Here is a video of Damilare Sonoiki speaking at Harvard Class Day, part of the 2013 Commencement activities.

Here is a press release from the Justice Department announcing criminal charges filed against Sonoiki and a pro football linebacker, who said, "His background as a Harvard graduate and an employee of Goldman Sachs gave me a false sense of confidence." My column this week is about this situation. Please check out the full column at the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here).

Two recent data points tending to support further the recent post here ("Social Capital Collapse And Other Supertrends") about the soaring time spent on video games instead of working:

Our friends at Baron Public Affairs LLC are out with an intriguing, if grim, new paper highlighting what they call "Super Trends: Drivers of U.S. Political Risk."

Among those trends, the firm says, is "social capital collapse." A series of statistics cited in the paper paint a somewhat dystopian picture. "Deaths of despair – defined as those caused by suicide or substance abuse – have more than doubled among certain demographics since 1990," according to a Brookings study.

Over this past weekend the Boston Red Sox were swept by the Tampa Bay Rays in a three-game series.

The Rays scored 24 runs over the three games and the Red Sox only scored 5. There were a variety of factors at play. The games were at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, so the Rays had the home advantage. The starting pitcher who has been the best for the Red Sox all year, Chris Sale, has been on the disabled list, so the Rays did not have to face him. The Red Sox, who are my own hometown team, have the best winning record in baseball overall this year.

But this is a website about capitalism, not sports, so it's worth noting, too, that the Red Sox have the largest annual player payroll in major league baseball, at $227,835,760, while the Rays have the smallest, at $71,083,023, according to Spotrac.

Self-incrimination in Jewish law and in American law is the topic of my column this week. Please check the full column out at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

The Investigators, a book about the FBI written by James Q. Wilson, was the topic of my column last week. Please check out the full column at the New York Sun (here), Reason (here), and Newsmax (here).

Under the headline, "Beware Rich People Who Say They Want To Change The World," The Sunday Review section of the New York Times carries an attack on the businessman and philanthropist David Rubenstein. The article describes him as "one of the reasons the government is strapped" and blames him for what the Times calls "the carried interest loophole." The Times claims, "closing the loophole could give the government $180 billion over 10 years."

Managers of real estate, oil and gas, and other investment partnerships have been taxed on their profits at capital gains rates since long before Rubenstein started the Carlyle Group. Congress, not Rubenstein, writes the tax laws, so blaming him for them seems odd. And "give" is the nicest possible word to use what actually would be a "take" — a forced transfer of money away from private-sector investors and into the hands of politicians.

Under the headline "The revolution that's about to transform blood testing; Forget labs and microscopes: 3 Israeli startups aim to disrupt the field of blood testing using advanced technologies that give on-the-spot results," the website Israel21c.org reports on some efforts to do what Theranos tried and failed to do. It could be true that Theranos was a fraud and also true that the area of blood testing — which in the U.S. is basically a duopoly of LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics — has lots of room for improvement, which presents a commercial opportunity.

From a column by Politico's Jack Shafer pushing back against the plan for more than 200 newspapers, led by the Boston Globe and including the New York Times, to publish coordinated editorials on August 16 defending the freedom of the press against the supposed threat posed by President Trump: "Another problem with a nationally coordinated pro-press catechism is that the audience likely to reap the greatest benefit from the haranguing—Trump and many in his base—tends not to read newspapers in the first place."

Mr. Shafer cites no evidence for his claim that Trump and "many in his base" tend not to read newspapers. But an article in Axios by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei — two of Shafer's former Politico colleagues — reported:

President Trump spends substantial time and energy ridiculing the media. He spends even more time consuming —and obsessing about — it.

As far as I can't tell it doesn't show up online, but the print edition of my Tuesday New York Times included, on page A3, a feature headlined "Here To Help: Vanessa Friedman Answers Your Style Questions." In response to a reader "seeking a hat to wear out on the weekends that would provide sun protection and doesn't scream 'beach,' 'cowgirl,' or 'fedora,'" the Times chief fashion critic, Ms. Friedman, replies in part:

I know the hat you're after exists, this is because after years of using a baseball cap as a fallback (mostly because I live with three children and a husband with a shaved head and thus there are many in our house), I have also been wondering about other options, since that look has been somewhat ruined by MAGA and all its associations.

The "insider trading" case against a Republican congressman from New York, Chris Collins, is the topic of my column this week. Please check out the full column at the New York Sun (here), Newsmax (here), and Reason (here).

A startup company offering air-conditioned, internet-connected doghouses for use by businesses where dogs are not allowed attracted "seed money" from the Brooklyn Public Library, a New York Times news article reports.

The article is about the doghouses and does not explore how the public library got into the business of providing seed money to startup companies. If it's true, though, it made me wonder why that's an appropriate role for the library. The Brooklyn Public Library became one of my favorite New York institutions because of its role in making books available to the public. Maybe it would also be good at startup investing, but maybe not, too. One wonders whether the library takes equity in exchange for this "seed money," and what expertise and track record the people allocating capital have. It looks like there may be some answers at the library website.

Former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy (at National Review Online) and Randall Eliason (at National Public Radio) both tackle the topic of the "perjury trap," which has been in the news because President Trump's legal team cites it as a reason not to have Mr. Trump submit to an interview with special counsel Robert Mueller.

A column I wrote last month focused on whether the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act protects foreign governments from being sued for hacking into the email of Americans. It the Democratic National Committee suing Russia and Elliott Broidy's lawsuit against Qatar. "If courts rule that foreign hackers or their American hired hands are immune from American civil suits under current law, don't be surprised to see Congress step in to try to close the loophole," I wrote.

A Cambridge, Mass., man has been arrested for a Twitter post offering a $500 bounty for killing a U.S. immigration agent.

A press release from the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, Andrew Lelling, says the man, Brandon J. Ziobrowski, 33, "was charged in an indictment unsealed today with one count of use of interstate and foreign commerce to transmit a threat to injure another person."

From the release:

On July 2, 2018, Ziobrowski allegedly tweeted: "I am broke but will scrounge and literally give $500 to anyone who kills an ice agent. @me seriously who else can pledge get in on this let's make this work."

I'm troubled by the Trump administration's separation of children and parents at the border, but demonizing or attacking immigration agents — many of whom also served in the Obama administration, and who in any event are mostly enforcing laws that Congress passed — seems a response that is not just illegal, but also just awful.