Watch “League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis” preview on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE. NEW YORK TIMES: Pressure from the National Football League led to ESPN’s decision on Thursday to pull out of an investigative project with “Frontline” regarding head injuries in the N.F.L., according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation. ESPN, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, pays the N.F.L. more than $1 billion a year to broadcast “Monday Night Football,” a ratings juggernaut and cherished source of revenue for Disney. “Frontline,” the PBS public affairs series, and ESPN had been working for […]

  LA WEEKLY: There’s a sign tacked to the tree where Hastings crashed that night, reading, “This was not an accident.” Taken down several times, it always gets put back up. Another sign says, “Didn’t have to know you to know the truth of what happened.” After the Fourth of July, someone gathered up about 30 mini American flags and planted them around the memorial site. Kimberly Dvorak, a freelance reporter for San Diego 6, was barely aware of [Michael] Hastings until he died in circumstances too bizarre for her to ignore. She’s now the leading reporter looking at “alternate” […]

NPR: “Blurred Lines,” this year’s song of the summer*, sounds a lot like Marvin Gaye’s “,” one of the songs of the summer of 1977.vIn fact, it sounds so much like the Marvin Gaye song that Robin Thicke and the other guys behind Blurred Lines have launched a preemptive strike: They filed a lawsuit against Marvin Gaye’s family. Thicke and the other plaintiffs don’t want money; they want the court to rule that “Blurred Lines” does not infringe on “Got to Give It Up.”vMembers of Marvin Gaye’s family have reportedly been asking for a cash settlement and threatening to sue, […]

Artwork by JOSE COCODRILO FRESH AIR If you’ve ever participated in a miserably long pub crawl, you’ll understand the plight of the characters in The World’s End, the latest from Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright. The film follows five old high school friends who reunite to finish a pub crawl they started 20 years earlier. But as they travel from pub to pub in their old hometown, they find strange, supernatural things start to happen. In 2004, Pegg and Frost’s zombie send-up Shaun of the Dead gave the English comedy pair a cult following that grew with their […]

JC Brooks & The Uptown Sound will play a free show at Morgan’s Pier tonight at 9 pm.

FRESH AIR Today’s Internet users have become accustomed to stories of hacking, identity theft and cyberattacks, but there was a time when the freedom and anonymity of the Web were new, and no one was sure what rules — if any — applied to its use. Many thought the Internet was beyond government regulation, its very chaos a source of creativity and strength. Those early days are the focus of technology writer Nate Anderson’s new book, The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed. In it, Anderson recounts how the opportunities the Web offered to snoops, scam […]

  THE GUARDIAN: As of today, Wednesday 21 August 2013, Bradley Manning has served 1,182 days in prison. He should be released with a sentence of time served. Instead, the judge in his court martial at Fort Meade, Maryland has handed down a sentence of 35 years. Of course, a humane, reasonable sentence of time served was never going to happen. This trial has, since day one, been held in a kangaroo court. That is not angry rhetoric; the reason I am forced to frame it in that way is because President Obama made the following statements on record, before […]

  THE DISSENTER: Toobin’s campaign against Snowden and in defense of the government’s right to protect sensitive national security secrets is incredibly hypocritical, given his past history. In journalist Michael Isikoff’s book, Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story, he described how Toobin was caught “having absconded with large loads of classified and grand-jury related documents from the office of Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh” in 1991: Toobin, it turned out, had been using his tenure in Walsh’s office to secretly prepare a tell-all book about the Iran-contra case; the privileged documents, along with a meticulously kept private diary (in which the young […]

Artwork by JOE CIERDIELLO NEW YORK TIMES: Elmore Leonard, the prolific crime novelist whose louche characters, deadpan dialogue and immaculate prose style in novels like “Get Shorty,” “Freaky Deaky” and “Glitz” established him as a modern master of American genre writing, died on Tuesday at his home in Bloomfield Village, Mich. He was 87. To his admiring peers, Mr. Leonard did not merely validate the popular crime thriller; he stripped the form of its worn-out affectations, reinventing it for a new generation and elevating it to a higher literary shelf. Reviewing “Riding the Rap” for The New York Times Book […]