One new post for subscribers to The Athletic this week, breaking down the surprise trade that sent Grayson Rodriguez to the Angels for Taylor Ward.

Over at AV Club, I reviewed the game Ink, the newest title from Kasper Lapp and his best game since his award-winning Magic Maze.

My next free email newsletter might have to wait until after this weekend’s PAX Unplugged convention, as I’ll be there gaming as much as humanly possible.

And now, the links…

• Longreads first: The Toronto-based site The Local has a piece on a freelance scammer who published pieces at some legitimate sites that appeared to be entirely AI-generated. I ran into something similar recently, where a site and writer I’d never heard of had a quote from me that I’d never said and that made no sense.
• Mother Jones digs into the grifter Riley Gaines, who finished 5^th in a swim meet, was gracious in defeat, and then realized she could make a career out of bashing trans people – and even cis women who she just decides are trans.
• This October 2024 story from Stereogum on the end of Japandroids is a tremendous piece of writing, not just music writing but any writing, especially with the Japandroids’ lead singer/guitarist Brian King being such a notoriously difficult person to get to know.
• The Guardian – one of the sites fooled by the AI scammer that The Local exposed – has the story of two men who have made a career of helping people leave cults. They eschew the term deprogramming and the sometimes coercive methods involved in that process in favor of an approach where you try to convince the cult member-victim that leaving was their idea.
• The Harvard Crimson has been all over the Larry Summers-Jeffrey Epstein connection, to a degree that professional outlets have not, highlighting how Epstein was Summers’s wing man as the Harvard professor tried to sleep with a student, and breaking the news that Summers reversed course and immediately left his teaching responsibilities for the semester.
• NPR details the backlash to Megyn Kelly’s claims that Epstein raping 15-year-olds doesn’t make him a pedophile, including this superb video by a 14-year-old girl named Eloise. (There are, in fact, some very good things on TikTok.)
• President Trump pardoned a January 6^th rioter who has now been charged with molesting an 11-year-old. I don’t know why Democrats aren’t pushing this headline everywhere; in 1988, Republicans used the case of Willie Horton, a Massachusetts convict who fled while on furlough, assaulted two people, and raped a woman, to help defeat Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis.
• A new research paper documents the discovery of a chemical found in a common soil bacterium that is 100 times stronger than current antibiotics and would be effective against MRSA.
• Thanks to climate change, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, carrier of dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, is now appearing in the Rocky Mountains.
• Texas A&M now prohibits any classroom discussions of topics related to “race or gender ideology” or sexual orientation.
• Switzerland has passed a law expanding the state’s power to force email and VPN providers to decrypt user messages and log IP addresses.
• Several countries are developing their own messaging apps to compete with and/or separate their people from the global behemoths of Meta, TikTok, etc., most of which are based in the unstable and uncertain United States.
• Amine Kessaci is a 22-year-old activist in France who started an organization to help victims of drug-related violence after his brother was killed for his involvement in the drug trade. This week, another of Amine’s brothers was killed in apparent retaliation for Amine’s political work.
• Wisconsin House Speaker Robin Vos (R) blocked a bipartisan bill that would expand Medicaid coverage from 60 days after a mother gives birth to a full year. ProPublica has more on this story, noting that Vos claimed he would “protect the unborn” but doesn’t seem to care if they die after that.
• A rare bit of positive news: A Republican candidate for Governor in Michigan had been demonizing the Muslim population in Dearborn, claiming Sharia Law was imminent and organizing a (white) march there, but after visiting the town and speaking to religious and civic leaders, he admitted he was wrong and said the propaganda about the Muslim community there was all lies. I’m most impressed that Anthony Hudson took the time to go to Dearborn and visit mosques and businesses, meaning his mind was at least somewhat open to the possibility that his views were based on misinformation.