CJ Moore, writing in The Athletic, has a pretty good take on the new look Illini Basketball squad.

How do you feel about the Illini? Do you feel they have a Final Four-caliber lineup? — Jeremy B.

I’m going to wait to see it before I go that far, but it’s promising. This is the furthest anyone has leaned into building a roster through international imports. UCLA’s 2023-24 team would be the next closest, but Mick Cronin ended up leaning way more on his American guys on that roster. Brad Underwood doesn’t really have that choice. This team is built for his international players to be the stars.

Mihailo Petrovic is the key. He’s 22 and an MVP candidate in the Adriatic League. One buddy familiar with that league told me his one concern is Petrovic is a burner and his speed is a real advantage in that league and might not be as much of one in the college game. But it’s a good league, and you have to be a real player to be an MVP candidate. To give you an idea of the level of competition, the leading scorer for the team above Petrovic’s in the standings (KK SC Derby) is Rasir Bolton, who averaged 10.1 points per game for Gonzaga in 2022-23 on a team that made the Elite Eight. Illinois’ Tomislav Ivisic played for Derby in 2023-24 and averaged 7.1 points per game in his final season. David Mirkovic, who was his teammate and was just signed by Illinois, is averaging 8.9 points this year. Ivisic just averaged 13.0 points, 7.7 rebounds and 2.3 assists in his first year at Illinois. These are real players who translate.

I’m interested to see what the frontcourt rotation looks like and if Underwood will try to play the Ivisic brothers together. Zvonimir Ivisic has shown flashes his first two seasons but has been inconsistent. Maybe playing alongside his brother will bring the best out of him, but it’s also possible he’s just the third big, and if that’s the case, that’s a nice luxury.

On the perimeter, returning Kylan Boswell and Ben Humrichous is a nice luxury. Jake Davis also has familiarity in the system. Cal transfer Andrej Stojakovic is a proven scorer who played on a crummy team, and he could benefit from the talent around him. The two freshman guards are wild cards and will be a bonus if Illinois gets anything from them. Keaton Wagler is one who I know well because he played high school ball at my alma mater. He could be a year away, but he was a nice steal and is the type of skilled guard with size Underwood likes.

This is a different approach to roster building, and a lot of coaches are going to be paying close attention to how it works out. I love the willingness to go for it and try something different. Cannot wait to see how it all comes together.

Electronic musician and producer Moby recently relaunched Mobygratis, the free sound library he originally created in 2005. In the relaunch, Moby has added 500 new tracks in addition to the original songs—and they’re all available in MP3, WAV, and multitrack formats.

I have not listened to it all, there’s far too much and I don’t all the time in the world. However, I did dig Glam 1 a lot.

here's a fun game if you're a music dork: what is the best album released by a music act at least 15 years after its debut album?

— Acting the Fulemin ([@actingthefulemin.bsky.social](http://actingthefulemin.bsky.social)) May 1, 2025 at 10:03 AM

it's harder than you think. Beatles and Zeppelin didn't reach 15 years. Floyd's only contender is The Final Cut. the last great Radiohead album (In Rainbows) was 14 years from the debut.

— Acting the Fulemin ([@actingthefulemin.bsky.social](http://actingthefulemin.bsky.social)) May 1, 2025 at 10:06 AM

Nicholas Bate –

1. Using music to put yourself in the best possible mood at all times.
2. Realising that someone, somewhere wants to replace your skills with a silicon chip and an AI interface. Become so good that they can never, ever do it.
3. Doing five rounds of 2.5 minutes on your boxing bag every morning.
4. Staying in touch: with your friends, with your accounts.
5. Having a definite and distinct place that you place and keep your car keys.
6. Prioritising what you do against your goals. And thus: having goals.
7. Getting the quantity and quality of sleep you need so that you are focused, creative and unstoppable in the face of challenging days.
8. Deciding to never rely on an employer. In reality they cannot guarantee anything apart from this month’s salary. Things are tricky out there. Plan your own destiny; you don’t need to go as far as T E Lawrence but he had some good ideas.
9. Clarifying your use of time. It is possible to work while in leisure time and dream of leisure while at work. Split the two. Word hard, play hard and don’t allow technology to confuse the two.
10. Get really good at listening and understand the other point of view.
11. In the business meeting, ask deep probing questions. The latter is a question asked until a point of hesitation: at that point you know the data is dubious.
12. Investing in yourself by reading.
13. Never ignoring symptoms whether they are headaches, poor sales figures or simply unease. Address them. Sooner than tomorrow.
14. Realising that the days of true leadership in Politics are over. Most Political activity is some point in a marketing campaign.
15. Doing a couple of rounds of Sun Salute yoga every morning.
16. Taking technology free days.
17. Getting out more.
18. Being courteous.
19. (Re-)realising that nobody thinks like you, works like you, is you. And that’s OK.
20. Not caring if they are cynical. Just do an awesome job time after time after time. After time.
21. Not trying to predict too much in a crazy world. Day by day…..
22. Sorting your finances even if that initial close observation will reveal how bad they really are. Knowledge is power.
23. Getting a French Press and making decent coffee, so easily.
24. If in doubt, write a list.
25. Remembering that creating a team is hard work. But the return from a High Performance Team is staggering.
26. Returning to The Beatles. Any time, anyplace, anywhere.
27. Buying a decent brolly, then you can walk in the rain.
28. When in NYC, never wait on the sidewalk: simply turn and walk on the nearest green. Momentum in that marvellous city is everything.
29. Use gentle humour to facilitate your point of view.
30. Learn De Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats concept.
31. Not forgetting the power of love compared to the power of right.
32. Really realising that school and college are only very crude approximations of business and Life. That’s the fun: there’s so much nobody told you which you can still discover.
33. Re-reading Joseph Conrad. Anything.
34. Getting up early on a Saturday and making fresh bread for the whole family.
35. Reminding yourself that wealth is not money. Wealth is love. It is health, a stack of great books to read and the long drive to an appointment as the sun is coming up. You have all the wealth you need.
36. Writing stuff down. Every so often consolidating and tearing stuff out.
37. Using the camera on your phone to record things.
38. whatever your fitness routine, work on your squat.
39. Realising that you have doubt because too few people tell you enough that you are good at what you do. Never make that mistake with your children, your team nor your favourite barista.
40. Drinking sufficient water.
41. Reducing junk food intake.
42. Switching phones off in meetings.
43. Thinking about why Sherlock Holmes was so good at his job.
44. Learning about Dmitri Mendeleev, the guy who put a system to atoms: The Periodic Table, of course. That’s the whole damn universe expressed in one sheet of shiny paper at the back of the science lab. That’s cool.
45. Understanding compound interest.
46. Stopping saying ‘I don’t have (enough) time’.
47. Be with your children. Be interesting. Be interested. Be at the ball game. Be at prize giving. Be at their heartache. Be at their growth. But do not stop them being them.
48. Simplify everything you do. Add, sure. But then take something away.
49. Listening to opera. Or more opera.
50. Realising that you have an eternity to do what you want to do if you slow down and notice what is happening. Really notice what is happening. Listen. And act.

I’ve been listening to a new band in the same vein as God is an Astronaut called If These Trees Could Talk. Kind of spacey, post-rock with a metal edge. I like these kinds of instrumentals when working.

Their latest track is “Trail of Whispering Giants,” which is a reference to a collection of sculptures by artist Peter Wolf Toth. The 74 Whispering Giants range from 15 to 40 feet (4.6 to 12.2 m) in height, and all resemble natives of the region in which they are located.

There’s even one in Illinois in a small village called Hopewell, near Peoria. Wild.

Alex Shepherd in The New Republic:

“Liberation Day” seems to have woken a lot of Americans up to something they had inexplicably forgotten: Trump is the same profoundly incompetent and stupid person who, just a few years ago, they did not like very much. Trump may be counting on his trade war somehow working, but much would have to go right for his popularity to recover. For one, that trade war would have to deliver what Trump promises it will: mass prosperity, an end to the income tax, and the return of well-paying manufacturing jobs—which pretty much everyone, aside from Trump and a handful of slavish loyalists, agrees is impossible. He would also have to somehow turn back time and restore the pre-Covid economy that many Americans remembered so fondly when they voted for him a second time. This is also impossible. He would probably also have to end the war in Ukraine—but in a way that doesn’t give Russia everything it wants, which is Trump’s current, and truly artless, negotiating position—and somehow repair America’s absolutely destroyed global reputation. None of that is going to happen, either.

It’s more likely that everything is going to get a lot worse. Trump’s approval ratings are historically awful right now, even though he has managed to delay the worst effects of his trade war. But he is still stubbornly clinging to tariffs, which inevitably will cause product shortages and rising costs in the near future—not to mention a potential recession, the odds of which are worryingly high.

A lot of other things will likely hurt his popularity too. Trump seems to believe that ending the war in Ukraine will win him a Nobel peace prize, but while Americans may have soured on supporting that nation’s fight against Russian invaders, a deal that ends up being a gift to Putin may not go down well with independents or even Republicans (and certainly won’t with Democrats, though they basically already all despise him anyway). His authoritarian immigration crackdown is already unnerving a majority of voters, and those numbers will likely continue to slide as his administration deports law-abiding undocumented immigrants and even legal residents and citizen children. That crackdown, moreover, is rapidly heading toward a confrontation with the judiciary and the Supreme Court that seems destined to lead to a constitutional crisis.

It is a scary time with the tariffs and this fucking idiot of a president. As soon as store shelves are missing items… as soon as fresh produce is non-existent… as soon as everything becomes 150% more expensive… as soon as Christmas toys and electronics are not on shelves… maybe, just maybe things will change.

It feels like Americans are waking up to the fact that they have elected an incompetent buffoon.

Wolfgang Van Halen’s band Mammoth née WVH has a new album coming out soon and just released the first track, “The End.” Melodic, but opens with a really cool tapping effect. The guitar work is incredible. The solo is unreal. If the cover of the album is the three flame headed image with the Mammoth mark, I’m really impressed.

The video though is inventive and hilarious. Actually, pretty much all of his videos are inventive and usually funny.

Ruth Buzzi, the actress and comedian best known for her time on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, died on Thursday. She was 88 years old.

Gladys & Tyrone | A Wedding Story (The Whole Story!)

Chris Poole (@chrispoolemusic) plays The Osmonds' “Crazy Horses” slowed down from 45 to 33 rpm for a good-natured Donny Osmond, so Donny can hear what he would have sounded like in his alternate career as a heavy metal singer.

It really works. I love how Donny corrects him about who’s singing and is honestly enjoying himself.

Matt Bircher on Meta Threads —

To me, Threads feels like a place where nothing happens. It’s 350 million users and nothing going on – a vast nothingness of a social network.

It had a chance to be the next Twitter, but BlueSky beat them at the game.

Will Leitch, writing for New York Magazine Intelligencer, has a piece about umpiring/refereeing that will undoubtedly piss people off. The whole thing is great, but I found this tidbit especially informative.

Take the K-Box, that little superimposed zone behind home plate you see during baseball games. The concept is simple in theory: If the ball lands inside the box, it’s a strike, and if it lands outside the box, it’s a ball. But in practice, all it does is give us something to get mad about. Before the box, if a pitch was close to a strike but called a ball, we could have a moment of frustration, but in the end, all you could do is shrug: It was a close call and it didn’t go our way. But now? Now every pitch the umpire calls differently than the K-Box is infuriating. It’s a little box that exists only to piss you off — to feel as if you have been wronged, little droplets of aggrievement interjected sporadically throughout the otherwise calming sensation of watching a baseball game. This box is particularly galling, because it is in fact not definitive. It’s just a broadcast creation, with whatever network you are watching imposing what it believes the strike zone is on its telecast, regardless of the actual rules. That was proven during this year’s spring training, when MLB, as reported by The Athletic’s Evan Drellich, introduced its Automatic Ball-Strike System (or ABS or “robo umps”), which contrasted with what networks have been showing for years. “The strike-zone box that we display on broadcasts and our app probably is inconsistent with the way we currently do it with the challenge system,” said an MLB executive. The box is just there to piss you off. And the aggrievement it and other technological innovations foster — the illusion that there is a right answer, and that we can find it, and the very real belief from most fans that the only “right” answer is the one that benefits specifically their team — is pervasive.

I did not know this.

Manuel Morello —

That is the magic day, the perfect day. The day when I’m gonna stop doing the things that make me feel miserable. The day when I’m gonna start doing the things that I know make me happy. Tomorrow is the day when I’m gonna start drinking more water, taking better care of my body, exercising more, and procrastinating less.

Tomorrow is that day. It was tomorrow yesterday. It was tomorrow the day before. It’s gonna be tomorrow this night, when I’ll be lying in bed, thinking about all the things I wanted to do differently throughout the day.

It was always tomorrow. It shouldn’t be always tomorrow.

Evelyn Quartz –

The public is not simply asking for louder performances. They are asking for something harder: a real reckoning with the failures of the old order. Yet much of the mainstream political class — campaign consultants, television pundits, party strategists — continues to mistake the appearance of fighting for real action. A fiery speech on MSNBC, a viral fundraising email declaring a once-in-a-lifetime ‘fight for democracy,’ a triumphant Twitter clip of a senator ‘owning’ the opposition: these are treated as victories in themselves. They confuse performance with renewal, noise with transformation. But the public knows the difference. And they are running out of patience.

When Democratic voters express frustration, they are told the problem is messaging — that if only the party could sharpen its slogans, tighten its scripts, and “frame the narrative” more aggressively, all would be well. In clinging to the management of perception, they are clinging to a language that no longer matches the lived experience of most citizens.

– They know, at a visceral level, that the problem runs deeper than the daily outrage cycles acknowledge. They hear passionate defenses of democracy from politicians who have done little to protect the material foundations democracy needs to survive. They watch solemn cable news panels lament “polarization,” even as their own wages stagnate, their healthcare bills pile up, their communities hollow out, and their children’s futures grow more precarious. They are told that democracy is under threat — and they believe it — but they are also living the slow erosion of dignity, security, and belonging that no amount of televised urgency can disguise.

In such a context, yet another viral speech or slick campaign ad does not inspire trust. It inspires something quieter, and more corrosive: a disillusionment that hardens with every empty gesture. The more the performances intensify, the more hollow the promises sound. Over time, the gap between public experience and political spectacle grows too wide to bridge with rhetoric alone.

The public is not cynical because they are foolish. They are cynical because they have been taught, through lived experience, that most of the “fighting” offered to them is a substitute for the reckoning they actually need. We no longer know how to name the collapse we feel. We are given slogans about rights and institutions, but the lived experience of abandonment has no official language. And what has no language eventually demands new forms — or new ruptures.

Until that shift happens — until leaders emerge who are willing to name the full scale of the collapse and confront it seriously — no amount of fighting will feel like enough. Because it won’t be enough.

Adam Mastroianni –

The internet is full of smart people writing beautiful prose about how bad everything is, how it all sucks, how it’s embarrassing to like anything, how anything that appears good is, in fact, secretly bad. I find this confusing and tragic, like watching Olympic high-jumpers catapult themselves into a pit of tarantulas.

The Functional Melancholic delivers a slow, quiet essay, The Death of Intelligence: Why Modern Society Celebrates Stupidity, in a 23-minute video about the seemingly constant drive in American culture toward stupidity.

His simple and straightforward talk really sums it up well. And, yes, he does mention Idiocracy, describing Mike Judge, now standing and chain smoking on a balcony, saying, “Don’t you realize, it was all just a joke?” Despite his nom de plume, he does say there is hope, see the post’s title, but he also says that we have a lot of work to do.

This is well worth your time.

See also: The BasketBalkans. Does your last name end in -ic? If so, welcome to the Illinois Fighting Illinic!

Andrej Stojaković committed to Illinois Basketball yesterday. Seems like the team is pretty much set and its not even May yet. Although, I’m sure they have something in their back pocket for a backup guard or a Will Reilly return (which I highly doubt).

Apparently, the team on paper is considered the number three best offensive squad in the country. That will change by the time school starts and all the portal guys have found new homes. The shot-making on this roster looks better than last season, although that’s not saying much.

I have to credit Brad Underwood for putting together a team of really talented basketball players and navigating the NIL waters better than some of his contemporaries. I wanted the team to get more athletic and they have, but they will still play drop coverage defense and I worry about how even more athletic guards will carve it up. At the end of the day, Illinois should be electric on the offensive end with multiple returners and awesome additions from Europe. Defensively, I’ll just have to live with the team being just average. It’ll be interesting to see how this team adapts to the more physical Big Ten on both ends of the floor.

As it stands now, this team should be right there with Purdue and Michigan for the Big Ten championship and a high seed in the NCAA Tournament.

I’m looking forward to seeing this team play starting in October (I think). I haven’t seen a schedule yet, so I don’t know if Illinois is again setting up a non-conference schedule to challenge the team early. My guess is they will and I hope they rise to it.

Heather Cox Richardson –

There has been a change afoot in the Democratic Party for a while now as its leaders shift from trying to find common ground with Republicans to standing firmly against MAGAs and articulating their own vision for the United States.

That shift burst dramatically into the open last night when Democratic Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker gave a barn-burning speech to Democrats in New Hampshire. After walking out to the American Authors song “Go Big or Go Home,” Pritzker urged Democrats to stop listening to “do-nothing political types” who are calling for caution at a time when Americans are demanding urgent action, and to “fight—EVERYWHERE AND ALL AT ONCE.”

She goes on to outline what he presented.

This fiery keynote in New Hampshire can only mean one thing: He’s running for President. Illinois will have to find a new governor because Pritzker isn’t losing.

Annie Mueller —

People can change. The only limit on what you can learn in a lifetime is how many years you get. There is not a hard stop on openness or curiosity. Change is difficult but people can change. It is right to ask them to do so because things change when people change.

It is right to ask ourselves to change, too. There are a few things in my life, in my heart, that are non-negotiable. The rest is up for discussion. It is good to require ourselves to be humble and curious and willing to learn. It is good to say things like I don’t know. I was wrong. I’m sorry. I’m learning. I could have done better. I will do better.

Calcification occurs when you don’t pay attention. The tissues harden in place. Things get dry and brittle. Another word for calcification is death. Change is life. Be open, and don’t be afraid to ask others to be open, too.

Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic with a very interesting look at how everything known about you (which is basically everything) could become a problem.

A worst-case scenario is easy to imagine. Some of this information could be useful simply for blackmail—medical diagnoses and notes, federal taxes paid, cancellation of debt. In a kleptocracy, such data could be used against members of Congress and governors, or anyone disfavored by the state. Think of it as a domesticated, systemetized version of kompromat—like opposition research on steroids: Hey, Wisconsin is considering legislation that would be harmful to us. There are four legislators on the fence. Query the database; tell me what we’ve got on them.

Say you want to arrest or detain somebody—activists, journalists, anyone seen as a political enemy—even if just to intimidate them. An endless data set is an excellent way to find some retroactive justification. Meyer told us that the CFPB keeps detailed data on consumer complaints—which could also double as a fantastic list of the citizens already successfully targeted for scams, or people whose financial problems could help bad actors compromise them or recruit them for dirty work. Similarly, FTC, SEC, or CFPB data, which include subpoenaed trade secrets gathered during long investigations, could offer the ability for motivated actors to conduct insider trading at previously unthinkable scale. The world’s richest man may now have access to that information.

An authoritarian, surveillance-control state could be supercharged by mating exfiltrated, cleaned, and correlated government information with data from private stores, corporations who share their own data willingly or by force, data brokers, or other sources. What kind of actions could the government perform if it could combine, say, license plates seen at specific locations, airline passenger records, purchase histories from supermarket or drug-store loyalty cards, health-care patient records, DNS-lookup histories showing a person’s online activities, and tax-return data?

It could, for example, target for harassment people who deducted charitable contributions to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, drove or parked near mosques, and bought Halal-certified shampoos. It could intimidate citizens who reported income from Trump-antagonistic competitors or visited queer pornography websites. It could identify people who have traveled to Ukraine and also rely on prescription insulin, and then lean on insurance companies to deny their claims. These examples are all speculative and hypothetical, but they help demonstrate why Americans should care deeply about how the government intends to manage their private data.

A future, American version of the Chinese panopticon is not unimaginable, either: If the government could stop protests or dissent from happening in the first place by carrying out occasional crackdowns and arrests using available data, it could create a chilling effect. But even worse than a mirror of this particular flavor of authoritarianism is the possibility that it might never even need to be well built or accurate. These systems do not need to work properly to cause harm. Poorly combined data or hasty analysis by AI systems could upend the lives of people the government didn’t even mean to target.