Sports Illustrated’s Alexander Wolff has an excellent story, “The NFL’s Jackie Robinson,” on the first African-American football players to reintegrate the NFL. It’s an informative, frustrating read, laying out the dollar signs that underlied the league’s “unofficial” bigotry as well as the unabashed racism of Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall.
(Gee, who’d have thought the owner of the Redskins would have a problem with race?)
In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire.
“Trial by Fire,” a New Yorker article by David Grann, lays out in painstaking detail how the state of Texas almost certainly executed an innocent man, Cameron Todd Willingham. Willingham was convicted in 1992 of setting a fire in his home that killed his three children, but modern analysis showed that the arson investigators violated “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.”
As the article highlights, the lack of standards and care displayed by the Texas criminal justice system is disgusting. Their heedless enthusiasm for the death penalty is backwards and reprehensible.
This seems a good time to link to the Innocence Project’s article highlighting the Causes of Wrongful Conviction.
A pretty amazing visual experience, the Zoomquilt drops deeper and deeper into an illustrated fantasy world. Thanks to Scott McCloud for linking to it.
In August 1979, I took my last drink. It was about four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, the hot sun streaming through the windows of my little carriage house on Dickens. I put a glass of scotch and soda down on the living room table, went to bed, and pulled the blankets over my head. I couldn’t take it any more.
Film critic Roger Ebert has a moving firsthand account of his experience with Alcoholics Anonymous.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver dedicated her life to improving the lives of those with special needs. The depth of her success is evident in this December 2008 profile of the Special Olympics by Sports Illustrated.