Earlier this week, this article went up on Grantland about a fancy new putter. Upon trying the putter and talking with its inventor, the author concluded that it's unclear if the putter is actually any good, and that the inventor had completely fabricated her credentials (descendant of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, graduate degree in aeronautical physics from MIT, worked on the B-2 stealth bomber, etc.).
Also, the inventor was a transgender in "deep stealth" who committed suicide a few months ago. It's unclear, but explicitly or implicitly implied by several other people around the Web, whether or not the investigation that led up to the article, and the fear of being outed upon its publication, drove her to commit suicide. She apparently had attempted suicide once before, and there is an extremely high rate of suicide in the transgender community compared to the general public.
There was some mixed reaction to the original article, then a strong surge of backlash, which culminated in two official response pieces from the site: one independent editorial on the mistakes made in the original article written by a transgender writer for ESPN (which also owns Grantland), and a letter from the editor-in-chief of the site addressing the breakdown in the editorial process.
It's all worth reading, if you have the time.
Edited, Jan 21st 2014 12:19am by Demea