For subscribers to the Athletic, I ranked the top 50 free agents in this year’s class, and held a Q&A about it that afternoon. Based on my Twitter replies, a lot of people looked at the raw rankings without reading any of the content. Good times!
My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was Caroline Criado Perez, author of the book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Menand host of the podcast Visible Women. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Last week’s roundup went up late because of all the sportsball going on over the weekend, so I’m relinking it here for folks who missed it.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Writing for the New Yorker, Jessica Winter looks at the rise in early puberty for American girls and what it might mean for them in the short- and long-term. She also explores the complex reasons why this trend increased during the pandemic.
- A ProPublica/Texas Tribune joint investigation shed more light on the botched police response in Uvalde.
- The Intercept ran a widely shared story about the Department of Homeland Security collaborating with tech companies to suppress (dis)information, but TechDirt writer Mike Masnick says the story is “absolute garbage.”
- Have you seen the “stop the insanity” or “anti-white bigotry” ads running during the MLB playoffs? Both are funded by dark-money groups founded and run by former Trump officials, including Stephen Miller. They’re bullshit, notably the first one’s claims about crime being out of control – crime is way down from the 1990s.
- John Leguizamo wrote an open letter to Hollywood about the continued lack of opportunities for Latinx actors on screen, in spite of growing evidence that movies and shows built around such actors and characters do well financially. The same argument applies to Black or Asian actors.
- Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, one of the worst and most vocal anti-vaxxers online for at least a decade, is now, finally under investigation by the Ohio medical board for her ridiculous testimony before that state’s legislature where she claimed COVID-19 vaccines made people magnetic, among other falsehoods.
- So much content on Elon Musk’s flailing takeover of Twitter, from how he’s backing down on promises and kowtowing to regulators to a massive drop in advertisers to a badly botched mass layoff to a class-action lawsuit because the layoff violated California law. And that’s without getting into this silly Twitter Blue program, that misunderstands the part where verifying users benefits Twitter, not the other way around.
- Musk also shot himself in the foot by retweeting a false right-wing conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, which Musk later deleted, but not before amplifying it to his huge follower base.
- Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), who campaigned on the bogus pretense that critical race theory was being taught in the state’s elementary schools, set up a tip line for parents to rat out schools that were teaching stuff they didn’t like. Parents instead used it to report actual violations of their rights, such as the denial of special education requests, including services and evaluations.
- Countries in the Middle East are happily selling oil to the world while shifting to cleaner energy sources themselves. They know you don’t get high on your own supply.
- Dr. Oz had a paper rejected in 2003 over questions about the strength of the data he used to reach his conclusions, earning a two-year ban from publishing in that same journal – an unusually harsh punishment.
- The Slay the Spire board game Kickstarter has raised over $2 million already.