Wall Street Journal

In Japan, where baseball is a cherished pastime and players practice relentlessly, a father and his talented son decide to take a different approach to training and pitching: playing in fewer games to avoid injury.

For nearly 30 years, a collector has been trying to prove his painting is a Rothko—potentially worth $20 million or more. Now, he’s got new evidence.

Douglas Himmelfarb spotted the painting in 1987 at an auction preview in South Los Angeles. The offerings that day were a mix of furniture and no-name artwork. This canvas was large and dirty, and depicted three rectangles of color stacked on top of one another. A handful of people stood clustered around it as someone pulled it off the wall and turned it around. On the back was a signature:

MARK ROTHKO

CAL. SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS

EX. NO. 7

A woman scoffed, Mr. Himmelfarb recalls: “Mark Rothko did not paint in California, and there is no such thing as the California School of Fine Arts.”

This story pick comes from our featured Longreader, Nicole Greenfield, who writes:

I must admit it was the photo of 90-year-old Roman Tritz, clear blue eyes and a blank stare to the camera’s side, that initially drew me into one of my favorite longreads of the week. But the photo didn’t prepare me for the truly harrowing nature of Tritz’s story, a deeply personal look into one of the thousands of forced lobotomies the U.S. government performed on World World II veterans, the details of which are uncovered for the first time in this multimedia feature. The in-depth, but straightforward reporting of such a horrendous trend, performed in the absence of answers, begs all kinds of questions. How could this happen? And, importantly, could it happen again? For it’s impossible not to connect Tritz’s struggle and the stories of veterans today also suffering from PTSD, also without adequate assistance, also afraid, also wondering, as Tritz himself did pre-operation, “Does anybody really care?” This is one that will stick with me for a while.

After their twin daughters were diagnosed with Niemann-Pick Type C, a fatal genetic disease, Hugh and Chris Hempel sought experimental treatments to save their daughters’ lives. They went public with their findings and kept detailed medical records to share with researchers, assuming the role of “citizen-scientists”:

Ms. Hempel began giving cyclodextrin to the girls in early 2008. “I am posting this message to the entire world to let everyone know that Hugh and I will not sue any doctor, scientist, researcher, hospital or non-profit if anything happens to Addi and Cassi as we embark on trying experimental treatments to save them from Niemann-Pick Type C disease,” she wrote in her blog.

From the beginning, scientists said drinking cyclodextrin wasn’t likely to help because not enough of the drug could reach the brain and other organs.

In December 2008, the Hempels’ doctor applied to the Food and Drug Administration for permission to give the girls intravenous infusions. The scientists were alarmed. No one knew how cyclodextrin worked. No one knew effective dose levels. And no one was sure if it was safe.

The planned collaboration of parents and scientists was moving forward. But Chris and Hugh Hempel wanted to set the pace.

An excerpt from the new book Wheelmen, on the doping scandal that brought down Lance Armstrong, and a scene from the 2004 Tour de France:

“But soon, Landis said, everyone on board realized what was happening. The bus was being transformed into a secret blood transfusion unit.

“The riders had known they would be asked to take blood at some point in the Tour, but weren’t told when. As had happened before, someone—sometimes a motorcycle driver who had been hired to do it, sometimes the team chef, sometimes a security worker—had delivered the blood immediately before the transfusions. Engine trouble was just a ruse designed to outsmart the journalists and the French police who suspected the Postal team of doping.”

Still, we face several challenges. First of all, every new company today is being built in the face of massive economic headwinds, making the challenge far greater than it was in the relatively benign ’90s. The good news about building a company during times like this is that the companies that do succeed are going to be extremely strong and resilient. And when the economy finally stabilizes, look out—the best of the new companies will grow even faster. Secondly, many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent.

When News Corp. officials gathered in the Hong Kong convention center in March to unveil their latest Chinese Internet investment, a tall woman in their midst handed out a business card that read simply, “News Corporation/Wendi Deng Murdoch.” Ms. Deng is not a News Corp. employee. Once a junior executive at the company’s Star TV unit in Hong Kong, the 31-year-old Ms. Deng quit her post before marrying News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch last year. Since then, she has been portrayed—by Mr. Murdoch and the company—as a traditional housewife who attends to decorating, her husband’s diet and the like. But Ms. Deng is no homebody.

“The most important thing to consider,” I began, “is that our own internal research shows our competitors are beginning to approach Google’s level of quality. In a world where all search engines are equal, we’ll need to rely on branding to differentiate us from everyone else.” The room grew quiet. I looked around nervously. Had I said something wrong? Yes. Not just wrong but heretical to engineers who believed anything could be improved through the iterative application of intelligence. Co-founder Larry Page made my apostasy clear. “If we can’t win on quality,” he said quietly, “we shouldn’t win at all.”

When he entered the magnificent Gothic church in early 1992, the former Christopher Crowe had a new name and a meticulously researched persona to go with it. “Hello,” he greeted his fellow worshippers in his perfectly enunciated East Coast prep-school accent, wearing a blue blazer and private-club necktie, which he would usually accent with khaki pants embroidered with tiny ducks, hounds or bumblebees, worn always with Top-Sider boat shoes, without socks. “Clark,” he said, “Clark Rockefeller.”

For three months, the Arab world has been awash in protests and demonstrations. It’s being called an Arab Spring, harking back to the Prague Spring of 1968. But comparison to the short-lived flowering of protests 40 years ago in Czechoslovakia is turning out to be apt in another way. For all the attention the Mideast protests have received, their most notable impact on the region thus far hasn’t been an upswell of democracy. It has been a dramatic spike in tensions between two geopolitical titans, Iran and Saudi Arabia.