Hockey coverage completely hijacked this blog over the past couple months. This change stemmed from a combination of obligation to that ever-enjoyable commitment, life developments that limit my willingness to comment on certain topics, and a good old-fashioned case of writer’s block. (More on that in the next post.) For now, though, I’ll get back into the swing of things by bringing back the feature in which I collect interesting articles and share them.

The news topic du jour is the college admissions scandal that has nailed a number of rich people behaving badly in their efforts to get their undeserving children into certain institutions of higher education, including my own alma mater. This is so terrible on so many levels that I almost left it alone; I try to avoid shooting fish in barrels on this blog. It’s a shameful indictment of the parents, the culture that makes them think they need to do this, and, well…instead of trailing on, I’ll let Claire Cain Miller and Jonah Engel Bromwich in the New York Times do it for me. Snowplow parenting is very real, and while I can’t say I knew any non-tennis-playing tennis scholarship kids in my Georgetown days, I’ve certainly seen no shortage of overzealous parents trying to do the heavy lifting for their kids, and not just on the East Coast. It’s a disease, and does no one any good in the long run.

In American Affairs, Jacob Siegel dives into California’s stunning homelessness problem. He explores poverty in Los Angeles in lurid detail, and touches on the factors that drive it, from housing policy to NIMBYism to the role of nonprofits to the decline of mental institutions. The piece also brushes on the perils of a technology-centered economy and a belief that said technology will somehow solve everything. It’s a sobering account of the growing class divides in America’s wealthiest cities, and makes one wonder if the rest of us aren’t that far behind.

A little old now, but excellent: Derek Thompson explores the American culture of “workism” in the Atlantic. Somehow, we’ve developed a cult of work that has made the well-off even more obsessed with results and the bottom line than they were before. The piece spends some time with college-educated millennials, who have been told to chase our passions instead of money or free time, which it turns out is a rather brilliant strategy by our superiors to turn us into workoholics. (I had the good fortune to fall under the spell of several iconoclasts who fought this vision in my Georgetown days, and Duluth, being somewhat out of the way of the march of history, also helped buffer me from it. But even with those influences I’ve felt the push, and given slightly different circumstances I have no doubt I would have been a total victim of this culture of work.) Work can develop meaning and should not be hell, but it is a means, not an end.

Oh, you thought you were going to escape hockey entirely? Nah. The New Yorker has a piece on the ten-year run of Minnesota hockey hair videos created by John King. The videos were a delight every year, though I don’t blame King for bringing it to an end now that his kids are out of high school. The whole thing went a bit overboard in the later years, with kids blatantly pandering to the video instead of just rocking luscious locks. I’m guessing someone, or several someones, will try to pick up the slack, but it’ll be hard to top King’s deadpan delivery and amusing interludes. And if it’s going to end, it might as well be with a Greyhound on top.