What we read while narrowly avoiding an NPI shutdown…
- Even Yankee fan John S was a little sad to hear about Manny Ramirez’s retirement. It’s depressing to see so much vitriol directed at one of the best hitters of all-time (whose Hall of Fame candidacy really requires no “debate”). He was enigmatic, but he was also a hitting genius, and an entertaining guy to root against.
- An interesting look at the for-profit education industry, by a newspaper with a vested interest.
- It was a fun week in the comedy world: Comedy Central had its first Comedy Awards, Hannibal Buress gave an interview about fedora basketball, and we got the lowdown on the new documentary about Bill Hicks.
- The empirics on happiness and parenting may have become a bit more nuanced since Josh wrote on the matter.
- Damon Lindelof and George R.R. Martin got into one of the nerdier celebrity feuds this week, as one fantasy writer slammed another.
- Justice Kagan authored her first major dissent on an issue riveting to legal outsiders: taxpayer standing!
- David Foster Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, talks to the Guardian. The Awl‘s Maria Bustillos examines Wallace in a much-tweeted essay.
- A list of the 20 best last lines in literature that omits Kurt Vonnegut but includes Harry Potter? Please…
- Joe Posnanski wraps up the national championship game, and Wright Thompson delivers the goods from Augusta. One of the bigger stories emerging from The Masters wasn’t winner Charl Schwartzel but rather the club’s denying access to the locker room to Bergen Record reporter Tara Sullivan because she’s a woman. We don’t often condone the use of “Really?” as a stand-alone reaction, but…really? Sullivan, who anyone in the business knows is a pro’s pro, wrote about the experience here — a “misunderstanding” according to Augusta National, which somewhat famously doesn’t have any female members — while also delivering her regularly scheduled column on Rory McIlroy. You may also remember Sullivan writing about the Ines Sainz scandal with the New York Jets back in the fall.
