No new content for subscribers to the Athletic as I’ve continued writing capsules for the top 100 prospects ranking, which will run on January 30^th. Please stand by.

My podcast did return this week, with guest Seth Reiss, who co-wrote the screenplay for the film The Menu. You can listen and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I’m planning to send out another issue of my free email newsletter on Sunday, now that I’m back on track with the prospect stuff. I was fairly stressed about it as recently a few days ago, but I’ve caught up enough that I can finish everything with a reasonable daily output of words.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: A 17-year-old woman in Texas wanted an abortion. A judge decided she wasn’t “mature” enough to make that choice. ProPublica looks at the ramifications of that decision.

• The BBC looks at the revolutionary TV show Homicide: Life on the Street on the 30^th anniversary of its debut. I can remember seeing it for the first time and being riveted. I’d never seen a TV show like that before.

• The Ringer looks back at the Simpsons episode “Marge vs. the Monorail” on the 30^th anniversary of its first airing.

• An epidemiologist and an emergency medicine physician debunk the whole “died suddenly” myth around COVID-19 vaccines. No, people are not dying suddenly of cardiac events from vaccines; we did see a jump in such cardiac deaths, but it came in 2020 and early 2021, due to COVID-19 infections.

• New York’s Intelligencer explains how the theft of Ashley Biden’s diary might take down Project Veritas – but that the case is creating some surprising bedfellows for the right-wing hoaxers.

• Also from Intelligencer, a longread on what it’s like right now at Twitter.

• The San Francisco Chronicle has the heartbreaking story of a mother’s attempts to help her daughter, a 35-year-old opioid addict living on the San Francisco streets, touching on the city’s lack of services for addicts and for homeless people. There’s a sad baseball connection: The daughter’s boyfriend, Abdul Cole, was a Marlins minor leaguer for three years, but died last April.

• A new research paper looks at decision fatigue in the context of baseball umpires.

• The COVID misinformation-spreading Brownstone Institute is mostly funded by a small number of large, anonymous donations, and is led by a neo-Confederate advocate who has previously written for white nationalist sites.

• LitHub has an excerpt from Dr. Henry Marsh’s new book, And Finally: Matters of Life and Death, as the 70-year-old neurosurgeon faces his own likely terminal cancer diagnosis.

• Quanta looks at a 17-year-old who helped prove part of a theorem on the pseudoprimes known as Carmichael numbers, which are related to Fermat’s Little Theorem (not the more famous Last Theorem).

• The School Board of Madison County, Virginia, voted to ban 21 books from its libraries, including The Handmaid’s Tale and four books by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, because Christian groups complained.

• Meanwhile, two Christian activists in Crawford County, Arkansas, are trying to remove the library director and defund the system over the display of LGBTQ+ books, calling it an “alternative lifestyle.” Sexual orientation is not a lifestyle, or a choice. Gender identity is not a lifestyle, or a choice. Religion is a lifestyle, and a choice.

• How does this shit happen? Because right-wing zealots have been pushing to take over school and library boards. The Christian nationalist group FlashPoint is even holding an event to train people to run for these positions.

• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) says that schools there cannot teach AP African-American History because of the state’s anti-anti-racism law.

• And that same law has professors at universities across the state scrambling to avoid any possibility that their courses would be found to violate it. So a law that is supposed to prohibit “indoctrination” is increasing the likelihood students will receive indoctrination, but from the other side.

• Iowa Republicans are trying to defund public schools by allowing parents to use vouchers for private schools, including religious schools, which would seem to violate the principle of separation of church and state. You can send your kids to a parochial school, but only without my tax dollars.

• The City of Pittsburgh passed an ordinance prohibiting police from using secondary infractions as a reason to make traffic stops. The Chief of Police has told officers to ignore it.

• Idaho Republicans are trying to “fix” the state’s anti-abortion law to avoid prosecuting women who have ectopic pregnancies, but within the article, you can see quotes from a legislator who wants to remove exemptions for cases of rape or incest and said that a woman who became pregnant after she was raped by a family member would view it “as the opportunity to have a child.” He also invoked Martin Luther King, Jr., of course.

• Texas’s Supreme Court declined to block the state’s attempted takeover of the publicly elected school board in Houston.

• Gregg Doyel says Tony Dungy should stick to sports and stop spreading anti-LGBTQ+ nonsense.

• A couple of Eagles players recorded a Christmas album for charity, hoping to raise about $30,000. It raised $250,000 and will help fund two toy drives and a summer camp for Philly kids with serious behavioral problems. (We have a copy.)

• Utah police investigated and then ignored complaints about child abuse from the daughter of the Mormon man who killed his wife, kids, and himself earlier this month. His 14-year-old daughter described serious physical abuse at her father’s hands less than three years ago, but no charges were filed.

• Scottsdale has cut off a nearby town, Rio Verde Foothills, from its city water supply, leaving the residents to use rain water to flush their toilets. The subtext here is that the whole state is going to run out of water sooner rather than later.
  
• A Republican candidate for the House in New Mexico was arrested for shooting at the homes of multiple Democratic legislators.