We hope your Sunday is sunny, because the June Gloom has coastal California socked in.

• From ESPN The Magazine, a superb piece about race, soccer, and cultural change in Italy (the author, Wright Thompson, also narrates the 30-for-30 documentary “Ghosts of Ole Miss“).
• More evidence that privatized online ed will be an expensive disaster (add the data to everything every decent teacher has told you when the subject comes up).
• Evgeny Morozov has written a cool polemic, To Save Everything, Click Here; read some condensed versions of its claims here and here and here.
• George Packer is one of America’s best nonfiction writers, and he just published The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. Spend your weekend reading up on the post-middle-class USA. Got my copy this week.
• . . . and if you want to see an example of ad hominem burbling from a person who gets paid to review books but apparently hasn’t learned anything about writing from them, check out the New York Observer‘s wail. You probably won’t finish it, because in addition to being bad (bad because it is stupid, not because it rejects Packer’s theses), it is long.
• Karl has a book coming out soon.
• I love Max Brooks’s World War Z, and if the new film is at least above mediocre, I will be a happy customer.