Tuesday, July 14th, 2026

Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of The Pennant. To listen to this newsletter, click the “Listen Online” link in the top right corner of this email.

On this day in 1987, Major League Baseball renamed its Rookie of the Year Award the Jackie Robinson Award, honoring the man who broke the sport's color barrier in 1947.

The Ohio Controlling Board is considering a request to allocate $1 million in emergency funds to help care for the 16 children rescued from a Vinton County home. Find out why in the Top of the Fold.

CNBC has named Ohio the No. 1 state for business, but that status may be in jeopardy. Read why in our Editorial section

VINTON COUNTY — Ohio's Controlling Board approved a $1 million emergency funding request Monday to help care for 16 children rescued nearly two weeks ago from a Hamden home described by first responders as "deplorable." 

The Ohio Department of Children and Youth says the money is needed after caseloads at South Central Ohio Job and Family Services more than doubled following the rescue.

COLUMBUS —The Ohio Department of Health is warning residents as cases of this intestinal illness continue to spread across the state. 

Director Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff is urging residents to take extra care when handling fruits and vegetables as cyclosporiasis, a gastrointestinal illness, spreads across multiple states, including Ohio. 

The state has logged 177 cases in 2026, with 171 occurring in June and 28 people hospitalized, though no deaths have been reported.

WAVERLY — Ohio's Fourth District Court of Appeals ruled last month that Jake and Angela Wagner were sentenced too early, tossing both convictions and ordering new hearings once Jake finishes testifying against his father, Billy Wagner. 

Both have since been moved from state prison to county jails to await resentencing, while Billy's trial date remains unscheduled.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Business and education leaders say emotional intelligence, or EQ, is becoming one of the most valuable skills young people can develop, as artificial intelligence reshapes the workforce and social media platforms increasingly target users' emotions to hold their attention.

EQ refers to the ability to recognize, understand, and manage one's own emotions while reading and responding to the emotions of others. Psychologists say the skill covers self-awareness, self-control, empathy, and the ability to navigate relationships and conflict.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures" that as AI automates more tasks, workers who build soft skills will remain in demand. "Learn EQ, learn how to be good in a meeting, how to communicate," Dimon said, adding that people with those skills "will have plenty of jobs," according to Entrepreneur.

Other executives have echoed the point. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said empathy and emotional intelligence are becoming more important as AI takes over analytical work, and IBM's former CEO Ginni Rometty has said automation will put a premium on judgment and collaboration, Fortune reported.

Educators say the stakes are especially high for teenagers and young adults, whose social lives increasingly play out on platforms built to exploit emotional reactions through algorithm-driven feeds, comparison culture, and constant notifications. Learning to recognize when an app or a headline is designed to provoke anger, envy, or anxiety, they say, is now a basic form of self-defense — alongside older EQ skills like managing frustration in a group project, reading a room in a job interview, or apologizing sincerely after a conflict with a friend.

Without that awareness, experts warn, young people risk letting engineered outrage and anxiety substitute for their own judgment.

Ohio got the news every governor dreams about this week. CNBC named it the No. 1 state for business in America, the first time the state has topped the ranking since the survey began in 2007. Ohio earned it the hard way, climbing 33 spots since 2010 on the strength of the nation's best infrastructure, the lowest cost of doing business, and the thing companies prize above almost everything else: shovel-ready sites they can build on without delay.

That last part is worth sitting with, because a growing number of Ohio communities are quietly working to undo it.

In Grove City, a proposed charter amendment on the November ballot would require a public vote before any large project can move forward. Ashville residents tried much the same against a specific data center before the village stopped the petition. In Pataskala and Sunbury, petitioners submitted their charter-amendment signatures the week of July 6 and are now awaiting certification by their county boards of elections; according to the Columbus Dispatch, the Pataskala petition needed at least 310 valid signatures and Sunbury's about 174, and organizers say they turned in well beyond that, including more than 450 in Sunbury. 

Continue reading the editorial here.

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