The Gun Lobby’s Hidden Hand in the 2nd Amendment Battle by Mike McIntire and Jodi Kantor

Much as I think “Hidden” is abused in the above headline, this article represents formidable reporting on the part of the Mike McIntire and Jodi Kantor. Writing for The New York Times, they dig into the life and career of William English, a political economist who’s essentially made it his life’s mission to doctor data to make it appear as if the overabundance of guns in American is a measurable public good. Right-wing judges have pounced on all that phony information to justify their ongoing fixation of making the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution into the most expansively interpreted twenty-seven word in the history of jurisprudence. I’m guessing that many of the judges who cite English’s work are comfortably aware that it’s garbage and that they simply don’t care. All those numbers, graphs, and dryly issued conclusions are official enough to let the judges come to conclusion they want to, which just so happens to directly result in more people being needlessly killed.

Why so many Americans have misconceptions about crime trends by Judd Legum

As Judd Legum details in this piece, crime is down significantly in the U.S. and had dropped in every year that Joe Biden has occupied the White House. Most people think the opposite is true, largely because the Republicans have few other strategies for courting voters than making them petrified of their fellow citizens. But the media is arguably more culpable because they parrot that message and accompany it with alarmist stories about every last criminal act that happens in a community, often positioning isolated incidents as if they are trends. The problem is that voters make decisions based on this rampant misinformation, which is a far larger problem a sleepy debate performance in the middle of the summer. This article is published by Popular Information, Legum’s own newsletter.

“Isn’t Willie Mays Wonderful?” by Joe Posnanski

When I heard Willie Mays had died, there was one remembrance I desperately wanted to read, and it did not disappoint. Joe Posnanski wrote one of the best books about baseball I’ve ever read and certainly captures what made me fall in love with the sport and stay smitten with it for decades. In that book, his chapter on Mays was especially stellar, and he does right by the legend in bidding farewell. This is published in Posnanski’s Substack, JoeBlogs.