Gypsies!
• The bottom line is that we should pay teachers more, not less — and that politicians who falsely lambaste teachers as greedy are simply making it more difficult to attract the kind of above-average teachers our above-average children deserve.” [Nicholas Kristof/New York Times]
• When United opens its MLS season against Columbus on March 19 at RFK Stadium, Davies will likely play in his first top-flight game since October 2009. “I’m coming full circle,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about this since the first day I got out of the hospital. Will I be sad? Happy? Nervous? If I score a goal, will I break down and cry? Will that signal [my] getting over the mountaintop?”
Davies flashes a grin that matches the smile-shaped scar which now traces his scalp like the seam of a baseball. “Will I dance?” he says. “Yes, I will dance.” [Grant Wahl/Sports Illustrated]
• Federal records indicate that Cabell knew of some of the overdoses for three months, but it did not disclose them publicly until The New York Times called the hospital for comment late last week. Within hours, the hospital issued a news release that was picked up by the local media. Charles Shumaker, a hospital spokesman, declined to say how many patients were overdosed, why the mistakes occurred or whether any hospital employees were disciplined as a result. [Walt Bogdanich/New York Times]
• During the nineteen-eighties, the Istanbul teams were enmeshed in a ganglike feud, characterized by clandestine raids, lynchings, and street battles. A “truce” in the nineteen-nineties mitigated, but did not eradicate, the violence. [Elif Batuman/New Yorker]
• Jose Mourinho’s children have attended the American Schools in London, Milan and Madrid. He expects they will go to college in the U.S. And therein lies an opportunity for soccer in America. “We want to be close to our kids the maximum we can,” he says. “So in a few years when they go in that direction, me and my wife are going to go in the same direction. I see myself coaching a [club] team, coaching the national team or helping develop soccer in the U.S. When I’m tired of winning things in Europe, it’s something I want to do. I want to coach the Portuguese national team, and I want to work in the United States.”
Do the math. Matilde will be college age in four years, José Jr. in eight. The timing would set up well for Mourinho to take over the U.S. soon after, say, World Cup 2018. He already brings his teams to Los Angeles for preseason training every year. “I love it,” Mourinho says of America. “The people have a very open mentality. Everybody is the same. Status doesn’t count a lot. I like it very much in this way.” [Grant Wahl/Sports Illustrated]
• Does the collective wisdom of the Web really say that Penney has the most essential site when it comes to dresses? And bedding? And area rugs? And dozens of other words and phrases?
The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating. [David Segal/New York Times]
• A few months later he retired, having achieved a 39–15 regular-season record as the Broncos’ starter. His former agent, Leigh Steinberg, applauded the move. “I have virtually never met an athlete who willingly walked away from sports,” says Steinberg, who at one point represented roughly half the quarterbacks in the NFL. “The courage and integrity is in knowing when you’ve had enough and being able to walk away from all the conventional markers of success. The courage is in choosing family and dignity over artificially extending a career just for the money. We should laud Jake Plummer for standing up for the best in American values.” [Chris Ballard/Sports Illustrated]
• Crowds are a condition of urban life. They are often viewed as a necessary inconvenience of city living, but there are occasions when we gladly join them, pressing together at raves and rock concerts, at sporting events, victory parades, and big sales. Crowd disasters occur all over the world, and for a variety of reasons. [John Seabrook/New Yorker]
• Such success comes against many odds: deeply rooted anti-Gypsy stigma, segregated schooling in some countries that often condemns Roma to an inferior education, stifling social codes in their own traditions that discourage contact with the non-Gypsy world. [AP via Philadelphia Inquirer]