For subscribers to the Athletic, I posted my first mock draft for 2024. I also held a free Klawchat on Wednesday to take questions on that and a few on some minor-league prospects.

I swear I’ll send out a new version of my email newsletter in the next day or two. It’s just been very hectic here lately. It’s not exactly slowing down – I may not go to any conference tournaments because my daughter’s birthday is this week and the Delaware state tennis tournament was delayed until Monday due to (a teeny tiny threat of) rain.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: ProPublica has the story of a mom in Texas who won election to her school board in Granbury on a platform of stopping left-wing indoctrination, only to find that none of that was happening. When she went public with her change of views, however, she found herself attacked by her former allies.

• Defector’s Nick Zarzycki interviewed Richard Garfield about the creation of Magic: the Gathering and his disenchantment with how the game has developed and (in his view) devolved in its 30-year history.

• This excerpt from Jacob Kushner’s new book Look Away: A True Story of Murder, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants hooked me into adding it to my to-read list.It’s about a trio of white supremacist killers in Germany who robbed banks when they weren’t murdering immigrants, and also about the new rise of such racist violence across the west in the last decade.

• Author Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies, Florida) has opened a bookstore in Gainesville, Florida, with a focus on banned and challenged books because of the state’s war on literature.

• An unvaccinated child, under the age of 5, died of measles in the Canadian province of Ontario. There is no reason whatsoever to allow parents to neglect their child’s welfare like this.

• RFK Jr. had quite a week, as reports found that in his divorce filing in 2012, he claimed a worm had eaten away part of his brain, leading to half-serious jokes that it explains how completely batshit his views have become. Slate has a short piece arguing that it’s just more evidence of how RFK Jr. is happy to lie his way through any situation. Scientific American explained that such “brain worms” are an actual global health problem, which you’d think the vaccine-denialist candidate would embrace since he claims to be so concerned with public health. Meanwhile, a new hire for his campaign appears to have been at the insurrection on January 6^th. And his VP candidate Nicole Shanahan just dumped $8 million of her own money into his flailing campaign effort.

• The Beverly Hills billionaires who own the companies behind Wonderful pistachios and Fiji water are trying to kill a California law that helps unions bring farmworkers under their umbrella. The Resnicks donate millions to mostly liberal and Democratic causes, but would rather destroy workers’ rights than deal with unions at their Wonderful agricultural firm.

• Saudi Arabia’s quixotic Neom project includes a 170 kilometer-long linear city called The Line, but the BBC reports that the autocratic nation has destroyed villages and murdered residents of the area to clear the path for the city’s construction.

• Is Mexico City about to run out of fresh water? Maybe not yet, but the situation is dire there and in many other large cities that have overdeveloped and/or relied too much on a single water source, with climate change exacerbating the situation on multiple continents.

• David R. Boyd, the outgoing United Nations special rapporteur for the environment and human rights, excoriated our reliance on exploitation of both humans and nature to run our global economy, citing climate change, plastic pollution, and declining biodiversity as critical issues that most people and governments are ignoring.

• David Tennant remains my favorite Doctor, although I have yet to see any of Ncuti Gatwa’s episodes; I’m not surprised that Tennant has also come out clearly in favor of trans rights as well.

• Tiffany Haddish, on the other hand, is not one of my favorite actors, and it turns out she used the United States’ lack of data privacy laws to dox people who criticized her online. There’s way too much personal information about us available to anyone willing to cough up a few bucks. Also, Haddish really needs to log off.

• I tweeted this link when the story ran, but it’s worth reposting: Jackson County legislator DaRon McGee (D) helped put the Chiefs/Royals stadium tax initiative on the ballot. He also hit up the Royals for free suite tickets last year while he was involved in negotiations with the club.

• The Supreme Court ruled that people whose property is seized in civil asset forfeiture cases have no right to a preliminary hearing to determine if the forfeiture was legal or justified, instead favoring the police’s so-called “right” to continue their “important law-enforcement activities.”

• North Carolina’s far-right legislature passed a bill banning the wearing of masks in public, which likely violates both the First Amendment and federal disability rights statutes. The ostensible targets are pro-Palestine protesters, but even so, they also have free speech and free assembly rights.

• Chad recently held the first free election in its 64-year history, although observers have said the election was not fair and at least two opponents have alleged fraud. The winner was Mahamat Idriss Déby, son of the strongman Idriss Déby who ruled the country from 1991 until he was killed in a coup in 2021.

• The parliament of the European country of Georgia passed a Russian-backed bill requiring organizations receiving at least 20% of their funding from outside of the country to register as “agents of foreign influence”, over objections from the country’s western allies and protests from Georgians that have lasted for weeks.

• ProPublica also explores Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s dubious claim that Israel has done enough to address serious rights violations by its military, such as the Israeli soldier who murdered an unarmed Palestinian and was sentenced only to community service.

• Evan Urquhart at Assigned Media points out how many other anti-trans voices have found J.K. Rowling too toxic to defend, coming in the wake of Rowling bullying a trans woman who became the first openly trans referee in a major soccer league.

• St. Petersburg, Florida, is banking on 7% annual growth to help pay for the stadium they want to build for the Rays, which is wildly optimistic in any circumstances, but I’d say even more so for a city right on the water in an era of rising sea levels.