Gaining Accolades While Covering War Victims in Burkina Faso by Clair MacDougall

In the regular Saturday Profile section of The New York Times, Clair MacDougall spotlight another journalist. Mariam Ouédraogo has earned several awards, including recently one the most prestigious, for her coverage of the ongoing conflict in Burkina Faso. MacDougall’s piece offers the timely reminder that there are abuses of humanity happening all across the planet, not just in the places that, for whatever reason, catch the attention of major national news outlets. Especially in her devotion to telling the stories of the noncombatants who are grievously harmed, Ouédraogo is doing vital work. Note that the infractions she reports on are very rough and the MacDougall article shares the particulars candidly.

‘The SNL of Sabermetrics’: How a group of message-board misfits changed baseball by Rustin Dodd and Jayson Jenks

I’ve largely abandoned my longstanding fandom of baseball, but during the late nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands, a span of fairly fervent devotion, I was enthralled by the website Baseball Prospectus and their various publications. Every year, I scoured the local bookstores until I could get my hands on and plunk my money down for the annual volume, a tome with the approximate feel, heft, and density of an old-school phone book that offered pointed, wry analysis of every MLB team and a sizable number of the players on their individual rosters. I devoured those books, which makes me the target audience for this piece by Rustin Dodd and Jayson Jenks that traces the origins and early evolution of that unlikely media outlet. This article is published by The Athletic.