The Mookie Betts trade might be falling apart as I write this, but I did break down the reported three-team deal on Wednesday morning. I’ll update that as needed when the trade becomes final. Schedule conflicts prevented me from chatting but I did do a Periscope on Friday. My prospect rankings will run on The Athletic the week of February 24^th.

My second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is due out on April 21^st from Harper Collins, and you can pre-order it now via their site or wherever fine books are sold. Also, check out my free email newsletter, which I say I’ll write more often than I actually write it.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: I reviewed Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys earlier this week. Read the Tampa Bay Times investigative report into the Dozier School for Boys, which inspired Whitehead’s book.

• “Pro-Trump forces are poised to wage what could be the most extensive disinformation campaign in U.S. history,” according to this article by the Atlantic‘s McKay Coppins, who details the methods operatives use to fool people, especially via social media, into believing fabrications are the truth and the truth is merely fake news.

• Rolling Stone‘s Ash Sanders spoke to adults who escaped the cult of Scientology and how they struggled to readapt to society.

• People keep dying in Mississippi prisons, but Governor Tate Reeves just wants to “turn the page” on the state’s responsibility to its inmates.

• Evenflo, one of the major manufacturers of child car safety seats, lied when marketing its “Big Kid” booster seats despite data showing kids in those seats could be injured or killed in side-impact crashes, according to this investigative report from ProPublica.

• Mass shootings get the headlines and the calls for needed gun control, but far more Americans who die from guns are suicides.

• The Economist‘s Nicholas Pelham tells his story of being detained in Iran in July 2019, despite his presence there on a journalist’s visa.

• Why the fuck is the New York Times running editorials defending Gwyneth Paltrow’s pseudoscience show GOOPagainst the evidence-based criticisms of its content?

• Developing countries with valuable internet top-level domains, such as .tv (Tuvalu), .ly (Libya), or .nu (Niue), have often missed out on the profits from those names, which instead flowed to programmers or entrepreneurs in the U.S. or western Europe.

• Southern Methodist women’s basketball coach Travis Mays stands accused of telling players they should kill themselves if they didn’t want to work and of otherwise verbally abusing his players. So far, SMU has backed him, and not its players (who are unpaid, mind you). Here’s a crazy idea, though: why not hire a woman to coach a women’s sports team?

• The Trump Administration is charging the Secret Service exorbitant rates as high as $650/night to stay at Trump’s hotels, yet another example of how Republican members of the executive branch are looting the American taxpayer.

• An abortion cannot be “reversed,” but six states require that women seeking abortions receive counseling that this is possible. There are also three times as many “pregnancy crisis centers,” which somehow receive federal funding,” in the U.S. than abortion clinics. STAT News argues in this piece that abortion advice needs to be safe and evidence-based. The United States is not a theocracy.

• US Bank came under (well-deserved) attack last week after news spread that they had fired an employee for giving a stranded customer $20 on Christmas Eve so he could get home, and fired her supervisor as well. They’ve said they offered to re-hire both women, although the first of the two says she still hasn’t received a formal offer or any apology for the way the company defamed her publicly.

• “Attention residue” reduces our productivity and happiness. One proposed solution is to carve out GLYIO (Get Your Life In Order) times during which you handle administrative tasks, or work out, or do other things that are bothering you because they’re always on your mind or your to-do list.

• The Facebook group Stop Mandatory Vaccinations, which has 178,000 members, urged a mother who reported that her unvaccinated four-year-old son had the flu not to give him TamiFlu. He died four days later. Facebook is a dumpster fire of anti-vaccine bullshit and other conspiracy theories, and they simply do not care about the real-world consequences of their choice to shield this content.

• Facebook also doesn’t do anything to stop anti-vaxxers from flooding pro-vaccine advocates, such as pediatrician Nicole Baldwin (whose pro-vax TikTok video went viral in mid-January), with threats and hate comments. That’s why Shots Heard Round the World was formed to help pro-vaccine advocates fight back against these armies of ignorance.

• C|Net has some advice on how to manage the information Google tracks about you.

• The FCC did something good, for a change: They have proposed a $13 million fine against a robocaller who used the death of Mollie Tibbetts to spread white-supremacist messaging.

• Miami, Florida, is the most vulnerable coastal city in the world as sea levels rise, yet Miami voters chose a Republican mayor, and the state has two Republican Senators and a Republican Governor – even though the GOP’s official stances on climate change range from opposing regulations on fossil fuels to outright climate denial.

• I reviewed Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep a few years ago and praised it; I listened to the audio version and it seemed to be well-sourced and backed by evidence. Now there are claims that Walker manipulated the data in the book, and his responses so far have not come close to addressing the criticisms.