"Best of All Possible Worlds": An amazing tale about a public art contest in Evansville, Indiana.

It's quite early in 2014, and yet this piece is an early favorite for most thought-provoking work -- and it's a page turner with one unsurprising ending and another completely unexpected plot twist.

Wow.

BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS: A Public Art Contest in Evansville, Indiana, Becomes a Debate over Class, Race, and Good Taste, by Mark Lane (Believer)

DISCUSSED: Awarding Prizes to Art, Portals and Boundary States, Riverboat Gambling, Questioning the Priorities of Urban Renewal, Order as a Healing Mechanism, Productive Mental Disorders, High Levels of Ambient Gayness, Part-Time Artists as Bellwethers of Economic Growth, Vandalism, Art Acting Like Art, Meeting the Neighbors, The Kardashians, A Lost Picasso

In early 2012, Saul Melman came across an ad for an outdoor sculpture contest in Evansville, Indiana, a city about which he knew nothing. Artists were invited to propose a sculpture for one of twelve four-by-four-foot concrete pads in Evansville’s arts district, to be evaluated in part based on the sculpture’s integration into the neighborhood and its connection to the community.

Evansville remembers the filming of "A League of Their Own."

It is pleasingly ironic that in the same year (2011) NABC began serving beer for Dubois County Bombers collegiate league baseball games held in Huntingburg's League Stadium, which was built as a set for the movie "A League of Their Own," the film's 20th anniversary is being marked.

Evansville extras, workers recall 'A League of Their Own', by Thomas B. Langhorne.

When Bombers management contacted us earlier this spring, I confess to having no recollection of Huntingburg's part in filming. What I remembered was the use of Bosse Field in Evansville, as Langhorne's news article describes.

My other memory of the time: Madonna's petulence at being stuck in Evansville, as recalled by the writer:

Not even Madonna's later criticisms of Evansville — she told TV Guide she “may as well have been in Prague” — could dim the afterglow.

It may be the only recorded instance of a comparison between Evansville and Prague, and if I were the Indiana city, I'd use it. Prague's reaction is unknown.