With about a month to go until the NBA Draft, Valley Tales will publish a series of profiles on prospects who could be a fit for the Suns, featuring exclusive interviews with a college assistant coach or personal trainer.  These are the people who discovered and recruited these players, who were around them every day, who observed their development into a potential lottery pick. Sure, these coaches/trainers want to support their guy, but they were also generally honest while evaluating where their player needed to improve to have a successful NBA career.

My main role in my day job is being a mechanism designer (along with auditor, cryptographer, and back end developer in a pinch). Wikipedia explains it well: The design problem is the "inverse" of traditional economic theory, which is typically devoted to the analysis of the performance of a given mechanism. An economist is skilled in analyzing the resultant behavior for a given (economic) system, where a mechanism designer is skilled in proposing a new system that drives the desired behavior.

Every Tom Waits Song is an email newsletter covering just that, in alphabetical order. Find more info here and sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox: “Day After Tomorrow” is the first Tom Waits song that Joan Baez covered. I mention that not just to shout out her version (which is quite good), but to point out it’s the rare Tom Waits song that sounds like something Joan Baez would cover.

A video has begun to circulate of Kenneth Copeland, “Lil Woody” of YSL fame, being interrogated after his arrest in October 2021 on weapons charges. Copeland is speaking to Fulton County investigators, apparently discussing a planned hit on one of his “ops.” The full video — at least until Judge Ural Glanville decides to go after it — is more than three … ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbjAp6uap5KfsqTAyK%2BcZ6ull8C1rcKkZZynnWS9cLDOp6tmrJGgsm65xGauoqyYYsawwQ%3D%3D

I suppose most every Beatles fan can remember some formative moment that fully led them down the path of becoming a fan for life. In my case, I can attribute it to a couple of things, starting with my next-door neighbor, Betty Steiner, giving me a copy of 20 Greatest Hits as a gift, but it was the purchase of Nicholas Schaffner’s invaluable tome The Beatles Forever that provided me with the deep dive I needed to become a Beatlemaniac for life.