The Inside Story of How the FBI Rocked College Basketball

Mark Schlabach, writing for ESPN:

The FBI announced Tuesday that 10 people, including four college basketball assistant coaches, were arrested as part of a two-year investigation into bribes and other corruption in the sport.

Assistant coaches from Arizona, Auburn, Louisville, Miami, Oklahoma State and USC were implicated in the investigation, and on Wednesday, Louisville announced that athletic director Tom Jurich and longtime basketball coach Rick Pitino have been placed on administrative leave.

And Jay Bilas:

The NCAA states that it protects players from being exploited commercially. Does that ring true to anyone? The NCAA uses the players as billboards for apparel deals and uses their names and likenesses to sell the product, and to sell media-rights deals. The NCAA continues benefiting from this multibillion-dollar business, while the players get only a scholarship, and the only ones exploiting the athletes are the NCAA and the member institutions. When you use a person to make money while at the same time limiting that person from making money, you exploit. Players are certainly not mistreated, but they are exploited.

Gerard Way Talks With PopBuzz

Gerard Way

Gerard Way recently talked with PopBuzz:

Well I now have a studio. I have this, like, compound type situation where I have a place to record live music and I have a place to record music in a control room and then a place to work on my art projects and my comics. I just kind of, right now, have so many comics due and so many comics to write that I’ve just been doing that. I’ve been trying to fit music in but I’ve just started to kind of write music. So that’s starting, it’s at a very early stage.

Rogue Amoeba’s 15th Anniversary Sale

Apps

Rogue Amoeba is having a 15-year anniversary sale on a bunch of their fantastic audio software. I record the Encore podcast each week using Audio Hijack, and it comes highly recommended:

We want to celebrate with savings for customers both new and old. For a limited time, we’re matching our 15 years in business with 15% off all our apps! But it gets better: Scratch the card below to save even more! The savings boost you uncover will multiply your discount, with a lucky few saving as much as 60%!

Lauren Williams Is the New Editor-in-Chief at Vox

Vox

Vox has announced that Lauren Williams will be their new editor-in-chief:

Replacing me as editor-in-chief will be Lauren Williams. Lauren joined Vox a few months into our existence, and from the moment she walked in the door, I’ve relied constantly on her brilliance, her calm, and her judgment, and all of us have relied on her constant focus on the quality of our journalism, the mechanics of the organization, and the morale of the people within it. She’s the exact right person to lead us in a new phase of growth — to make sure we’re built to handle it, that we’re being conscious of the strains it places on us, and that our work is always deep, decent, and ambitious.

How the NFL Watered Down Colin Kaepernick’s Protest

Football

Jamil Smith, writing for The Washington Post:

No true protest assuages those who are already comfortable. Athletes, especially those who wear a helmet for a living, must know that they have limited windows for communicating their truths to the American public. Protests during the anthem are their best avenue. They know that there are many people in America who don’t give a damn about black people outside of those three hours when their team is on TV. Last weekend, at least for those linking arms, that time was annexed, repackaged and sold.

And Michael Baumann, writing for The Ringer:

That’s what this debate is about: Some say cops shouldn’t be able kill people of color with impunity, and others want everyone else to shut up and go back to watching football. There aren’t two worthwhile viewpoints here, and there’s no greater condemnation of our culture than the idea that both sides deserve equal consideration.

They Took a Knee

Football

Megan Garber, writing for The Atlantic:

The president had, once again, misrepresented the situation. The players are not, as a whole, protesting the national anthem. (There are bodies in the street, Kaepernick had said.) They are not protesting the flag. They are protesting police brutality against African Americans. They are protesting the lack of legal accountability for the officers who enact that violence. They are protesting, more broadly, the ways racism gets codified in America, the ways it is expanded from a personal evil into a societal one.

Propagandhi Talk With Punktastic

Propagandhi

Chris Hannah of Propagandhi sat down with Punktastic to talk about their upcoming album:

Given how bands with members who are seen as marginalized in society are gaining significant traction in various punk circles than ever before, Hannah acknowledges that he’d rather see these groups be bigger rather than expand on Propagandhi’s legacy. “People are tired of hearing a white man spout off about politics and social issues. I’m tired of it too. There are far more interesting perspectives come from those involved in organizations such as Black Lives Matter and The Indigenous Resistance Movement. Whilst they might not be organizations in the traditional sense, they are important forms of social justice. They can channel our efforts of how we might be able to salvage what we call civilization.

Macy Santa Maria Details Leaving He is We Tour; Alleges Sexual Assault

He Is We

Macy Santa Maria has posted a statement on Facebook talking about why she left the recent He is We tour. She alleges she was sexually assaulted by the lead singer Rachel Taylor:

I had the opportunity to do what I love this past summer and play guitar for the band He Is We, but unfortunately it was short lived. The night before the first show, I was sexually assaulted by the lead singer Rachel Taylor. I have contemplated sharing my story and have decided to share it on my own in hopes to raise awareness of sexual assault, specifically in the music industry. My objective is shed a little light on sexual assault, that a man or WOMAN is capable of committing. Rachel Taylor has ruined a part me and for her to have the opportunity to hide from this and continue her music career is disgusting. This is something I’m not going to hide from, and neither should anyone facing this issue.

Update: Rachel Taylor has responded on Facebook:

I have zero idea as to why any allegation was made and money was asked for. I will always promote a safe work environment and I was never given any reason to believe it was anything other than that. If I had known that there was ANYTHING offensive or out of line, it certainly would’ve been handled. I will always be a champion for equality for all. That is what the name He Is We means. I will remain steadfast and resolute to what the name means. I am confused and hurt that anyone would make such a despicable accusation. I will continue to be an example of leading the fight on.

Anatomy of a Moral Panic

amazon

Maciej Ceglowski:

The real story in this mess is not the threat that algorithms pose to Amazon shoppers, but the threat that algorithms pose to journalism. By forcing reporters to optimize every story for clicks, not giving them time to check or contextualize their reporting, and requiring them to race to publish follow-on articles on every topic, the clickbait economics of online media encourage carelessness and drama. This is particularly true for technical topics outside the reporter’s area of expertise.

And reporters have no choice but to chase clicks. Because Google and Facebook have a duopoly on online advertising, the only measure of success in publishing is whether a story goes viral on social media. Authors are evaluated by how individual stories perform online, and face constant pressure to make them more arresting. Highly technical pieces are farmed out to junior freelancers working under strict time limits. Corrections, if they happen at all, are inserted quietly through ‘ninja edits’ after the fact.

There is no real penalty for making mistakes, but there is enormous pressure to frame stories in whatever way maximizes page views.

‘Rick and Morty’ Co-Creator Slams Online Trolls

James Hibberd, writing for Entertainment Weekly:

Continues Harmon: “These knobs, that want to protect the content they think they own — and somehow combine that with their need to be proud of something they have, which is often only their race or gender. It’s offensive to me as someone who was born male and white, and still works way harder than them, that there’s some white male [fan out there] trying to further some creepy agenda by ‘protecting’ my work. I’ve made no bones about the fact that I loathe these people. It f—ing sucks.”

Nathan Fielder: How the Cult Comedian Rules the Outer Limits of Awkward

Nathan Fielder

Andy Greene, writing for Rolling Stone:

Television has never seen anything quite like Fielder, who grew up in Vancouver as a gawky kid who loved to perform magic tricks, then went on to get a business degree from the University of Victoria. Nathan for You manages to make use of both his love of magic and his business acumen, as well as his natural social awkwardness. On the show, he “helps” mom-and-pop shops with schemes that can border on offensive – like when he convinced haunted-house visitors that they’d contracted an autoimmune disease “a step below AIDS” in order to give them a real scare. Other bits are hilarious, sophisticated illusions: To promote a petting zoo, he made a video in which a pig appeared to rescue a goat from drowning. In reality, it was a scheme involving divers and other underwater props, but most of the big morning shows played the clip, believing it was real.

Nathan for You returns tonight. I’m ready.

Meet the Font Detectives Who Ferret Out Fakery

Glenn Fleishman, writing for Wired:

What does international political corruption have to do with type design? Normally, nothing—but that’s little consolation for the former prime minister of Pakistan. When Nawaz Sharif and his family came under scrutiny earlier this year thanks to revelations in the Panama Papers, the smoking gun in the case was a font. The prime minister’s daughter, Maryam Sharif, provided an exculpatory document that had been typeset in Calibri—a Microsoft font that was only released for general distribution nearly a year after the document had allegedly been signed and dated.

A “Fontgate” raged.

The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Matt Bellinger

Planes Mistaken for Stars

Jason Heller, writing about the passing of Planes Mistaken for Stars’ Matt Bellinger:

A basic obituary isn’t enough to sum up a life, let alone one that had as much impact as Matt’s.

When I met Matt in 1998, I had yet to even dream of being a journalist. Back then, I worked the cash register at Wax Trax, while Matt and the other members of Planes lived in Peoria, Illinois, where they had grown up. Their singer-guitarist, Gared O’Donnell, visited Denver frequently in the ’90s to see his mom, who lived in Colorado.