Kevin Wildes has an ice-cold take that should settle the Michael Jordan versus LeBron James GOAT debate once for all. It’s just brilliant.

"I'm going to invent a player here: guy w/ 2 titles, 2 Finals MVP, league MVP, 3 All-Defense teams, DPOY & 9 scoring titles. That's the difference between LeBron & Jordan. Everyone's says it's close, it's not. It's a full HOF career better. LeBron's still chasing." — @kevinwildes pic.twitter.com/3liYzaECK2

— First Things First (@FTFonFS1) February 21, 2022

Cracked’s “Roger” is a real straight shooter known for telling it like it is in their Honest Ads series. ​So, he’s been enlisted to share the truth about the “exciting world of non-fungible tokens.”

This whole series is smart and funny.

The Athletic has everything the casual professional baseball fan might need to know about the lockout they might have only just started noticing.

MLB and the players association met for 15 short minutes Thursday, but the sides will likely reconvene soon to go over the players’ latest proposal. The details are tedious but they show progress in the negotiations. Key date to keep in mind: February 28, the deadline the league has set to get a new CBA done if they want the season to begin on time.

Seems stressful. And impossible.

Kevin O’Connor breaks down why the Bulls rookie’s game is advanced beyond his years, how he fits on this team, and what he needs to do to become a star player.

Steal of the Draft. Illinois fans knew.

Ryan Holiday has an essay that speaks directly to me personally even though it was written for everyone.

America has many problems. Reading too many books is not one of them. In fact, I would argue that our problems stem from the exact opposite. We spend too much time online. We watch too much real-time (partisan) news. We have a poor understanding of history and our founding principles. We say experience is a great teacher and neglect the hard won experiences of the people who came before us and did us the service of writing that all down. 

Read the whole thing.

Eliza Strickland and Mark Harris, writing at IEEE Spectrum, outline a trend I never would have thought possible. Hundreds of recipients of retinal implants will be “in the dark” after the company makes them goes out of business—an outcome expected imminently after layoffs at Second Sight, which no longer makes the devices. The story is horrifying.

These three patients, and more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight’s implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget. One technical hiccup, one broken wire, and they lose their artificial vision, possibly forever. To add injury to insult: A defunct Argus system in the eye could cause medical complications or interfere with procedures such as MRI scans, and it could be painful or expensive to remove.

For me, this is the story of the week. I am blind in my right eye and I always look at technological developments surrounding “bionic” eyes. The Six Million Dollar Man notwithstanding, medical technology has not advanced enough to reconnect the optic nerve so I quickly move on when the story is about “fixing” retinal blindness. Still, the ramifications of this is uncharted. Smart patients will start demanding rights to service, repair, and upgrade these kinds of implants and the technology has to become available when company’s go belly-up.

What do heart transplant or cochlear implant recipients do?

Bernie Miklasz, on his Bern Baby Bern column for Scoops With Danny Mac, has a few smart thoughts about the DH coming to the National League

Pitching has become so specialized, MLB makes extensive use of designated pitchers — mostly relievers that have a specific duty for a specific situation and rarely work more than an inning at a time. They’re specialists. They aren’t asked to hit. They aren’t utilized for their fielding. They aren’t on the club to steal bases.

Maybe they’ll drop down a sac bunt now and then, but the sacrifice bunt is slowly fading. In 2009, MLB pitchers delivered 671 sac bunts. Last season, there were only 421 sac bunts.

Most of these highly specialized relievers hunt strikeouts and others entice ground balls. They aren’t nine-inning ballplayers who bring a complete set of skills to the job. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We just accept them for what they are — specialists. That’s what confuses me about the DH argument.

If you flat-out dismiss the DH as a one-dimensional specialist that violates the tradition of the nine-man game, then what’s up with the double standards in play as you accept dozens and dozens of one-dimensional specialist relievers?

There’s a hard line of separation in today’s game: teams invest small fortunes in pitching. They want good pitching. They need good pitching. They need a deep supply of pitching. None of the salaries being paid to pitchers contain one dollar invested with the pitcher’s hitting in mind.

So why do we continue to insist that pitchers hit?

It doesn’t help the team. It doesn’t help the pitcher, it doesn’t enhance offense. And we’ve seen pitchers hurt and miss considerable time — including Wainwright in 2015 — while swinging and/or running.

What, exactly is the benefit?

Yes, yes, yes. A thousand times yes.

Now, if the Cardinals want to bring Albert Pujols back… I’ll enjoy every minute of it as a fan. It really does not make sense from a baseball perspective, but maybe DeWitt is quietly freaking out about the possibility of lagging home attendance in 2022.

Maybe…

JJ Abrams says a new Star Trek film “with the original cast” will start shooting by the end of the year.

— Jason Lynch 🇺🇦 (@jasonlynch) February 15, 2022

Matt Shakman, fresh from directing WandaVision and has done work on Game of Thrones, has been tapped to direct. It will be interesting to see if the powers that be are able to snag the “Kelvin Timeline” cast. Who knows if the script is any good?

I am not holding my breath on any of this.

David Ubben, writing for The Athletic, published a fantastic story about what’s going on behind the scenes at Tennessee, where an in-house “college sports collective” is aiming to raise $25 million a year to fund athlete name, image, and likeness deals. Not a typo.

Things that have been included in Tennessee’s NIL deals so far:

• Housing

• Car rentals

• Car washes

• Free meals

• Car maintenance

Some deals have reached six figures overall for certain athletes. It is still surprising to me that this is all legal and “normal.” Of course, this is just a starting point for NIL deals across college sports.

The schools that are at the forefront of NIL are going to benefit the most. Five-star student-athletes are about to get paid serious cash.

Imagine what it’ll be like in five years.

Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel, reporting for The New York Times, has the most important story of our time: What employees of Meta will now be called by their android/alien boss.

Google’s employees are called Googlers. Amazon’s workers are known as Amazonians. Yahoo’s employees were Yahoos.

So it was a conundrum for employees at Facebook, long known as Facebookers, when the company renamed itself Meta late last year.

The terminology is now no longer in question. At a meeting on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and Meta’s chief executive, announced a new name for his company’s employees: Metamates.

I work for a company where we are called Horizonites and it is mildly eye-rolling inducing, but also a way to “brand” all employees. Metamates sounds like a fiber supplement.

Also, could you maybe worry about the existential crisis of misinformation and white supremacy Facebook has wrought upon society.

I don’t really care too much about Sean McVay or the Los Angeles Rams. However, the story about McVay considering retiring at age 36 is interesting. Dylan Hernandez, writing for the Los Angeles Times, has the story.

The Rams were only a handful of hours removed from a Super Bowl LVI celebration that extended into Monday morning when coach Sean McVay said two words with potentially alarming implications for their future: “We’ll see.”

That was McVay’s response to The Los Angeles Times when asked whether he would return to coach the Rams next season.

I find all of this fascinating. He’s been a coach for five years. He’s only 36. He has decades of coaching ahead of him. Why retire?

It seems like the most natural thing to do once you are set for life financially. Of course, I think I know the answer. To get to that level where you are in an incredibly high-paying job like professional athlete, you are obsessed with that sport. Change it to lawyer or doctor and the dynamic doesn’t change. Those individuals want to keep doing the thing they love.

If I were a betting man, I’d say McVay stays a head coach for at most five more years and then moves to something possible just as lucrative, but with far less pressure and stress like broadcasting.

Still, I’d love to see the number of people 40 years old or younger who become so financially wealthy at a relatively young age they can retire and do so.

Ivan Reitman, director of comedies such as Animal House and Ghostbusters, is dead at 75.

Known for bawdy comedies that caught the spirit of their time, Reitman’s big break came with the raucous, college fraternity sendup “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” which he produced. He directed Bill Murray in his first starring role in the summer camp flick “Meatballs,” and then again in 1981′s “Stripes,” but his most significant success came with 1984′s “Ghostbusters.” Not only did the irreverent supernatural comedy starring Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis gross nearly $300 million worldwide, it earned two Oscar nominations, spawned a veritable franchise, including spinoffs, television shows and a new movie, “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” that opened this last year. His son, filmmaker Jason Reitman directed.

So many movies that were part of my life growing up. Rest in peace.

I was today years old when I learned Season 1 American Idol runner-up Justin Guarini plays and sings as Lil’ Sweet, the Dr. Pepper commercial mascot. My mind is sufficiently blown.

It seems the Super Bowl has not been getting tremendous ratings these last few games. If you’ve been following along this year you might know the last six NFL playoff games have all come down to the final minute, with five of those games being won on the last play. Those games have jumped up in television ratings.

On the other hand, last year’s Super Bowl fell to a 14-year low dipping below 100 million viewers. Yikes.

Tim Baysinger, writing for The Wrap, outlines the teams and what it will boil down to regarding ratings.

It didn’t help that last year’s game, despite featuring Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes, was a snoozefest that was dominated by the Bucs defense. This year’s game pits the hometown Rams who get to play in their own stadium in Inglewood, Calif., against the Cincinnati Bengals and rising star quarterback Joe Burrow.

For the Bengals, it’s their first Super Bowl since 1989, while the Rams were in the Big Game just three years ago (they lost to the New England Patriots in the lowest-scoring Super Bowl ever).

As we’re seeing with this year’s playoff games, if it comes down to the final minute, the league and broadcaster NBC will get a Hollywood ending.

I could not care less about who wins or loses. Mostly, I’m just hoping for entertaining commercials.

Caitlin Lovinger, writing for The New York Times, has a breakdown of last Sunday’s New York Times crossword puzzle.

The constructor, Stephen McCarthy, embedded a wonderful trick centered on the Star Trek vs. Star Wars debate. For the clue “The better of two sci-fi franchises,” either answer works.

I am a fan of both “Star Wars” and “Star Trek,” so it’s nice to be able to highlight both (not to mention the friendly rivalry between the two fandoms) in one puzzle. I grew up with the second iterations of both franchises (Episodes 1-3/The Next Generation) and had a crush on both Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker and Wil Wheaton as Wesley Crusher when I was a teenager, so I couldn’t decide which franchise I liked better!

Ha!

Greg Morris, writing at his site, thinks he’s figured out the ultimate minimalist phone.

SPOILER: it’s a cellular version of the Apple Watch.

Perhaps my perfect combination would be an iPad Mini and an Apple Watch. I can’t see a future where the smartphone won’t dominate our lives, but I am some way to freeing myself. The Apple Watch gives me a semi-smart device when required, and the accompanying phone gives me a phone if I really need one. Which isn’t frequently, it sits alone on my desk because I don’t use it much. Even less now.

I would like to try this except for the part where I don’t own a cellular Apple Watch…

Olga Khazan, writing in The Atlantic, gave herself three months to change her personality.  

I’ve never really liked my personality, and other people don’t like it either. In grad school, a partner and I were assigned to write fake obituaries for each other by interviewing our families and friends. The nicest thing my partner could shake out of my loved ones was that I ‘really enjoy grocery shopping.’ Recently, a friend named me maid of honor in her wedding; on the website for the event, she described me as ‘strongly opinionated and fiercely persistent.’ Not wrong, but not what I want on my tombstone. I’ve always been bad at parties because the topics I bring up are too depressing, such as everything that’s wrong with my life, and everything that’s wrong with the world, and the futility of doing anything about either … my editors wanted me to see if I could change my personality, and I’ll try anything once. Maybe I, too, could become a friendly extrovert who doesn’t carry around emergency Xanax.

She says the results were mixed. I think she came up with a killer sentence about the whole experiment.

The key may not be in swinging permanently to the other side of the personality scale, but in balancing between extremes, or in adjusting your personality depending on the situation.

Adjusting your personality to situations sounds hard, but ultimately the right course of action.

The long-awaited Obi-Wan Kenobi series has finally set a release date, one Star Wars fans will recognize. Obi-Wan Kenobi, starring Ewan McGregor as the iconic Jedi Master, will release on May 25. That date, of course, is when the original Star Wars movie hit theaters.

A release from Disney shares more about what this series will entail:

The story begins 10 years after the dramatic events of “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” where Obi-Wan Kenobi faced his greatest defeat—the downfall and corruption of his best friend and Jedi apprentice, Anakin Skywalker, who turned to the dark side as evil Sith Lord Darth Vader.

Ten years seems like a long time, but also just about right. I do hope we move quickly away from Tatooine as I’m quite tired of seeing the desert planet in every iteration of Star Wars on television.

Also, the teaser poster looks great.

Here’s what seems like a good “explainer” about what’s going on with Russia and Ukraine. Like you, I have no idea what’s going to happen there but someone — actually a lot of someones, plural — will be very unhappy.