Jemele Hill ignores that everyone hated Isiah Thomas

Jemele Hill, writing about Magic Johnson and Larry Bird's book, mentions that Johnson led the charge to keep Isiah Thomas off the 1992 Olympic basketball team (everyone knows them as the Dream Team). Yet, she ignores one salient fact in this: No one like Thomas.

Thomas played on one of the most unlikeable teams ever (the "Bad Boys") and almost no player on any other team liked him.

On the Amazon-Wal Mart price war

From The New Yorker:

The best way to win a price war, then, is not to play in the first place. Instead, you can compete in other areas: customer service or quality. Or you can collude with your putative competitors: that’s why cartels like OPEC exist. Or—since overt collusion is usually illegal—you can employ subtler tactics (which economists call “signalling”), like making public statements about the importance of “stable pricing.” The idea is to let your competitors know that you’re not eager to slash prices—but that, if a price war does start, you’ll fight to the bitter end. One way to establish that peace-preserving threat of mutual assured destruction is to commit yourself beforehand, which helps explain why so many retailers promise to match any competitor’s advertised price. Consumers view these guarantees as conducive to lower prices. But in fact offering a price-matching guarantee should make it less likely that competitors will slash prices, since they know that any cuts they make will immediately be matched. It’s the retail version of the doomsday machine.

Definitely a cool read (and don't worry, it's short).