…and then when I got out, they arrested me for swindling the sons of my dead housekeeper out of the settlement they got when she fell and died on my front steps.
Okay, that was not one of the more successful Amy Winehouse songs. The scansion could probably use a little work.
I love the fall season. Fall is a great time for philosophy.
For example, Mike Shildt out as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals.
Shildt was 252-199 in a little over three seasons, and the Cardinals have made the postseason each of the past three years. They won 17 straight games this year, made it to the wild card game, and lost to the Dodgers.
In other news, the Yankees fired Phil Nevin and Marcus Thames. Thames has been the hitting coach for four seasons, and Nevin has been the third base coach since 2018. Also out: P.J. Piliterre, assistant hitting coach.
Giggle. Snort. Both Mike the Musicologist and Lawrence sent this to me.
Also charged: Marilyn Louise Flynn, “who at the time was dean of USC’s School of Social Work”.
In a 20-count indictment, he and Flynn face charges of conspiracy, bribery and mail and wire fraud.
But what exactly did they do?
Allegedly, the senior Ridley-Thomas funneled about $100,000 to USC.
The Times reported that USC alerted federal prosecutors to the unusual arrangement after an internal investigation. It also described the intense budget pressure Flynn was under at the time of the alleged scheme with Mark Ridley-Thomas in large part because of her embrace of online degree programs.
Under her tenure as dean, USC’s social work program became the largest in the world, growing from an enrollment of 900 in 2010 to 3,500 in 2016.
That growth, however, was achieved largely through a partnership with a digital learning startup that received more than half of the tuition that students paid for a master’s degree through the school’s online program. The profit-sharing required Flynn to aggressively raise money and seek government contracts to increase revenue.
To fill the online ranks, the school began admitting less qualified students, who sometimes struggled to do the work and who ultimately drove down the rankings of the once-prestigious program. In 2019, USC was forced to lay off social work professors and staff members.
More fun: Ridley-Thomas is the third council member to be indicted in the past two years.
The council has been mired in corruption scandals. Former L.A. Councilman Jose Huizar is awaiting trial on racketeering, bribery, money laundering and other charges. Prosecutors allege he headed up a criminal enterprise involving multiple real estate developers looking to build projects in his downtown district when he was on the council. Huizar and a former deputy mayor who was indicted with him have pleaded not guilty and are seeking to have many of the charges dismissed.
In a related case, former Councilman Mitchell Englander is serving a 14-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to lying to federal authorities about cash and other gifts that he received in casinos in Las Vegas and near Palm Springs.
And even more fun: USC has other issues.
And the cherry on top:
Anne Saxelby. No, you probably never heard of her if you didn’t live in New York.
She was one of the people responsible for the growth of American cheese and American cheese making.
In 2006, when Ms. Saxelby opened Saxelby Cheesemongers, the American cheese industry was largely just that: industrial and mass market. Her shop was a daring enterprise that carried only American-made cheeses from small producers.
The space was hardly more than a nook with a refrigerator in the original Essex Market on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Almost immediately, Ms. Saxelby attracted attention among cheese lovers, and especially among chefs in the growing farm-to-table movement.
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“Her passion for celebrating American farmstead cheese influenced a generation of cheese makers, chefs, cheese enthusiasts and friends and changed the way we engage with American foods,” Michael Anthony, the executive chef of Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan and a regular customer, said in an interview.
Steven Jenkins, a former cheesemonger at Fairway Market, said in a statement: “Anne Saxelby was the U.S. ambassador for American cheese makers and their handmade cheeses. Her yearslong, tireless effort to promote them and make them mainstream will forever have its effect, and will long be remembered.”
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She was 40.
Two by way of Lawrence: Brian Goldner, CEO of Hasbro. He was only 58: cancer got him.
Timuel Black, Chicago activist, historian, and war hero. He was 102.
While enduring racism in the military during his two years of service, he’d participate in two of the war’s decisive battles — the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge — as well as the liberation of Paris, earning four Battle Stars and the French Croix de Guerre.
“We went all the way from Normandy up onto the front line of the extermination camps,” he said in that interview on his 100th birthday. “At Buchenwald concentration camp, I saw human beings systematically being cremated.”
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He returned to civilian life with militant views, working as a social worker, high school teacher and as an organizer — with a prominent role in just about every labor, civil rights and political justice movement of the next six decades.
He worked with activists Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois in the 1940s and 1950s, and alongside King in the 1960s. He helped establish the Congress of Racial Equality and the United Packinghouse Workers of America.
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Mr. Black spent most of his life working to fulfill King’s dream. For nearly 30 years, he was a social worker and teacher at Farragut, DuSable and Hyde Park high schools, fighting segregation and discrimination within the school system and helping establish the Teachers Committee for Quality Education. He went to City Colleges of Chicago in 1969, initially as a dean at Wright College. He was vice president at Olive Harvey from 1971 to 1973, and head of communications systemwide from 1973 to 1979. Then he taught cultural anthropology at Loop College until his retirement in 1989.
In 1994, Sun-Times columnist Vernon Jarrett wrote of Mr. Black: “Tim was of a generation that viewed education not only as a vehicle for personal elevation but also as instrument for a people’s liberation … Whenever there was a good crusade against Jim Crow housing, segregated public beaches, job discrimination or the shortchanging of Black students in public schools, there was Tim Black.
I have my own set of issues with the New York City Police Department, and I don’t even live in NYC.
But I think this story is worth calling out.
In January of 1993, Katrina Brownlee was shot 10 times by her abusive boyfriend.
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She survived, but lost the child she was carrying.
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In 2001 she entered the police academy. What followed was a 20-year career of promotions to busy, dangerous areas of policing, from the streets of Brooklyn to undercover work in narcotics and prostitution stings. She ended up on the elite executive protection detail, as a bodyguard to the mayor of New York.
The entire time, through all those postings, Ms. Brownlee did her best to keep her shooting a secret. She feared what her fellow officers or her bosses would make of her traumatic injuries and her motivations for joining their ranks.
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After more than five years of being undercover, she was transferred to a quieter post in a community affairs office in police headquarters, and, now a police officer in plain sight, she saw an opportunity.
In 2012, she founded a program with the office called A Rose Is Still a Rose, which was eventually renamed and designated a nonprofit, Young Ladies of Our Future. The organization “aims to inspire, educate, mentor, and empower at-risk young ladies,” according to its website. At offices in Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn, young women would gather for weekly workshops — “from etiquette to bullying to gun violence to nutrition,” she said.