For subscribers to the Athletic, I wrote another scouting blog, looking at some Phillies, Orioles, Nats, and White Sox prospects, including the four big arms the Phillies had at Jersey Shore; and did a quick breakdown of some of the highlights and omissions from the Futures Game rosters. I’ll have an updated, final Big Board for the draft on Sunday, and then a new mock draft on Monday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Ouch!, a fun, silly game for kids as young as five, and pointed out why it works where games like Candyland, my bête noire among children’s board games, fail.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Eric Longenhagen, for an extensive conversation about this month’s MLB draft. You can subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I found my voice again and sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter this week. Also, my two books, Smart Baseball and The Inside Game, are both available in paperback, and you can buy them at your local independent book store or at Bookshop.org.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The New England Journal of Medicine has a long story on vaccine hesitancy and how we might combat it.
• Inside Higher Ed looks at the Great Resignation in academia, as even tenured professors leave their universities due to burnout, lack of institutional support, or greater financial opportunities elsewhere.
• New York talks about how NYC Mayor Eric Adams (D) has shown no evidence of a clear philosophy of governing.
• Jessica Luther, co-author of Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back, wrote for Vox about the myth of “fairness” in sports and how transphobes are using it to further their anti-trans agenda.
• Two law professors wrote on LawFareBlog that Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony changed their minds on whether former President Trump should be indicted.
• The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik reviews Daniel Levin Becker’s new book on rap and rhyme, called What’s Good, and writes in praise of the variety of forms and styles of rhyming.
• Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Yong writes in the Atlantic that we have stopped caring about the pandemic, and that leads to our inevitable defeat, where SARS-CoV-2 will kill hundreds of thousands of people a year and nobody will do anything to stop it.
• Vanity Fair has the story of the great video game heist of 2019, where a collection estimated to be worth over $1 million was stolen and eventually recovered, but where many of these extremely rare Nintendo games were badly damaged by the incompetent thief.
• The Washington Post ran an excerpt from the new book American Cartel: Inside the Battle to Bring Down the Opioid Industry, detailing parts of the lobbying campaign to keep the DEA from shutting down opioid suppliers.
• The Verge’s Nilay Patel interviewed the TSA’s Chief Innovation Officer, asking some insightful questions about PreCheck and the relationship between data privacy and increased security. Patel also used one of my favorite phrases, security theater, which also applies to the metal detectors that are ubiquitous now at major sporting events.
• U.S. road fatality rates are rising. One big reason is the increase in distractions in your car, or as this article puts it, “The problem is asking the brain to do too many things at once.”
• What is the point of Sunday political news shows? They’re little more than propaganda vehicles, putting profit over accuracy.
• The Internal Revenue Service didn’t notice that 76 registered charities all shared the same mailbox. Needless to say, it was all a scam.
• An evangelical pastor who used to lead a religious right organization has bragged about wining and dining three current SCOTUS justices, Alito, Thomas, and Scalia, to try to sway their views on issues like LBGTQ+ rights and abortion. Above The Law has more on this story, pointing out that the same group that prays with these justices also files amicus briefs with the court.
• Jonathan Chait wrote about Blake Masters, who is running against Mark Kelly (D-AZ) for the latter’s Senate seat, calling Masters “Nazi-adjacent” and another sign of the GOP’s trend toward extremism.
• The New Republic called Pamela Paul’s latest op ed for the New York Times her version of Great Replacement Theory, with an amalgam of anti-trans talking points common to the right and to gender-critical feminists.
• Brynn Tannehill, author of American Fascism, called Paul’s column and those like it part of the right’s plan to demonize trans people the way the Nazi Party demonized Jews.
• At the Raw Story, Thom Hartmann writes that the SCOTUS majority is planning to “pre-rig” the 2024 election.
• Herschel Walker hid his two secret kids from his own campaign staff.
• The Harvard Business School’s site posted a breakdown of the implosion of artisan ice cream maker Ample Hills. The founders expanded too soon, both in scale and geography, and didn’t pay attention to short-term cash flow.
• Leon County School District near Tallahassee passed its own don’t-say-gay “guide” for teachers, which requires parental notification if a student who is “open about their gender identity” is in their child’s PE class or on an overnight field trip. So the school will be outing kids to the entire community.
• Also in Florida, the state’s Florida Healthy Kids Board kicked off a pediatrician for taking a public pro-vaccine view, which puts her in line with (checks notes) every major medical and scientific body in the world.
• A Detroit police officer was shot and killed in the line of duty, and the Police Chief said there is too much gun violence in the city.
• Texas’s soi-disant “Freedom Caucus” is threatening companies that help employees travel out of state for medical procedures.
• Kentucky Gov. Andy Brashear released emails about President Biden’s plan to nominate an anti-abortion judge to a lifetime district court appointment in that state.
• My editor at Paste wrote about the Hyperspace Lounge, a cocktail bar on a Disney cruise ship with a $5000 drink on the menu.
• You do not, in fact, have a constitutional right to have dinner.
• A particle physicist wrote about the possible discoveries in Run 3 of the Large Hadron Collider.
• I haven’t seen a good link on this yet, but Alea/Ravensburger have announced a new version of the board game Puerto Rico called Puerto Rico 1897, which tries to eliminate the rather questionable elements of the original game, not least the use of “colonists” who, in historical terms, were slaves, and who in the game were unfortunately represented by dark brown discs.