board game news, colorado, florida, gaza, harvard, immigration, links, longreads, pennsylvania, police, science, social media, stick to baseball, tennessee, utah, vaccines, war crimes

July 26, 2025 · 4 comments

Stick to baseball, 7/26/25.

I ranked the top 60 prospects in the minors, including recently drafted players, for subscribers to the Athletic, and then answered a bunch of reader questions on Thursday in a Q&A that happened on a delay of sorts due to a site outage. You may still have issues accessing the articles; it’s a server issue of some sort and beyond my control.

Over at Endless Mode (ex-Paste Games), I spoke to four board game publishers about how the arbitrary and capricious Trump tariffs are likely to affect the board game industry. I’ll be writing for them once a week, with another review dropping this Wednesday.

I sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter on Friday, now that I’ve recovered from the mid-July content crush.

In lieu of links this week, however, I am going to repeat the call at the end of my newsletter and ask all of you to make three phone calls – one to your Representative plus one to each of your Senators. There is a mass starvation happening right now in Gaza, with at least a third of the population there having nothing to eat for days, the result of Israel’s illegal blockade of that part of the Palestinian state – which isn’t a new act by Israel, but an intensified version of the blockade they’ve had in place since 2007. (Israel, of course, is claiming Hamas is stealing aid, which international aid groups say is not true.) This is a genocide happening in real time, in front of us, and the United States in particular is doing nothing to stop it.

You can do something. All you need to do on Monday morning is take less than ten minutes and call your representatives in Congress to demand that they act. I called mine on Friday – total elapsed time, under six minutes – and asked all three to block any new aid to Israel until the blockade was lifted. (Sen. Chris Coons has made public statements to this effect; Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester has not said anything recently, and Rep. Sarah McBride didn’t so much as mention Gaza in her recent newsletter to constituents. All three are Democrats.)

I haven’t read Omar El-Akkad’s book One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This yet, but the title seems like a warning to the complacent and the silent. Many people will claim they opposed the war on Gaza, even though they didn’t raise a finger or voice to stop it. Will you be one of the ones who took action?

Tagged gaza, stick to baseball

July 19, 2025 · 4 comments

Stick to baseball, 7/19/25.

My recaps of all 30 teams’ draft classes are now up for subscribers to The Athletic, organized by division:

I wrote up a recap of day one that ran overnight Sunday into Monday, and my editor Melissa helped compile all of my comments on first & comp round picks as they happened into a single post.

I also wrote up some observations on the Futures Game.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the new edition of the push-your-luck game Celestia, which really needs the expansions and promo cards that will come in the redo of the big box version, supposedly out later this year.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: ICE arrested a teenager in Milford, Massachusetts, who was on his way to volleyball practice because they were looking for his father. The arrest mobilized the town to help get him freed through the legal process.

The Wall Street Journal has the exclusive story of a “bawdy” letter that Donald Trump sent to pedophile and rapist Jeffrey Epstein on the latter’s 50^th birthday.

Multiple police chiefs and sheriffs in Louisiana have been charged with handing out fraudulent visas to immigrants in exchange for cash.

ICE and Customs and Border Protection have held a family of five U.S. citizens in custody for two weeks with no contact with other family members or legal representation. We live in a police state, but they’re imposing it on us so slowly that no one seems to notice.

The Trump Administration also deported a Guatemalan pastor and father of five who had lived in the U.S. for twenty years. The people posting videos of themselves applauding ICE agents need to hear about these stories.

Israel is destroying civilian buildings in Gaza as part of its genocidal war on the Palestinian people. This is a war crime, by the way.

Israel also killed six Gazan children who were waiting to fill water containers in what they’re calling a “technical error.”

A group of San Francisco-area journalists have joined together to form Coyote Media, a worker-owned publication due to start publishing later this summer.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is fighting public records requests for his emails with Elon Musk because he claims they are too “intimate and embarrassing” to be made public.

Hugo Award-winning author Paolo Bacigulpi said in an interview with Colorado Public Radio that the future is even stupider than he imagined it would be.

How stupid? The Trump Administration is spending over $160,000 to destroy contraceptives meant for women outside of the U.S.

More stupidity: The Secretary of Transportation keeps lying about the safety of the New York City subways. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) finally called him out on it in a hearing that devolved into Secretary Duffy shouting that Nadler was the one lying (another lie).

Tagged gaza, immigration, journalism, links, longreads, louisiana, massachusetts, new york, police, stick to baseball, texas, the swamp

July 13, 2025 · 28 comments

Stick to baseball, 7/13/25.

I had a fourth mock draft go up Saturday morning for subscribers to The Athletic and then updated it on Sunday (same URL), following one I published just this past Tuesday. I also wrote up short capsules on fifty more players who might be drafted this week, beyond those on my top 100. I recapped Saturday’s Futures Game with notes on the standouts and a couple of disappointments. And I wrote up a scouting notebook on some guys I saw in triple A and high A games the previous week, including Cam Schlittler and Konnor Griffin.

At Endless Mode (formerly Paste Games), I reviewed the light tile-laying game Flower Fields, which reminded me a bit of Patchwork, but less tense and for up to four players rather than just two.

I really meant to get a newsletter out last week but never had time enough to write up the first half (the part that matters). Anyway, sign up here for free and I’ll try to do one after the draft dust settles.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Hollywood Reporter describes the celebrity-impersonation scams that proliferate on social media, and how those celebrities may be the best hope for fighting back against this scourge.

Anas Baba, NPR’s producer in the Gaza Strip, described the horrendous conditions there in a story on how difficult it is for Gazans to secure food from one of the few distribution centers. Meanwhile, the IDF bombed a queue of mothers and children lining up to receive nutritional supplements in Gaza, and it appears that Israeli ‘settlers’ in the West Bank beat an American citizen visiting family there to death. I’ve seen no comment or demand from our federal government about his murder yet.

The New York Times has an in-depth story on a woman who kidnapped her daughter after her divorce, because in the 1970s courts would not award custody to mothers if they were gay. The piece focuses on the child, who has very mixed feelings about what her mother did and how it altered the course of her life forever.

The family of a Northwestern University Professor who killed herself during a (dubious) federal investigation into whether she was some kind of spy for China is suing the school for contributing to her declining mental state.

The author Gary Shteyngart visited the country of Georgia and wrote about its food and sights for Condé Nast Traveler.

A few months ago, Texas Republicans voted down a bill to improve local disaster warning systems, such as tornado and flood sirens.

The Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan asks why The New York Times appears to be trying to take down Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, focusing on the paper’s recent story about what she calls a “made-up scandal.”

I included a link on John Wilson, who was running for executive of King County (WA), getting arrested for stalking and violating a restraining order, in the links a week or two ago; this week, charges were dropped, but he also ended his campaign.

Rare good news on the vaccine front, as NBC News reports on some states, mostly blue ones, trying to end the fake ‘religious exemptions’ to school vaccination requirements.

That’s important because, as this BMJ piece notes, the vaccine-denial movement is threatening global health.

Texas AG Ken Paxton (R) loves to talk about what a strong Christian he is, and has attempted to bring religion into government since he took office a decade ago. His wife announced this week she’s filed for divorce because he keeps cheating on her. Thou shalt not, or something like that.

Paste explores how AI-generated content is drowning the publishing industry in slop.

The Intelligencer explains how a combination of changes at Google, Twitter’s self-destruction, and AI have led to a traffic apocalypse for media companies.

The Guardian has a story on just how dangerous choking during sex is, even as the practice seems to be becoming more prevalent – and it’s almost always women being choked, of course. The whole story made me feel very old and creeped out.

Libraries in Kent, England, have been instructed by the Reform-led council there to remove any trans books from their shelves if they might be seen by children. There are many problems here, but the most fundamental one is the idea that books about trans people – or other LBGTQ+ people, or Black people, or Jewish people – are inherently inappropriate for children. They’re not.

Some board game Kickstarters of note: Allplay has one for Sail Legacy, a legacy version of the cooperative two-player trick-taking game; and Restoration Games has one for a storage solution for players of their Unmatched card-game series.

Tagged artificial intelligence, board game news, book banning, gaza, georgian cuisine, links, longreads, new york city, scams, social media, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

June 28, 2025 · 3 comments

Stick to baseball, 6/28/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I had a scouting notebook on Jesus Made, Luis Peña, Trey Yesavage, and some Orioles and Brewers low-A prospects, and a post on the 2025 draft prospects who might be the first to reach the majors.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Conservas, a solitaire push-your-luck game that brings environmental sustainability into its victory conditions.

I also sent out another edition of my free email newsletter on Monday.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The fast-fashion craze is a huge drain on the planet’s resources, although this Scientific American feature also examines some entrepreneurs fighting to make clothing more sustainable.

In the New Yorker, Rivka Galchen examines the enormous cost we’re about to face from rising vaccine denialism (or “skepticism”).

The New York Times tells the stories of people caught up in measles outbreaks from Texas to North Dakota, all preventable, all the result of scam artists and lunatics spreading lies about vaccines.

Kate Shemirani was a nurse in Britain who lost her license for spreading false information about COVID-19. Her anti-medicine insanity ran so deep that her 23-year-old daughter just died of a treatable cancer because her mother opposed her getting chemotherapy. Shemirani’s two sons blame their mother and are urging social media sites to crack down on misinformation.

Gregg Gonsalves writes in The Nation about the cowardice of Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician who voted to confirm RFK, Jr., knowing full well what the noted anti-vaccine crank would do as head of the HHS.

A presentation for this week’s meeting of CDC vaccine “advisers” cited a study on thimerosal in vaccines and autism that does not exist. (There is no link between thimerosal and autism.)

Vanity Fair profiles Iowa state Rep. J.D. Scholten (D), who is running to unseat Sen. Joni “We all die some day!” Ernst (R) while also pitching for the independent Sioux Falls Explorers.

Haaretz spoke to IDF soldiers who say they were ordered to shoot at unarmed Palestinians trying to get food and other aid.

The University of Florida’s law school gave an award to a paper written white-nationalist student in which he argued that Constitutional rights only apply to white Americans.

Harvard hired a researcher to examine the school’s historical ties to slavery … but when he found too many, they fired him.

Everything is bad – it’s just as terrible as you imagined and probably worse – but a three-judge panel struck down a Louisiana law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments. Your religion is yours; don’t force it on me or my kids or anyone but your own.

Your energy bill may be going up because of the AI bubble as energy companies rush to build more infrastructure to support these greedy tech companies.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R, of course) refused $450 million in federal funds that would have provided food to school-aged children over the summer. Just like Jesus intended.

Roll20-owned site DriveThruRPG, a major store to download new and classic role-playing games, removed a game called Rebel Scum from its catalog because the anti-fascist game is “too political.”

I really hesitate to share anything made by AI, but this satirical newscast is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in months.

Tagged board game news, environment, gaza, harvard, iowa, links, longreads, louisiana, stick to baseball, texas, vaccines

June 14, 2025 · 1 comment

Stick to baseball, 6/14/25.

For subscribers to the Athletic this week, I published my second mock draft of 2025 and held a Q&A that afternoon. I also posted a minor-league scouting notebook on Travis Sykora, Carson Benge, and a few others from that Nats-Mets high-A game. I did see Trey Yesavage’s double-A debut this week but am holding off until I get to at least one more game somewhere so I have enough for a column (Aidan Miller didn’t play in that game so it was really light on prospects).

I appeared on Kauffman Corner with Soren Petro and Rany Jazayerli to talk about the Jac Caglianone callup, the Royals’ 2024 draft, and briefly about this year’s draft class as well.

You can subscribe to my free email newsletter for more content from me, which I’ve sent out three times in a month, not quite at my goal of returning to weekly issues but getting closer!

And now, the links…

The New York Times published a video feature on a Palestinian girl who escaped an Israeli air strike, finding her in a Gazan hospital and telling her story.

Also in the Times, this longread on AI chatbots leading users down conspiracy-theory rabbit holes and convincing them of some truly insane things is a horrifying look at where we’re heading. (More links on AI below.)

Dr. Angela Rasmussen writes about the Bethesda Declaration, an attempt by scientists to rally support for the NIH against the illegal impoundment of funds by its new head, Jay Bhattacharya. There’s a link to sign the petition at the end of her essay.

Trump announced plans to open an Office of Remigration, using a term associated with ethnic cleansing throughout history. Mainstream media outlets have said little to nothing about the choice of names.

Trump also cancelled an agreement between the federal government, Washington, Oregon, and local indigenous tribes to protect the Columbia River Basin and restore salmon populations, claiming that it advanced the “green agenda” and other nonsense. The press release sounds like “environment + Biden = bad.”

This was the week for lazy columns saying that Bluesky is “failing” or something similar despite the platform passing 35 million users and publishers saying repeatedly they’re seeing better engagement there than on Twitter. This blog post on Tedium does a solid job of reacting to those columns without overreacting, making what I think is the key argument: it’s about community, and what Bluesky has in its favor right now is a sense of community that’s been absent from other social media sites for some time.

NYPD Chief of Department John Chell pleaded guilty in 2013 to departmental charges of misconduct, but that undersells it – he committed tax fraud by using a false identity to hide money he took in from a side hustle. It’s at least the 11^th investigation into his actions since he joined the force. He’s the highest-ranking uniformed official in the NYPD. Why is he still employed?

South Carolina State Rep. RJ May (R), who has previously ranted against drag queens in schools and made false claims about gender reassignment surgery for toddlers, was arrested and charged with distribution of child sex-abuse material. The charges were significant enough that he was denied bond. He founded the state’s Freedom Caucus.

A Texas man has been charged in a case where he poisoned his pregnant girlfriend with abortion pills. The charges aren’t related to her, though; he’s only been charged with murder for the death of the fetus. The girlfriend’s life and body don’t matter. Texas has a religious-based “fetal personhood” law, under which Justin Banta, who works for the U.S. Department of Justice, has been charged.

Wikipedia toyed with putting AI-generated summaries atop some of its articles, but pulled them down after a strong negative response from editors on the site. I don’t even care why they did it – we don’t need AI-generated stuff everywhere and too few people are talking about its environmental cost.

Along those lines, here’s an AI-generated video that shows just how dangerously deceptive these videos have become, and how we’re likely to see them used for phishing and other scams now.

When this year’s high school graduates in Oklahoma started pre-K, the state ranked 17^th in the nation ine education. Now they’re ranked in the bottom three.

Tagged abortion, artificial intelligence, environment, gaza, links, oklahoma, social media, south carolina, stick to baseball, texas

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