• I've given Jeff Wells a lot of shit over the years (particularly his advice to Jackie Robinson on how to slide), but I like the bluntness of his blog; and I like this post in particular: Who deserves our truth and who doesn't? Who can we lie to? I'm 52 and still learning this lesson. 
• What was it like to be the daughter of Josef Stalin? Olga Grushin on the new bio of Svetlana Alliluyeva.
• Related: I know adding new subtitles to Hitler's near-bunker speech in “Downfall” has been done to death, but this version, about the St. Paul, Minn. Bike Plan, made me, as a cyclist, laugh out loud. 
• Alex Rodriguez goes deep for No. 3,000. I'm genuinely happy for him. Good call, too: “Eighteen thousand men have played Major League Baseball! Only 29 of them have had 3,000 hits!” My other thoughts on A-Rod here. 
• Related: Were you confused by newspaper and MLB accounts touting A-Rod passing Babe Ruth on the RBI list and then becoming only the second man in baseball history (after Hank Aaron) to drive in more 2,000+ runs, when Baseball Reference (not to mention Total Baseball) clearly states the case: Aaron: 2,297; Ruth: 2,214; Cap Anson: 2,075. Well, Cheat Sheet dissects it all. Seems the RBI wasn't an official stat until 1920; and though you can obviously go back into newspaper accounts, etc., to extract the correct number of RBIs for the Bambino, as statisticians have, to Major League Baseball it's not an “official” stat. To which they can blow me.  
• A little video fun with Coen Bros. movies, from Steven Benedict. 
• A lot of good dissections of the Rachel Dolezal matter. Jelani Cobb's is one of them. (And the only one that references John Howard Griffin, if not Lois Lane.) 
• A lot of good dissections on the racially-motivated killings of nine people in a Charleston, S.C., church this week. David Remnick's is one of them. 
• Jon Stewart's is another one. 
• And Jelani Cobb's. He ends his piece with the truest words of all in our race-baiting age: “Even if [Dylann Roof] acted by himself, he was not alone.”

Via Dan Wasserman and the Boston Globe.