Newsweek: An Unwanted Inheritance

New Yorker: The Apostate

Slate: The beauty and majesty of the world’s greatest soccer team.

Wired: The man who cracked the scratch lottery code.

Gil Meche, pitcher for the Kansas City Royals, retires rather than phoning it in this year for $12 million (whilst also preserving his winning record, 84-83).

The inventor of Excel, Douglas Klunder, on the 25th anniversary of its release.

New Yorker: “Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can’t bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren’t surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.”

L.A. Times: “The 1997 slaying of rapper Notorious B.I.G. has been one of L.A.’s enduring mysteries. CNN reports that LAPD officers are still actively working the “Biggie Smalls” case: “According to one law enforcement source, the investigation into the 13-year-old unsolved case was “reinvigorated” months ago as a result of new information, but the source would not elaborate further because of the ongoing investigation that includes the Los Angeles Police Department, the L.A. County district attorney’s office and the FBI.”"

NYT: “The worm itself now appears to have included two major components. One was designed to send Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.”