Sports-memorabilia Heist & No Safe Word

Featured Articles

They Stole Yogi Berra’s World Series Rings. Then They Did Something Really Crazy

The Atlantic • 14 Jan 2025 • ~7300 words

The childhood friends behind the most audacious string of sports-memorabilia heists in American history.

Berra's rings now glinted on Trotta's hands. They evoked for him a magnificent time before his own birth: the mid-century years when Berra had won World Series after World Series with teammates such as Joe DiMaggio, Roger Maris, and Mickey Mantle. How many men besides Berra—and now Trotta—would ever know the feeling of those rings on their fingers? How many besides Trotta could sense the weight of all those victories, then destroy every last ounce of it for cash? In the garage in the Pennsylvania woods, an electric melting furnace was reaching a programmed temperature of more than 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit. Trotta handed Berra's rings to a friend, who used jewelers' tools to pluck out the diamonds and cut up the rings. The dismembered rings were then dropped into the furnace, where they liquefied into a featureless mass of molten gold.

There Is No Safe Word

Vulture • 13 Jan 2025 • ~11450 words • Archive Link

How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades.

And it was a line that Gaiman, according to the women, did not respect. Two of the women, who have never spoken to each other, compared him to an anglerfish, the deep-sea predator that uses a bulb of bioluminescence to lure prey into its jaws. “Instead of a light,” one says, “he would dangle a floppy-haired, soft-spoken British guy.”

Recommended Articles

The Spectacular Burnout of a Solar Panel Salesman

WIRED • 13 Jan 2025 • ~5300 words

He thought he’d make millions of dollars selling solar panels door-to-door. The reality was much darker.

On his sixth day in Tampa, shit finally worked: An appointment Colvin had set up resulted in a closed deal. Since he’d been promised a 50-50 commission split with the closer, Colvin calculated he was due to make at least $3,500. “It’s like I cannot fathom—I’ve never seen so much money at once in my life,” he said in that night’s celebratory video. “I can’t believe it’s real.” Looking at the records he’d been keeping, he estimated that he’d been through about 850 face-to-face rejections before this one success. Colvin kept a close eye on his bank account in the days that followed, checking to see whether the first of his two payments had arrived. Then, more than a week later, it finally did: The amount was $180.

Jazz Off the Record

The Nation • 14 Jan 2025 • ~4500 words

In the late 1960s, the recording industry lost interest in America’s greatest art form. But in a small, dark club on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, jazz legends were playing the best music you’ve never heard.

John Coltrane’s death in July 1967 had seemed to mark the end of an era. Coltrane was the lodestar of a generation, a virtuosic saxophonist and visionary composer who channeled devout spirituality and fierce intellectual exploration in every note he played. Between the death of Coltrane and the death of Morgan, there is a dearth of great material in the recorded canon. However, at least according to legend, the music was better than ever, and a lot of it was happening at Slugs’.

Taking Old Ladies’ Homes: A Comparative Exploration of Eminent Domain in Islamic Law

Harvard Law Review • 10 Jan 2025 • ~11100 words

This piece explores the history of eminent domain in Islamic law in contrast to its Anglo-American counterpart, and how societies negotiate the balance between public good and private ownership.

the forced appropriation of property by a sovereign for public purposes has been described by American jurists as something “[n]o society has ever admitted that it could not [do].” We take government takings for granted, fighting over their contours and contexts rather than their existence. But is it true that they have always been universally accepted? And where forced government takings were practiced, have they always looked the same?

Ellen Brown: Beating Wall Street at Its Own Game — The Bank of North Dakota Model

ScheerPost • 13 Jan 2025 • ~2950 words

North Dakota stands out with its unique approach to banking, having the only state-owned bank in the United States. Ellen Brown explores how the Bank of North Dakota operates on capitalist principles while prioritizing public benefit over private profit.

How could the BND have outperformed JPM, the nation’s largest bank? Most important, it has substantially lower costs and risks than private commercial banks. It has no exorbitantly-paid executives; pays no bonuses, fees, or commissions; has no private shareholders; and has low borrowing costs. It engages in old-fashioned conservative banking and does not speculate in derivatives, so it has no losses or risk from derivative trades gone wrong.

Lorne Michaels Is the Real Star of “Saturday Night Live”

The New Yorker • 11 Jan 2025 • ~10600 words

He’s ruled with absolute power for five decades, forever adding to his list of oracular pronouncements—about producing TV, making comedy, and living the good life.

Michaels rules “S.N.L.” with detached but absolute power. His office is decorated with a sign that Rosie Shuster, his first wife and a writer on “S.N.L.” ’s early seasons, found in a West Village antique shop: “the captain’s word is law.” It’s a joke that isn’t really a joke. But he doesn’t micromanage every moment. “I’ve never been able to tell whether Lorne is driven by a managerial philosophy or a life-style philosophy,” Robert Carlock, a writer who went on to help Fey develop “30 Rock,” told me. “He’ll let everyone fight things out while he’s at Orso”—a midtown Italian restaurant—“and he’ll come back after a nice dinner and make the decision.”

The King of Ozempic Is Scared as Hell

WIRED • 13 Jan 2025 • ~5050 words

Now that Novo Nordisk is the world’s weight-loss juggernaut, will it have to betray its first patients—type 1 diabetics?

Whether for insulin or other biologics, it’s not cheap to grow, ferment, and purify living cells. (Though it is made in a similar way as insulin, the engineered protein in semaglutide contains fewer than 40 amino acids, so the FDA classifies it as a small-molecule drug, rather than a biologic.) Like pets or people or gardens, microorganisms need to be lovingly cared for, which requires patience, sugar, climate control, and constant cleaning with substances that don’t kill microorganisms. In West Lebanon, New Hampshire, where Novo has a secretive biologics facility, one local referred to the plant as “the place where they teach fleas to sing and dance.”

Revealed: US hazardous waste is sent to Mexico – where a ‘toxic cocktail’ of pollution emerges

The Guardian • 14 Jan 2025 • ~5150 words

Investigation finds very high levels of lead and arsenic in homes near a factory processing US toxic waste.

As Soto Jiménez looped around the neighborhood to share his toxicology results in September, many residents expressed dismay. One of the two schools tested – an elementary school about a kilometer away from the plant – had the highest levels of lead found in window sill wipes, at 1,760 times the US action level. It also had high levels of arsenic and cadmium.

The Forgers Hall of Fame: A Brief History of Literary Fakes and Frauds

Literary Hub • 14 Jan 2025 • ~3750 words

Bradford Morrow Investigates a World of Deception, Duplicitousness, and a Great Deal of Skill.

While one might reasonably assume that all such proven forgeries would instantly lose their value, be relegated to the category of worthless curiosities, this is not always the case. Indeed, some counterfeits and forgeries are collectible in themselves and even boast values similar to the originals. In the Sotheby’s October 18, 2024 sale of books from the magnificent Renaissance library of T. Kimball Brooker, an authentic 1502 copy of Dante’s Le terze rime—the Divine Comedy—one of eight known copies printed on vellum in Venice at the Aldine press, beautifully illuminated, brought $165,100. Several lots later, the Gabiano-Trot forgery of the same book printed on vellum just a year or so after in Lyon, France—the first edition of Dante ever printed outside Italy—was hammered down at a competitive $158,750. The intrigue behind Lyonese Aldine counterfeits is the stuff of legend, and in the history of intellectual property theft it is hardly surpassable for prowess, guts, and mendacity.