What I Read or Listened to This Week


Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:

  • Athlete breaks silence about sexual misconduct of University of Guelph’s star coach - This is a pretty infuriating story.

  • The Spy and the Traitor - The story of a Oleg Gordievsky, who worked for the KGB and became a British spy.

  • The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President - “Over the past few years, hundreds of websites with innocuous-sounding names like the Arizona Monitor and The Kalamazoo Times have begun popping up. At first glance, they look like regular publications, complete with community notices and coverage of schools. But look closer and you’ll find that there are often no mastheads, few if any bylines, and no addresses for local offices. Many of them are organs of Republican lobbying groups; others belong to a mysterious company called Locality Labs, which is run by a conservative activist in Illinois. Readers are given no indication that these sites have political agendas—which is precisely what makes them valuable. According to one longtime strategist, candidates looking to plant a negative story about an opponent can pay to have their desired headlines posted on some of these Potemkin news sites. By working through a third-party consulting firm—instead of paying the sites directly—candidates are able to obscure their involvement in the scheme when they file expenditures to the Federal Election Commission. Even if the stories don’t fool savvy readers, the headlines are convincing enough to be flashed across the screen in a campaign commercial or slipped into fundraising emails.”

See also