Three excellent pieces of writing from the past week for you to enjoy on this Sunday evening:

Tim Graham of the Buffalo news (and friend of the blog) tells the poignant and remarkable story of the connection between two people in an iconic Desert Storm photo.

For 24 years, the photo has embarrassed Kozakiewicz but buoyed Alaniz’s high school sweetheart, who became a 19-year-old, pregnant widow. “I don’t see my husband in a body bag,” Catherine Alaniz-Simonds said Friday. “I see a man crying. I see my husband surrounded by people that loved him. This picture shows the true meaning of war. Not everybody came home.”

Dan Wetzel of Yahoo with, as always, a must-read evicseration of the powerful in sports - this time, FIFA:

"The government of Qatar estimated last year that the project was on pace to have 5,000 perish building soccer stadiums, high-speed rails and opulent hotels for FIFA. And that’s the government’s own projection. Which is almost assuredly low. Five thousand. Consider that number for a moment: 5,000 deaths, every one of them avoidable. Five thousand young, strong, industrious and incredibly driven men, worked to death so a soccer tournament can be staged in a place it should never be staged because staging it there meant lining enough pockets (allegedly) that you get to sleep under a nice Egyptian thread count at the Baur au Lac."

In a story that we'll be discussing here later this week, Sam Stecklow of Gawker says scoops are irrelevant in journalism:

The only people that care about such arbitrary designations are the reporters and editors that get them and the reporters and editors that do not. The internet made the “scoop” irrelevant. This has been obvious for a very long time.