NFL Star: Fantasy Football Dehumanizes Us | Chinese Cyberwars Heat Up

This NFL running back doesn’t want to hear about your fantasy football picks.

It was over in an instant — not with the snap of a finger, but that of a fibula. Washington Redskins running back Chris Thompson opened a lane for quarterback Kirk Cousins, with Saints defensive tackle Sheldon Rankins in pursuit. A lunge, as Rankins tried to bring Cousins down. A step, as Thompson tried to block him. And a snap, as Rankins’ 287 pounds broke Thompson’s leg.

The injury ended Thompson’s 2017 season. On pace for the best campaign of his five-year career, the versatile halfback instead found himself reliving a nightmare he couldn’t seem to shake: another year, another season-ending injury.

Thompson became a household name last year thanks to fantasy football. Players scrambled to add him as he logged gaudy receiving numbers — 150 yards here, 105 there — and frequent carries. But if Thompson, 27, has a bad day on the field? He’ll hear about it on social media.

Kene Anoliefo has already achieved at age 30 what most hope to do over a long career.

On Sundays, Kene Anoliefo’s mother took her children to the public library in Cleveland, Ohio. Though Anoliefo’s parents usually were strict about where she was allowed to go, she could roam anywhere among the books during those four- or five-hour reprieves while her mother studied for her master’s program. Already an avid reader, Anoliefo checked out 20 books at a time and dove into new universes each week. One she recalls reading in particular: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

Morrison’s dive into racial identity and topics including child molestation were heavy material for a third grader, but Anoliefo has always been ahead of the curve. Now at 30, she’s a senior product lead for Spotify’s Creator Marketplace — leading a new feature that allows independent artists to upload their music directly to the platform — after stops at Google, the Obama White House and a real estate startup. Those around her, not to mention Anoliefo herself, can’t quite predict where she’s going. But they know it’s somewhere big.

In 1857, a newly elected American president conspired behind the scenes with the Supreme Court to produce perhaps the worst decision in its history.

As a work of presidential prose, James Buchanan’s inaugural address on March 4, 1857, is widely considered one of the most forgettable ever given by an American leader. As The New York Times put it dryly at the time: “Little if any impression has been made by the inaugural.” Still, it would not take long for Buchanan’s unimpressive inauguration to become one of the most significant in history. For one thing, it was the first to be photographed. It was also the first inaugural given after the creation of the Republican Party, the last before secession and ultimately the last one that a Democrat would give for almost 30 years.

Buchanan’s oath of office was also administered by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney. Yes, that Justice Taney, the one who just two days later would hand down the Supreme Court’s landmark Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the court held that Congress had no power to deprive slaveholders in U.S. territories of their property — because, as Taney put it, Blacks were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the White man was bound to respect.”