August 18, 2026 - Ohio State, Oregon Lead Pre-Season Ranking

In 2005 my wife came home from her book club and told me I had to read "A Million Little Pieces." An inspiring story of addiction and redemption. They had devoured it. Oprah had blessed it. It captivated me, too.

But one scene gave me pause. James Frey described enduring root canals with no novocaine, squeezing tennis balls until his fingernails cracked. I said on the air that I didn't buy it. When we debated it on radio, several callers told me they’d done likewise. So who was I to doubt him?

Then The Smoking Gun published "A Million Little Lies." Three days later Frey sat across from Larry King, and Oprah phoned in to wave it all off as "much ado about nothing." Both of them let him off the hook. Two weeks later she brought him back and said she felt duped, and all at once we all said the same thing. Of course it was BS.

Race had nothing to do with James Frey. We believed him because we wanted the story to be true.

Now consider Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor found dead last Friday at 41, nine days after resigning. More than 100 passages of his thesis matched someone else's work. His life story came apart claim by claim. Same credulity. Same institutional shrug. Same retroactive certainty.

But this time race is in it, because Cambridge made race part of the story when it announced him. Which is why one side sees affirmative action run in the extreme and the other sees a racist witch hunt. I’m thinking it’s both. Either way it’s terribly sad.

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Ohio State and Oregon lead the AP preseason Top 25 for college football at No. 1 and No. 2, while the SEC dominates the rankings with nine teams in the poll and the Big Ten eyes a fourth straight national championship.

Associated Press

Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday announced drug trafficking charges against 14 people tied to a cocaine ring at Penn State's University Park campus, where investigators say pledges at fraternities Delta Upsilon and Sigma Chi cut and packaged kilos of cocaine shipped in from Philadelphia and New York.

WPSU

President Trump's approval rating dropped to 33% in a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, the lowest of his current term, as 80% of Americans expect U.S. involvement in the war with Iran to drag on and gasoline prices weigh on households ahead of the November midterms.

Yahoo

Millennials and Gen Zers battling loneliness are flocking to in-person meetups built around chess, birding, silent book clubs, puzzles, mahjong and "meet-cute" singles events, with Eventbrite and Evite data showing sharp year-over-year jumps in soft-socializing gatherings.

Axios

Tens of thousands gathered in Trafalgar Square to mourn Jason Arday, the 41-year-old former Cambridge professor found dead at his London home days after resigning amid plagiarism allegations he denied, with speakers and family blaming a relentless and racist media campaign for his death.

Al Jazeera

Adm. Brad Cooper recounts his visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln, praising its more than 4,000 sailors and Marines for their resilience and extraordinary performance after more than 260 days at sea and 150 days in a combat zone.

The Wall Street Journal

After a new CBS News poll found 58% of Democrats view socialism positively compared to 32% for capitalism, Sen. John Fetterman called the trend "lunacy" and warned that the Democratic Party is becoming "the party of socialism."

USA Today

As prosecutors rested their case in the murder trial of Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy, jurors heard her mother testify that Clancy had confessed thoughts of harming her three young children weeks before killing them in January 2023, while the defense argues postpartum psychosis and overmedication.

CBS News

Hayden Panettiere, the 'Heroes' and 'Nashville' star who was found unresponsive Sunday at a Greenville, South Carolina residence, had opened up in her May memoir and press tour about child-star pressure, postpartum depression, substance abuse, losing custody of her daughter and the 2023 death of her brother Jansen.

The Hollywood Reporter

Bucks County, USA,' a five-part PBS docuseries from filmmakers Barry Levinson and Robert May that follows two 14-year-old friends in the Central Bucks School District as pandemic-era politics divides their parents, premieres Sept. 20 after debuting at Sundance.

PhillyVoice