(because I'm totally starting this long weekend a day early.)
The Thieves Who Steal Sunken Warships, Right Down to the Bolts
Shit, guys. I read and thoroughly enjoyed the piece last week and totally forgot it.
The lede: Last November, a team of international divers departed the Indonesian island of Java on a mission to survey sunken World War II warships. The Dutch government had tasked them to assess the condition of two particular Dutch vessels, the Hr. Ms. Java and Hr. Ms. De Ruyter, both sunk in 1942 during the Battle of the Java Sea, not far from the remote island of Bawean.
'I Can't Feel My Body.'
TJ Ford has always been one of my favorites. The Players Tribune is growing into being one of my favorite websites.
The lede: The first time I was paralyzed was during a pickup game.
Alone on the Open Road: Truckers Feel Like ‘Throwaway People
Speaking of being on the road on this long weekend ...
The lede: EFFINGHAM, Ill. — The vast Petro truck stop here is a neon-lit, blacktop oasis at the crossroads of America. It beckons big-rig drivers with showers, laundry machines, a barber shop, even a knife store. “Professional drivers only,” reads the sign above the tables of the Iron Skillet restaurant, where truckers sit mostly alone, carrying the solitude of their jobs into an otherwise social setting.
HOW ANKER IS BEATING APPLE AND SAMSUNG AT THEIR OWN ACCESSORY GAME
... here's a hint: It's because Apple and Samsung stink at this.
The lede: Steven Yang quit his job at Google in the summer of 2011 to build the products he felt the world needed: a line of reasonably priced accessories that would be better than the ones you could buy from Apple and other big-name brands. These accessories — batteries, cables, chargers — would solve our most persistent gadget problem by letting us stay powered on at all times. There were just a few problems: Yang knew nothing about starting a company, building consumer electronics, or selling products.
Read New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu's Remarkable Speech About Removing Confederate Monuments
This is good.
The lede: The city of New Orleans has elected to pull down Confederate monuments from its public spaces. With the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee this week, that task is complete. The proposal brought near endless debate, and vitriolic outcry from the monuments' defenders. But in a remarkable speech shortly before Lee's statue was removed, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu declared with astonishing moral and historical clarity that these were not monuments to some bygone way of southern life implied by believers in the Lost Cause. They were symbols of white supremacy, and of the systemic oppression of human beings.
The Oral History of a Hungover David Wells' Unlikely Perfect Game
And now, some baseball.
The lede: For all the New York Yankees’ storied and glorious history, before 1998 the franchise could claim just one perfect game: Don Larsen’s wildly improbable performance against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1956 World Series. That was until David Wells in 1998, a most imperfect Yankee in what would become the Yankees’ greatest season.