Friday Recap: Justin Jefferson Injury, Nobel Prizes and Fog of War

It's been a busy week of news and it's been tough to focus on football. Nevertheless, there's been good football pieces to digest.

This has been an intense week. As you can imagine much of the stuff included in my recap has to do with the conflict in the Gaza Strip, though I’ve separated that out from some of the other work I’ve enjoyed that has nothing to do with that.

I’ve tried to be more diligent letting people know when a link is a video or a podcast — I don’t want anyone find out a link is a video as some loud words play in a quiet office on your phone or anything like that. As always, media behind a paywall is denoted with a ($).

My Work:

• I wrote a Chiefs-Vikings recap ($)

• This is a summary I wrote of the media coverage surrounding Justin Jefferson ($)

• And of course, my piece on media coverage surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict ($)

• Podcast: I also appeared in two episodes of my podcast, Norse Code. The first recapped the Chiefs game and the other previewed the Bears game, with guest Lorin Cox.

• Podcast: The Thursday episode of the Minnesota Football Party talked about the Bears and about a future without Justin Jefferson

Work I liked (sports):

• This piece by Steven Ruiz at the Ringer on Dak Prescott and the Dallas Cowboys offense — how McCarthy tried to fix something that wasn’t a problem.

• Pat McAfee pays Aaron Rodgers for his interviews

• Reporters are allowed to report ($), by Tom Ley at the Defector. This is about the … apparent controversy over reporting Orlando Arcia’s honestly fairly mild words about Bryce Harper.

• Danny Kelly on the weirdness of delineating this year’s quarterback as the GOAT prospect.

Work I Liked (non-sports, non-Middle East):

• Video: John Oliver took on the wave of homeschooling we’re seeing in the United States and the shocking lack of regulation in the area.

• Video: Rebecca Watson goes into the “Nobel Prize for Economics” and the economic evidence for the Gender Wage Gap. If this is a topic you’re even more interested in, then a video I also recommend this slightly older but much longer video from Unlearning Economics (he uses Jordan Peterson as a jumping off point).

• Video: Here’s a good case for cooking vegetables from frozen

• Video: Hyundai’s are easy to steal!

• An investigation into whether or not Ron DeSantis secretly wears high-heel-type lifts

Work I liked (non-sports, Middle East):

• From an electoral standpoint, Ettingermentum brings up that the attacks on Sunday represent Israel’s Tet moment ($) and could signal the end of Netanyahu’s leadership.

• MSNBC took three Muslim anchors off its anchor chairs this week.

• Podcast: Watching War Behind A Screen. Robert Evans, a veteran of wartime on-the-ground reporting, goes into the misinformation-heavy problem of “real-time” information on wars and why it is dangerous to trust social media.

• Shayan on Twitter has been excellent about cataloging the kinds of misinformation that go viral, often using old videos with invented captions. Here’s his Day 4 thread, for example.

• Parker Molloy talked about the particular issue on Twitter ($), where disinformation is both extremely easy and extremely monetizable

• While I went into the paradigm of violence and imbalance in my piece, Samer Kalef went into the extreme circumstances that Gazans face.

• Video: Cody Johnston on Some More News goes into the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict and why “it’s complicated” is an easy cop-out.