• The Best Night $500,000 Can Buy
  A look in one of the largest clubs in Las Vegas and the superficiality behind it.
  

  Like how, as we drank more and more and it got later and later, three o’clock and then four, they began emptying the outer reaches of the club—the pool deck, the Library—and pulled everyone in toward the dance floor. So that from our high-priced bottle-service real estate we still had the valuable sensation that we were at a place where the party, like the music (or the Ecstasy), would never, ever end, where more and more girls could be fed in from still more flights out of Kansas City and Sacramento and you could start to think that the you who has a job back in Pittsburgh or Irvine doesn’t exist, and also that after this you’d better go find some coke or else deal with the reality that awaits you back in the rollaway suitcase in your hotel room.

• My Life with Lance Armstrong
  Not dealing directly with his drug allegations, but more about the character who is Lance Armstrong
  

  The cash came from the post-Tour races that are an important part of the cycling culture in Europe, because they allow people in smaller French towns, or outside France altogether, to see pros racing on their local roads. All a rider had to do was show up, race for a while, and collect payment, which was made under the table. Russey told me how much it freaked him out to be handed tens of thousands of dollars in bills.

  In Spain, we often paid people with Euro notes worth $500, which Armstrong told me to pull from the pockets of a pink Chanel coat that hung in Kristin’s old closet. He kept the coat crammed with cash from his appearance fees. Whether he declared this as income or not, I don’t know. All I discussed with Novitzky was its existence.

• For Violin Maker Howard Needham, a Rarefied World
  This focus piece on a local Washingtonian violin maker may hopefully boast his sales as he talks about how difficult it is to be successful in the business of hand crafting violins.
  

  Violin-world insiders familiar with Needham’s work might be surprised to see him peddling his wares to teenagers, since he’s considered by many to be one of the country’s best modern violin makers. But he’s an uber-independent in a relatively unregulated field. Unlike most top-tier American violin makers, or luthiers, he didn’t come up through the ranks of an apprenticeship system, which means he lacks access to the networks that could lend him more credibility. The violin universe is all about reputation: If you’re a violinist in the market for a new fiddle, you might spend a couple of years talking to colleagues about their instruments and trying out various models before buying. Almost wholly self-taught, Needham relies solely on word of mouth — and whatever marketing approaches he can devise.

• Cheating Upwards
  While the story of Harvard students cheating at Goverment 1310 has been making the rounds, this article also focuses on the cheating scandal at the prestigious NYC high school, Stuyvesant.
  

  He got bolder. Turning to page one of his completed exam, Nayeem lifted his phone just enough to snap a picture of that page, then put the phone down again. Over the next few minutes, he photographed the whole test booklet—all fifteen pages.

  The night before, Nayeem had sent a group-text message to 140 classmates: “If you guys get this, I’ve got the answers for you tomorrow.” The students on Nayeem’s list included honor-roll students, debate-team members, and “Big Sibs” (upperclassmen deemed responsible enough to mentor incoming freshmen). There were kids who were also good at physics (to double check Nayeem’s answers) and a girl he liked. That list still existed on his phone from the text he’d sent the night before. He hit send fifteen times, once for each page of the test. When it occurred to him that some kids didn’t have iPhones, he went back to manually typing in all the answers and sent them too. The proctor never saw anything.

• Moneyball 2.0
  While the article is titled Moneyball 2.0, there isn’t actually any secret sauce in it. It recaps another surprising Oakland A’s season and talks a pitching coach who just lets his staff do their thing. Revolutionary does not this strategy make.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: schoolsystem, sports, vegas