The Brandon Miller Situation Is Completely Grotesque
Writing for New York Magazine, Will Leitch has a take on the Brandon Miller situation.
At the risk of sounding histrionic, it is downright ghastly the extent to which the University of Alabama has attempted to normalize what’s happening here, simply because the school’s basketball team is so good. Jamea Jonae Harris is dead. The men indicted with her capital murder allegedly procured their gun from Alabama’s best player, who then delivered it to them minutes before the killing. Now he’s going to be a part of “One Shining Moment.” Isn’t this shocking to you?
I hate all of this. I mean, Alabama is a legitimate NCAA Tournament winner this year. They would not be without this one player, who should be in jail.
Aaron Judge and Paul Goldschmidt and the day they spent together
Chris Kirschner, Andy McCullough and Brendan Kuty, writing for The Athletic, has a cool story about Aaron Judge and Paul Goldschmidt hanging out in the off-season.
One day in January, the most exclusive club in baseball convened a meeting. Aaron Judge, the reigning American League MVP, booked a block of time at a baseball facility near his home in Tampa, Fla. Paul Goldschmidt, the reigning National League MVP, drove three hours across the state from his home in Jupiter, Fla., to join him. The session had been months in the making and the agenda was straightforward: discuss and demonstrate methods to further terrorize opposing pitchers.
It was the equivalent of Kendrick Lamar and Jay-Z getting in the booth to talk about coming up with harder rhymes. It was J. Cole’s bar on “Middle Child” come to life, the one where he talks about his relationship with Drake: “they act like two legends cannot coexist.”
Yet, Judge and Goldschmidt did more than coexist. They made each other better.
This type of story is why I subscribe to The Athletic.
The Hierarchy of Productivity
Least Important: Tips and tricks and hacks and shortcuts.
Very Important: Habits and routines. Your daily actions and behavior. Your system of execution.
Most Important: Vision and values. Your purpose, your priorities, your why.
I’m not sure I spend enough time on the most important.
What Makes Poker Face a Triumph
Spencer Kornaber, writing for The Atlantic, has a great in-depth story on the success of Poker Face.
The brutality contained in Poker Face’s 10 episodes is outweighed by humor, humanism, intelligence, and, perhaps most crucially, optimism. The fact that the show is a hit speaks to a hunger for entertainment that counterbalances cruelty and kindness. In Poker Face’s America, justice depends less on vigilantism or the law than on regular people making authentic connections with one another. (I won’t significantly spoil any plot details.)
Easily one of my favorite TV shows of 2023.
Just a Reminder...
For any who believe anything Fox news or any of their hosts tell or show them, the hosts themselves are now on public record not only telling you it’s all a bunch of lies to boost ratings but they also laugh at you and call you idiots behind your back.
So, yeah. Keep watching.H/T: Patrick Rhone
How Shaquille O'Neal Made Himself Bigger Than Ever
Will Leitch, writing for Inc magazine, has a business oriented profile of Shaquille O’Neal.
And to be sure, O'Neal's approach to business, at least until recently, has looked like a holdover from an earlier era of celebrity business that was rooted in sponsorships, endorsements, and licensing deals. But a new model has appeared in recent years--led by LeBron James and carried forward by Kevin Durant, Patrick Mahomes, and others--that's less about being a smiling pitchman and more about building empires. Durant's venture-capital firm, 35 Ventures, was one of the earliest investors in Postmates and Coinbase. James's production company, SpringHill, has a $725 million valuation. The conventional wisdom holds that O'Neal, by comparison, is just cashing checks.
But then you take a closer look. Consider the sheer number of companies that O'Neal owns a piece of, often a substantial one: Papa Johns, Five Guys, Krispy Kreme, Auntie Anne's. The connected doorbell company Ring, well before Amazon acquired it in 2018 for north of $1 billion. Even Google, all the way back in 1999, long before its IPO, when it was valued at only $100 million. (Guess he didn't lose it all on that one.) O'Neal has opened more than a hundred franchises--car washes, health clubs, restaurants--around the country. He founded a film production company, Jersey Legends, and won an Oscar with a documentary about women's basketball great Lusia Harris. He founded a marketing agency called Majority that has created campaigns for clients including Sprite, GM, and the CDC.
I had no idea about some of his investments. I always saw Shaq as a spokesperson and not really that invested in the companies he “shilled” for, and I was wrong. I love the Starbucks story and what he learned.
Rooted in the Game
My friend Joe created the graphic and photography for this profile of Illinois Basketball player Coleman Hawkins. I know Coleman wants to play in the NBA, but I hope he strongly considers coming back to the Fighting Illini for one more year and, hopefully, increasing his stock.
A Powerful Message
Arnold Schwarzenegger has a powerful message for those who have gone down a path of hate.
Watch Jon Stewart's epic takedown of Second Amendment absolutist Rep. Nathan Dahm
Is it epic? Well, yes. Sort of. Stewart does what most Americans want done to our politicians and leaders who have stupid ideas–call them out on it. Hey, look at all of this hypocrisy.
The thing is, nothing is going to change because of this viral video.
The people who seek to regulate the freedoms of drag queens don’t care about hypocrisy, much less the opinions of liberals who take great satisfaction in seeing it “exposed.” Hypocrisy is rooted in liberal values – fairness, equality and everyone playing by the same rules. Are we supposed to believe people who are OK with mass child death care about fairness? Are we supposed to believe exposing unfairness will change things?
It will not.
What they say when they see drag queens read stories to kids in public libraries around the country is a threat to children. They say they attempt to “sexualize” them, even “groom” them. It’s because they have no concept of art. What they say they see when they see drag queens and LGBT-plus people is the same thing. It’s not.
Of course, it doesn’t matter to them. You can’t explain the difference. They don’t want to see it. Not only are drag queens and LGBT-plus people the same thing from their myopic point of view, they are also equally bad. Drag queens “sexualize” children. LGBT-plus people do, too. Together, these factors ask us to ask another question, which is: what is good?
In their eyes, drag queens and LGBT-plus people are not good. So, they are bad. None of this is true. They only want what they consider normal sexualization, meaning heterosexuality. Anything not hetero is bad. They believe the government should enforce the “normal sexualization” and outlaw the not normal. They don’t want people to be who they want to be. They want them to be “normal” in their eyes and if they refuse, they should be rounded up and sent away to “save the children.”
They don’t care about kids being killed by guns because they think drag queens are worse. How stupid do they think we are?
ICON Collective launches to strengthen Illini NIL effort
Jeremy Warner, writing for Illini Inquirer, has the story about the brand new NIL collective for Illinois Athletics, ICON.
ICON Collective is Illinois athletics' reaction to the NCAA’s guidance in October that schools cannot directly engage in negotiations for collectives or student-athletes, something the Illini athletics program had been doing during the previous months. In this ever-changing world of NIL — and ever-changing NCAA oversight of NIL — this meant the Illini needed to pivot and rely solely on collectives to raise and disperse NIL funds to student-athletes with the athletics department focusing on NIL education and guidance.
This is great. We need more ways for everyone to help attract the best student-athletes to the Illinois campus.
KISS Announces Their Final Concert Ever Will Be in 2023
KISS was on The Howard Stern Show and announced their final concert. There’s one more show in November in Rosemont that I kind of want to go to, but I’ve already seen them so many times. That show is on a Monday, which sucks.
It is good to remember this is just an end to touring. I fully expect the band to have a long-term Vegas residency in 2025, which I think will transition to a fully non-Gene, Paul, Tommy, and Eric version of the band akin to The Blue Man Group.
The Howard Stern Show also released clips of the interview and the band goes into “Detroit Rock City,” “Shout it Out Loud,” and “Rock and Roll All Nite.”
The Baseball Clock Is Good
Will Leitch, writing for New York Magazine, has a story about how great the pitch clock has been for MLB.
This year, pitchers have 15 seconds to throw a pitch if no one is on base, and 20 seconds with a runner on. If they don’t throw a pitch in time, umpires will call a ball. But hitters have new responsibilities too: They have to be in the box “and alert to the pitcher” by the time the clock hits eight seconds, or the umpire will call a strike. What does “alert to the pitcher” mean? Essentially, it means assuming your stance and looking at the pitcher, ready to hit.
...
At a certain level, baseball will be criticized no matter what it does. Changing its rules offends purists, or at least people who consider themselves purists but really just hate change. Not doing anything at all gets the sport labeled stodgy. In a way, merely opening the door for change is a step in the right direction. Baseball isn’t the way it was when you were a kid because nothing is the way it was when you were a kid. Allowing it to break free from those constraints — to stop being a morality play or a paean to a supposedly more innocent time, to let it simply be a sport — is perhaps the best way to save it. We all grew up. Maybe it’s time to let baseball do the same.
Saving 30 minutes off of a typical game is pretty amazing. I still hate the rest of the rules (ghost runner on second, minimum batters, only two pickoff attempts, no shift, etc.), but this one seems good, so far.
A Chatbot Is Secretly Doing My Job
Ryan Bradley, writing for The Atlantic, outlines how he’s using AI to generate copy for work.
This article made me wonder how I could use AI in my job.I have a part-time job that is quite good, except for one task I must do—not even very often, just every other week—that I actively loathe. The task isn’t difficult, and it doesn’t take more than 30 minutes: I scan a long list of short paragraphs about different people and papers from my organization that have been quoted or cited in various publications and broadcasts, pick three or four of these items, and turn them into a new, stand-alone paragraph, which I am told is distributed to a small handful of people (mostly board members) to highlight the most “important” press coverage from that week.
Four weeks ago, I began using AI to write this paragraph. The first week, it took about 40 minutes, but now I’ve got it down to about five. Only one colleague knows I’ve been doing this; we used to switch off writing this blurb, but since it’s become so quick and easy and, frankly, interesting, I’ve taken over doing it every week.
The process itself takes place within OpenAI’s “Playground” feature, which offers similar functionality as the company’s ChatGPT product. The Playground presents as a blank page, not a chat, and is therefore better at shaping existing words into something new. I write my prompt at the top, which always begins with something like “Write a newspaper-style paragraph out of the following.” Then, I paste below my prompt the three or four paragraphs I selected from the list and—this is crucial, I have learned—edit those a touch, to ensure that the machine “reads” them properly. Sometimes that means placing a proper noun closer to a quote, or doing away with an existing headline. Perhaps you’re thinking, This sounds like work too, and it is—but it’s quite a lot of fun to refine my process and see what the machine spits out at the other end. I like to think that I’ve turned myself from the meat grinder into the meat grinder’s minder—or manager.
I keep waiting to be found out, and I keep thinking that somehow the copy will reveal itself for what it is. But I haven’t, and it hasn’t, and at this point I don’t think I or it ever will (at least, not until this essay is published). Which has led me to a more interesting question: Does it matter that I, a professional writer and editor, now secretly have a robot doing part of my job?
I’ve surprised myself by deciding that, no, I don’t think it matters at all. This in turn has helped clarify precisely what it was about the writing of this paragraph that I hated so much in the first place. I realized that what I was doing wasn’t writing at all, really—it was just generating copy.
Paul Stanley and His Paintings
Jim Ryan, writing for Forbes, has an interesting story on Paul Stanley and why he started painting.
I really like his abstracts. I really hate his self-portraits, KISS-related paintings, and guitar stuff.
This Is What You'll Pay For
Jaime Brooks has an incredibly in-depth look at music today, what it will become tomorrow, and how we will consume it.
I don’t like his conclusions.
John Wick: Chapter 4
Here’s the final trailer for John Wick: Chapter 4.
Looks as amazing as the previous three installments. What a cool world.
World Series champion, TV analyst Tim McCarver dies at 81
Tim McCarver has died.
I will miss hearing his voice and his insight.
America’s unique, enduring gun problem, explained
Li Zhou, Nicole Narea, Ian Millhiser, and Cameron Peters, writing for Vox, has a story on the gun problem in America.
Call me cynical, but nothing is ever going to change. There is literally nothing that will change people’s minds about this subject. There is no amount of people killed that would do it. No one person killed by gun violence would motivate a wholesale change. Someone could kill every member of Congress and nothing would change.
It’s pathetic to have to live in this kind of society. I don’t have any hope for change and that’s sad.
Future Letter
Future Letter is a website that allows users to write a letter to their future selves. The website has a simple design. Just type your message, select a time frame, and click “configure.” The letter will come to your future self through your email address. You can choose to receive your letter in six months, a year, five years, or ten years.
I just sent myself a letter to receive in 5 years. Due to my bad memory, I assume that by the time my letter comes back to me, it will catch me off guard as a pleasant surprise.