The Secret Dam Collapse That Killed 230,000 | She’s Breaking Up the Nobel Prize Boys Club

The regulations against insider trading on the stock market are now coming to sports betting, as state after state plots legislation to monitor oddsmaking.

After losing in Game 1 of the 2018 NBA Finals, an emotional LeBron James smashed a whiteboard in the Cleveland Cavaliers locker room, breaking his right hand. His play faltered in the subsequent three games that the Golden State Warriors also won for a clean sweep. Yet, the injury wasn’t made public until after the finals were over. That kind of information can prove decisive for oddsmakers like Tom Stryker, a nationally renowned sports handicapper who compares his profession to a stockbroker’s. “I would’ve never come up with that pick or advised my clients to play Cleveland knowing he was hurt,” he recalls. If known only to a select few, it’s also the kind of inside dope that’s now coming under scrutiny stock markets are usually subjected to.

Just weeks before the game where James was injured, the U.S. Supreme Court had opened the gates for states to legalize sports betting, striking down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA). But while oddsmakers, professional sports leagues and gambling enthusiasts wrestled questions related to James’ injury, lawmakers were already beginning to address another: insider betting.

Swedish literary critic Mikaela Blomqvist, 31, is bringing a new perspective to an old, male institution.

Mikaela Blomqvist prefers reading quietly with a cup of tea and distances herself from the daily gossip within the small, insular cultural scene in Sweden. But that doesn’t mean the well-known, 31-year-old literary critic doesn’t have opinions. She just prefers to deliver them in assured, measured tones.

That might be why the Swedish Academy tapped the literary critic for the Göteborgs-Posten — Sweden’s second-largest paper — to be on the committee that will recommend the next winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. It’s a major leap for Blomqvist.

“This seems like a very perfect job. To be able to read a lot and especially if you get to discuss [books] with competent people,” she says, seemingly oblivious to the importance of her task. She's not nervous about joining the literati, but does acknowledge that she'll have to work harder, perhaps read more, to be taken seriously.

Trump has declared a national emergency to start building his wall, but is it worth the political cost?

Few people in history have understood how to deploy power in Washington better than Mitch McConnell. So when the Senate Majority Leader told the world on Thursday that President Donald Trump would both sign a government funding bill and declare a national emergency so Trump could cobble together more money to build a wall at America’s Southern border, he did so through gritted teeth. Sure, McConnell said “I’m going to support the national emergency declaration,” but reports indicate that he tried to wave Trump off this idea for months. In the end, McConnell ended up having to “eat a manure sandwich” as former GOP Rep. Mike Rogers put it to CNN.

Why? McConnell does not consider the wall an “immorality” as many Democrats do. Nor is he terribly concerned about preserving historic norms. He was more than willing to change Senate rules to approve conservative Supreme Court justices without Democratic votes, or refuse to even hold a hearing on President Barack Obama’s final SCOTUS nominee.