“I was apparently the first person from our high school with whom she’d had contact in nearly 10 years.” A gay teenager shook her high school and her Marin County community when she was the victim of a rash of hate crimes. Then it turned out that she committed the crimes herself. And she never spoke publicly of that era again, until now. Buzzfeed’s Sandra Allen: Why would a gay teenager commit hate crimes against herself?

+ “If they didn’t receive the money, they were saying that at any moment they might give him a machetazo — a whack with a machete — chop off an arm, a finger, whatever, and he would never play baseball again, not for anyone.” LA Magazine with a story about a Dodger that’s so interesting, even a Giants fan could love it: Escape from Cuba: Yasiel Puig’s Untold Journey to the Dodgers.

+ The NBA’S improbable pipeline: How alumni from tiny Emerson college infiltrated pro basketball’s front offices.

+ And for your queue-filling pleasure, our friends over at Longreads have a links to many of the 2014 National Magazine Award Winners.