• Apologies for radio silence…Mardi Gras 2026 has ended and I am back looking at my computer. New Orleans: what a town. Obviously the high-level takeaway from both near and far is the Shia LaBeouf dustup…blog policy dictates that the New Orleans criminal justice system’s operations are too close too home to chat about publicly. DM or pay if you want to get into it. Friends and GF saw him at the scene of the crime about twelve hours prior, I’d already started walking to another bar (Mardi Gras, love it), life is full of these sort of close calls. Mercifully got nowhere close to A$AP Bari. Long and short of the LaBeouf thing is that I wish the guy well and hope he takes Lent seriously.

• Big NBA story this week aside from the Durant burner imbroglio is that Adam Silver is afraid of his own shadow. Crazy, because what little I saw of All Star Weekend was pretty fun. Egor Dëmin won himself a ring (love the guy), the actual games were compelling (loved the part where Scottie Barnes didn’t know he’d hit a game-winner as the big French one flipped a shit), the dunk contest was hilarious. Truly can’t believe that the Richardson nepo baby fell like that, love that the guy I’ve never heard of before won because he dougied a bunch. Just great stuff. Anyhow: Silver. The guy, simply put, is ontologically incapable of not bugging out. In response to the government-mandated month of anti-tanking chatter that’s more a byproduct of our endless conversation economy than genuine public dissatisfaction, the Vampire has purportedly put the league on notice about radical anti-tanking measures to come. My two cents: who cares? The only people with any standing to kvetch about tanking are fans of tanking teams themselves; the Jazz repulse me (these young men do not want to live in Salt Lake City), but only because I think that the Nets deserve their draft pick. As far as everyone else is concerned, though, this really isn’t a problem. To paraphrase Durant: don’t worry about what goes on at the bottom of things. If you’re a fan of a non-tanking team who is in any way preoccupied with the outcome of a February matchup between the Wizards and the Pacers, you should go do some pushups or read a book.

• Love the little Japanese monkey with the plushie toy…

• LaMelo…what’s left to say? Love the kid and hope he doesn’t kill anybody. Keep returning to the compilation of TikTok comments suggesting that basically every driver in Charlotte has had a near-death experience with LaMelo Ball’s insane driving.

• Lot of good music. Xavier, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, Daphni…

• Would be remiss if I didn’t offer a word on Hoboken, New Jersey’s prodigal son, Clavicular. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably spent the last two weeks in a torture chamber of Clavicular content—you see the ASU frat leader in your dreams, you have opinions on which legacy media outlet most capably handled the troubled young man, it’s old hat at this point. Won’t belabor the point here, but a quick two things: (1) it’s insane that he’s evidently destroyed his body’s ability to naturally produce testosterone just to look like that (he’s handsome, but nothing to write home about). I’ve toyed with the idea of looksmaxxing as a form of MtM transitioning, but the dirty little secret here is that it’s basically just live-streamed puberty. Bleak stuff—I hope that young men out there don’t follow his lead and (allegedly) take meth to keep a fast going or whatever else…unspoken truth in life is you can sort of just be hot if you want to, obviously. (2) Can’t get over the Hoboken of it all. Have to raise my hand here—I had no idea that Braden Peters grew up in the Mile Square. Everything about him immediately slotted into place in my mind’s eye: growing up in Hoboken means literally living in New York City’s shadow, if you’re predisposed to a completely totalizing inferiority complex, these are the environmental conditions that can ratchet this sort of stuff to the next level. Plus, per NYT, you’ve got the fact that his dad is a stockbroker, which is dangerous stuff in a place like Hoboken. Stockbroker’s kids are supposed to live in the suburbs, maybe fuck around with the car that they got on their sixteenth birthday, play lacrosse…nothing all that new or exciting. About 20 or so years ago, though, a ton of stockbrokers started moving into Hoboken with their families—total disaster. Clav being a case in point—a young man does not navigate a childhood in Hoboken with the name Braden. It’s just antithetical to the culture—you can’t say it with an affected Italian accent that, after long enough, just becomes second nature. The guys at the little league field who do PA don’t stand a chance with something like that. So a guy like young Braden, all of a sudden you’re working on two levels of inferiority: the inability to belong to a place that, definitionally, exists in the shadow of another. Doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that he goes on to get obsessed with self-transformation as an ethos rather than a means to an end—he didn’t stand a chance. If he’d grown up in Wycoff he’d be applying to summer banking internships as a junior at Clemson right now, and we all could have saved ourselves a load of trouble.

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  And now, a main event: going lawyer mode to prove that Kevin Durant in fact sent those messages

Here we go: as you now know, the basketball internet was set ablaze last week by the allegations that Kevin Durant, the guy who both has faced burner scandals before and whose public persona is largely defined by his love for Twitter, has from roughly 2021 to now maintained an active burner account from which he would DM a group of regular guys to chop it up and occasionally shit on his teammates. High-level take here: I love that this scandal, if true, is sort of the morally pure version of the early-season’s gambling scandal, with Durant dishing insights not to materially advantage any close associates but to get some crying laughing reactions from a bunch of strangers. It’s just totally awesome—I love him and wish every day that he’d never left the Nets (may make two of us…).

To stop myself for a second: enough of the “if true” hedging. This is absolutely real. If I owned my home, I’d put the house on it. If anything, I’m shocked by how many people are approaching this affair with a dose of healthy skepticism (speaking of, the Nothing But Respect boys put out a characteristically great episode nailing down the timeline and articulating both the bear and bull case for all this being real…which, of course, it is). The reason I know it’s real is because a lot of the cast of characters involved—various Durant associates and Brooklyn Nets-centric accounts—are people with whom I, through my phone, am greatly familiar.

There’s about eight different ways toward proving that @gethigher77 is, or was, in fact KD—love the part where all of the replies to the now-locked account are from his buddies and wishing him a happy birthday on his actual birthday—but the most compelling evidence, as far as I’m concerned, is the reaction of the random Twitter guys caught up in it. Here, as always, context helps. The public revelation of Durant’s burner comes amidst a conversation between Durant and one of those bad actor clout-addict guys Pranav Sriraman (hate this guy). Durant, as he is wont to do, responds to a random post of Sriraman’s complaining about the design of a series of NBA trophies (it’s all so ridiculous). Sriraman, for his part, uses the opportunity to call out Durant’s investment in Skydio, a company that supplies drones to the IDF among many drone-interested bad actors. The exchange is both embarrassing for Durant (who is constitutionally incapable of recognizing when he’s lost an internet fight) and for, well, the reader—I’m sorry, but I just don’t trust the people behind accounts like Sriraman’s, and it’s incredibly difficult for me to imagine that he’s coming at this conversation from a place of sincere conviction rather than from the insane and omnipresent online belief that Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza is just a way to dunk on strangers on describe things you don’t like.

Anyhow, it’s the type of exchange that (in my opinion) is worth ignoring until our friend basedfrog23 pops his head in with a bombshell—Durant has purportedly shit-talked his Rockets teammates in group chats under the name ‘getoffmydickerson’ (love it). Will get to all of that in a second—but first, by way of proof, it’s helpful to then pull out to a high-performing quote tweet by a “saeedemon25” character (lots of numbers in this affair, could be a fruitful Swiftie numerology exercise for someone with capacity). Saeed, for their part, latches onto Sriraman’s IDF-drone tweet to slam not Durant, but two ostensibly random dudes on Twitter: @PaulTweetsRIP (fka PaulTweets2Much) and @WaveyForever (who, heads will remember, spoke to this very blog for the big aura piece way back when).

By way of background, WF (birth name Dre) and Paul are characters with whom I’ve grown quite familiar through my exposure to the Brooklyn Nets internet. Paul, for his part, is a Nets (and Philadelphia Eagles? How does that happen?) fan and prolific poster whose prose style most resembles that Big Business guy—a lot of quote-tweet bait and talking ball for the love of it. Dre, for his part, is a one-time-if-not-standing Durant fan and one of the funniest posters on the web; if I’m not mistaken, he once jokingly told someone that Kevin was too rich to respond to them and that he would instead. Just a hilarious guy.

Now: an appeal to authority. You know how when a doctor tells you to do something you probably should just do it, insofar as they’ve spent so much time preparing for this moment that they almost certainly have insights into the situation that you, the patient, cannot divine? I have spent enough time on the Brooklyn Nets-centric internet—I want you to picture me groggily dragging my timeline down for one more dreadful pop, telling my girlfriend “five more minutes” from a haze on the couch, truly Requiem for a Dream-style engagement with the Nets internet—to tell you that it makes perfect sense for Durant, if he in fact wanted to chop it up with Twitter strangers, would include Paul and Dre in his inner circle. It just does. They lean pro-Durant, they’re funny enough guys, they share a set of sensibilities with the north stars of the Duranternet (Big Business, Eddie Gonzalez, that Niko guy with the badges in bio), they’re always on their phones. Enough background—zip back to the present. What we have here is Dre and Paul’s involvement in the group chat being public enough knowledge that a different Twitter rando, the aforementioned Saeed, cancels them for being complicit in Durant’s joking about his investments in a company that supplies the IDF with drones.

The hard proof that Durant was in fact out there in those group DMs comes, then, in Paul’s response to his own potential cancellation. The IDF DM in question, in which Mr. Dickerson responds to a shared post about Durant’s investments in Skydio with “If they need drones!! We got ya” (so, so Durant—like, come on), comes after apparent posts from Eddie Gonzalez (well-established KD friend, podcast co-host, etc.) and our friend Paul. Paul, in response to Saeed’s sort of horizontal-plane-punching (good for him, that’s hilarious), issues a statement in his own right:

What we have here, to put a fine point on it, is Paul covering his own ass on the Israel front by saying that all that screenshot shows is him sending a message before Durant’s IDF non-joke. Paul, in other words, is claiming to have not actually riffed with Durant on the Israel of it all, himself. Paul’s response, then, takes as a complete given the fact that 1) the screenshot in question is in fact real (non-doctored) and 2) that the sender in question was, to his knowledge, Kevin Durant. As far as I’m concerned, that is crystal-clear proof that getoffmydickerson is, in fact, Kevin Durant—one of the dudes in the group chat tacitly admitted that it is!

Which leaves us with one final alternate hypothesis of innocence: that gethigher77 was simply someone pretending to be Durant and duping a bunch of people in a group chat for about 4 years. To which I say: get real. The person who sent a message just before Paul in the IDF-shot, remember, is Eddie Gonzalez—again, a real-life friend of Durant’s. What’s more likely? That KD’s actual friend messaged a fake version of his close associate for four years, or that the most internet-addicted NBA star wanted to chop it up with a bunch of dudes who spend their working days enmeshed in Socratic debates about Rodgers v. Mahomes? Wish there was a way to get Polymarket action on this—it is Durant beyond a reasonable doubt.

A word to the wise, though: just because Durant was in fact the guy sending these messages doesn’t mean that every message you see attributed to him is real. I’d be very wary of anything not included in this thread. Even that thread…who knows? I wasn’t in these chats, which fact will haunt me to my dying day. Still…so much good stuff in what I’m calling the Saeed canon: “I miss James,” “I miss Ben Simmons,” the Kyrie cereal line. Durant is just a hilarious guy, and I wish we lived in a world where everybody had a strong enough sense of self that he didn’t feel the need to sneak around with his opinions like these. If it were up to me, Durant would feel empowered to share these thoughts on his main account, TL-posting, for all to enjoy. But, alas, our society is one structured upon shame, decency, and obligation like the court of Guermantes.

Not going to get into the ramifications of these messages—maybe later, lot of Nets stuff in here, and the Israel shit is disappointing if not unsurprising—because this is long enough. But, yeah, it’s absolutely Durant.

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• January…enough already. Ready for 2026 to ‘begin in earnest.’ Haven’t heard a great or even really good album this year yet—Dry Cleaning was okay. Love the song where she’s mad about cleaning. I love tidying but it isn’t for everyone, and I understand how the politics of it can be fraught.

• Got to write about Egor Dëmin for BK Mag, never thought I’d see the day I was affiliated with Brooklyn Nets state media, I guess it’s true that anything is possible. Can’t say enough about the kid. I love that his dad is totally insane.

• Enjoyed Die My Love, don’t think it can go band for band with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, but there’s a really incredible part where Robert Pattinson tries to defuse tensions by calling the mother of his child his “OG.” Has to have been ad-libbed. So good.

• NFL playoffs: none of my business.

• Had fun participating in predictions for 2026. Predicted the END OF TWITTER. It’s…just how I feel. Site is total slop now—the other day I saw some guy celebrating the Indiana Football account announcing their championship in a text-only post…just bonkers to me. Site has lost all its juice and makes me embarrassed to even check it.

Now, a blog about going to the Brooklyn Nets v. New Orleans Pelicans game and experiencing an internal crisis about the value and practice of fandom:

I’ve got about three routes that I jog through in my neighborhood, and two of them pass this beat-up pickup truck with the famous “I Like Music That Sounds Like Shit” bumper sticker. I find new-wave bumper stickers distasteful, but the OGs work for a reason—every time I see this sticker, I smile thinking about the neighbor of mine whose commitment to self-differentiation is such that they refuse to entertain music that sounds good. In my more cynical moments, I imagine the likely driver of this stickered-pickup as a person who has fundamentally imprisoned themself within the confines of their taste, someone who has foreclosed against the possibility of beauty in order to bootstrap an identity. But on days like last Wednesday, which found me spending sixty of my hard-earned dollars to ensure that a friend and I could sit as close as fiscally feasible to Egor Dëmin as the Brooklyn Nets played the New Orleans Pelicans, I begin to entertain the possibility that we don’t consciously choose our chains, that recognizing the contours of our desire is half the battle. I Like Basketball That Looks Like Shit.

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In other words, after clocking out of my depressing job, I had the privilege of clocking into my depressing hobby: watching the Brooklyn Nets lose. The last time I’d gone to the Smoothie King Center to watch my Nets, I got pretty drunk with a now-ex-coworker and met the biggest celebrity lawyer in a city that revolves largely around celebrity lawyers and enjoyed what in retrospect was the last time Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant ever played together as Brooklyn Nets.

In the three intervening years, I’d thought of the Brooklyn Nets in much the same way I do climate change: as a terribly depressing fact of life brought about by people more powerful than you and I that will probably ruin my children’s lives and of which a baseline awareness is probably enough to satisfy my civic duty. But things have changed recently, my blackpill has shaded considerably more gray, Egor Dëmin is shooting the lights out, and Michael Porter Jr. is so good at basketball that I’ve almost forgotten his gender politics. And so despite the fact that a year ago I opted out of attending a Nets-Pelicans game for which tickets were literally $0, I found myself giddy at the prospect of watching my boys in town this time around. Life is full of its surprises.

The last time I wrote about the Nets in longer-than-bullet-point fashion, I was catastrophically pessimistic. The Nets entered this season on the heels of an aborted tank, a confounding draft, and a series of Israel- and Michael Porter Jr.-related PR mishaps frustrating enough for me to question how, and why, anyone would choose to spend their time and attention rooting for the near-perennial bottom-dwellers. I don’t disown anything said then—like Nico Harrison, time will tell if I’m right. But a curious thing has happened over the course of the season, in that some combination of surprisingly competent rookie play, hard-nosed coaching, freedom from the shackles of rooting for busted-ass-journeymen, and, lord forgive me, good vibes has made it such that I look forward to watching Nets games again. Every game features something—heroics from my crazy Russian son, psychotic resolve from Day’Ron Sharpe, Nolan Traore slowly learning how to breathe through his nose—that excites me for the future. I feel myself relearning the joys of fandom in real time; that I can say this about a 12-29 basketball team is a testament to the depths of my previous desperation.

At our current historical juncture, team fandom can feel increasingly like a political statement or a consumption decision in line with, say, prioritizing physical media over digital streaming content. In 2026, sports are as legitimate a lens through which to forecast societal trends as any; sports condition how people discuss and approach politics, sports serve as the springboard for the 2020s great gambling onboarding event, sports provide grist for the content mills that colonize and replace what might once have been called interiority. People lost their shit when Trump said “everything’s computer,” because everyone wants to be hip to the next new thing, but, like, everything is sports. To acknowledge that is not to do the chungus Twitter leftist thing—you claim to be a leftist but like organized sports?—but rather to acknowledge that sports, for all their virtues, are perhaps the main entertainment product that society’s architects turn to when answering the age old question of how to get more people to buy more stuff they don’t need.

Which is to say: I’ve been thinking a lot about the excellent recent TrueAnon episode with Pablo Torre, in which Liz and Pablo discussed what it means for organized sports to be strip-mined by the gambling industry. Their conversation, which is both characteristically funny and comprehensive, contains perhaps the best articulation of what gambling and its industrial logic (literally every other big engagement account on sports Twitter is sponsored by Kalshi or Polymarket now, that Cam Newton Kadoosh video you just liked is probably promo for odds on whether Trump will invade Greenland) does to shake the until-now settled meaning of organized sports. Sports, the argument goes, are not just a celebration of athleticism and competition, but an exercise in settling differences. Before “see the game?” was a meme, it was among the great experiential levelers in human history; rooting for a team alongside neighbors and strangers alike is a transcendent experience. The real tragedy of gambling, then, is that by operating from the premise that the experience of mere fandom is not enough to justify watching a game, it silos young suckers into the hyper-individualized experience of rooting for their prop bets and parlays and out of the communal experience of watching a game as game. In the age of gambling ascendant, watching a game because you root for a team involved can feel like watching a roulette wheel spin not because you have any chips down but because you like the way the colors look. The implication, to borrow a phrase from the worst people alive, is that you’re NGMI.

Look, this is supposed to be a dispatch from my night at the Smoothie King Center. The reality is I don’t have too many notes from the night. I see now that I thought it was worth observing that the Pelicans production team was seemingly unable to distinguish between Danny Wolf and Egor Dëmin, such that the Jumbotron was never able to reliably tell you which tall white guy was on the floor for the Brooklyn Nets. I thought it was funny that the dreadful New Orleans Pelicans play in jerseys adorned with patches for Newage Grills, which as I search them now look quite nice but from an insulation-from-slander standpoint were probably not the best idea. I wrote “Jordan Poole looks like Justin Bieber now,” I have a reminder to request my friend for dinner (she paid before I even thought to charge her, stand-up act), I see a note from when a dude appeared to grind with his young daughter in order to win the timeout break dance-off, and I have a note that reads “Zion goatee” followed by one that just says “Nets.” I can tell you that the arena was unsurprisingly empty, that in the upper-deck there were often complete sections that were empty, but that over the course of the game I noticed couples decamp to them to enjoy a section entirely to themselves, which I thought was romantic. I can tell you that the guy doing the Crumbl cookies 3-shots-in-30-seconds challenge was really on track to win a year’s supply of cookies but then he got to the halfcourt line and it got really ugly, I can tell you that a guy beat a lady 2-1 in the “2010s dance moves” timeout battle but that they scored the rounds incorrectly (he should have won the first two rounds, not the first and the third, it was the sort of thing that makes people stop watch boxing). I can tell you that I saw the King Cake Baby mascot again, and how cool it is that a major sports franchise has a time-limited mascot whose explicit purpose is to be scary.

Each of these observations slipped off my exterior before making an impression because I was so distracted, over the course of the game, by the utterly unnatural and antisocial experience of rooting for an ostensibly tanking team in person. Which, ultimately, is what I was trying to get at with the gambling crap. My abiding takeaway from my Wednesday night with the Brooklyn Nets in New Orleans is that it is bad for the human spirit to root for your team to lose games. The fact is that I had a lot of fun at the game: I got to see my gigantic son Egor Dëmin go characteristically ape from behind the arc (he’s so tall, it’s crazy; love that kid), I got to see Drake Powell smooth out his shot and pogo-stick himself across the court, I got to see Cam Thomas be totally evil (done with that guy), I got to see Michael Porter Jr.’s totally insane hairstyle. I don’t get to do that a lot, it felt like hearing a beloved band play live, I got to point at dudes and say things like “that’s Nolan Traore, he’s French and so fast but he doesn’t really know how to make layups.” The problem is that this primal, innocent fun was repeatedly beaten down by the smug superego that colonizes the minds of all people who root for bad teams, the poindextrous voice that insists that it’s better for your team when they lose, the utterly perverted notion of a “good tank loss.” To root for the Nets to play well but ultimately lose was, I realized then, to fully and totally inhabit gambler brain. The common sense among Nets fans—that the Nets should lose every game by one to three points atop promising games from five young players and stock-increasing showings from every tradable veteran—leads to the experience of viewing every game through the lens of a convoluted, long-shot parlay. It is the undeniably logical position for a Brooklyn Nets fan to have; it is also the sort of dork shit that stamps out whatever genuine joy can be found within the inherently illogical framework of sports fandom.

All of that is to say that when Michael Porter Jr. launched one of the most ill-advised shots I’ve ever seen on a basketball court, much less in person, to seal a come-from-behind victory for the New Orleans Pelicans, I told both myself and my friend that I was happy the Nets were able to lose such a close game. I was lying. I wish that the Nets had won, because a life well-lived is not one in which everything is optimized and predictable and wack and soulless. Call it tank resistance, Chad humanism, or whatever else you’d like. I want my terrible favorite basketball team to win games, and so should you.

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• Happy New Year. Not much has happened—love that everyone agrees that December doesn’t really exist from a cultural standpoint, we just spam lists and predictions instead. I think it’s fun, things don’t have to always be going on, it’s nice to slow down. New year’s resolution: slow down, buddy.

• Saw Avatar 3, loved Avatar 3…not going to go long on it because there’s a lot there and I’m wary of biting off more than I can chew. I’ll leave it at this: it’s endlessly fascinating to me that the most commercially successful director in history has been dreaming about these gigantic blue cat people for like thirty years, and the exact historical moment at which motion picture technology allowed him to actualize his vision happened to be the same historical moment at which he would feel compelled to give one of his characters the bussin’ haircut. Everything else—whale court, the Na’vi ISIS ketamine subplot (really interesting deep politics lens for anyone willing to carry the torch), teenage Sigourney Weaver kissing the soulful white boy with dreads—pales in comparison to the fact that there’s a water Na’vi who looks like Lil Mosey. What a movie.

  

• Marty Supreme—awesome. Saw it on Christmas Day with the family, which reminds me of a bone to pick: people on the Internet should stop talking about their parents like noble savages. There’s some intense libidinal investment located in the Twitter/Letterboxd class that likes to imagine they’re too esoteric for their parents to understand them or the media they use to slap together an identity…it’s antisocial. You don’t need to check with Internet strangers about whether your parents can see Marty Supreme or “erm” your way around hanging out with your parents. It’s okay—they’re adults. Anyway, sick movie, love that it implies that Mamba Mentality predates Kobe, which is a Twin Peaks: The Return-level vision of historical evil. Wish I saw Kemba and T-Mac as Harlem Globetrotters but I was having too much fun with the seal. Love the movies.

• Shorting It Was Just An Accident as a final-twenty-minutes merchant.

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• Nets defense is randomly elite, Michael Porter Jr. is running an Eddington-style all-star campaign, Egor Dëmin ends up in double-digits as a matter of course, and Nolan Traore is eating his David bars. What gives? Who’s to say. Where I’m at right now is that I believe the Brooklyn Nets can do anything they put their minds to. Situation to monitor: Cam Thomas’s hairstyle. He’s going through something.

• Read a few great books recently, won’t go long here, planning something more substantive. One note I can’t overlook, though: Yasmin Zaher’s excellent The Coin features a blurb from Slavoj Žižek that’s pretty imprecise and prioritizes her identity as a Palestinian author moreso than, in my opinion, any aspects of the marvelous book itself. Begs the question: did Z read the book, or is this a classic vibe-based-never-saw review in line with, like Joker? Which is funnier? Again: who’s to say.

• Main event today on the most important memetic development of the past month:

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A brief exploration of the Cam Newton video podcast meme gold-rush

The most important development in the sporting world linguistic domain: someone out there decided, at some point over the last month-and-change, to start watching the Cam Newton video podcast. Already, clarification is needed. I’m talking, of course, about the instantly-iconic edit of Cam Newton’s impassioned rant about Buffalo Bills wide receiver Keon Coleman’s work ethic and entitlement, set to Future’s “Solo." It’s the sort of cultural development that creates an immediately observable seismic imprint, like “Johnny B. Goode” or the Timmy Thick-Harvard experiment tweet. Perhaps due to the fact that it occurred during the barren wintertime, the Cam Newton Cookies video triggered an immediate, gold-rush-style pilfering spree: everyone under the sun has had their Twitter history searched for the keyword “cookies,” people are scouring Newton’s “4th & 1” video podcast for the next big clip, in general it’s a precarious time to mess up as a young person. When Zohran says something inadequately radical about Maduro’s abduction someone is going to quote tweet the press hit with a video of Cam Newton mockingly saying “yeah, I love cookies.” This is how culture moves now: fast.

So, first, some groundwork. “4th & 1” is but one of at least two Cam Newton video podcast properties. Where “4th & 1” appears to center around sports discussion—specifically, if its viral clips are any indication, discussion of young football players’ shortcomings—his other project, “Funky Friday,” merits some discussion as well. “Funky Friday,” an apparently pop culture-centric video podcast, appears to get 6-to-7-digit views on each of its expertly-titled clips. My preliminary scan of Newton’s YouTube account just now reveals genuine innovations in the clickbait-titling sphere.

Don’t need to belabor the point, but, wow. Newton’s social intern is a three-level scorer. From thumbnail to thumbnail, you get everything: the breathless gravity of “Natalie Nunn: Don’t Speak On My Family” (accompanied by the thumbnail’s slight elaboration, “Don’t Ever In Your Life Speak On My Family”), the honeypot-style “Natalie Nunn Explains What A Real Baddie Is,” and the series of utterly brilliant Jemele Hill-centric thumbnails “Did I Fumble Her? Perhaps I Did,” and “They Told Me To Take The Obama Photo Down.” A lot of the grousing about AI in culture misses the point, in my opinion. I’m not scared that artificial intelligence will replace, like, the people who made Marty Supreme—I’m scared that it will replace the person who put such deliberate care into these thumbnails. This is what it’s all about. There also appears to be a recent full-length episode with Jussie Smollett that I’m just not touching here, but go check it out for yourself.

Point being, Cam Newton is working to put shit out there, and by all accounts he appears to be pretty successful at it. Good for him: I love that he dresses like a Tubi supervillain and I think he’s the sort of personality that American culture is richer for having created. And yet—and yet. The philosophy Newton’s team seems to prize for viral growth seems incompatible with what happened on the cookies front. I’m inclined to think of most out-of-left-field-immediate-sensation memes as a psy-op or a savvy marketing campaign. Here, I’m comfortable ruling that out. I sincerely believe that Newton’s team has had nothing, whatsoever, to do with the Keon Coleman video colonizing my brain. The whole thing seems sophisticated beyond their paygrade. What we have, instead, is a non-GMO, grass-fed viral sensation. In this day and age? A treat.

So what, then, makes the video work? The short answer is: basically everything. You’re greeted with a generational Cam Newton outfit: checkered button-down and block-green tie underneath a green bomber jacket and accompanied by a signature Newtonian white bowler hat that looks not unlike a baseball designed by the Zodiac Killer. His initial warning—“folks ain’t going to keep being patient with you”—is lent immediate gravity by virtue of his unbreaking eye contact with the camera. But like good writing, this clip becomes what it is by virtue of sharp editing. The decision, about five seconds in, to omit what the editor presumably and incorrectly believed to be an unnecessary clause, is what begins to make the clip unforgettable. “That playful person,” Newton muses, “that the Buffalo city by storm…in his first interview.” It just works, and it’s worth celebrating. It’s like when you’re playing Jenga and at a certain point the tower starts to resemble a futurist sculpture. It’s a miracle.

The top-line things in this video—the cookies of it all, the dancing, the yellow jacket—don’t do it for me as much. For others, they do. That’s how blockbusters work: people come together to enjoy something because there’s something in it for everyone to enjoy. It’s why I loved One Battle After Another. And like One Battle After Another, the cookies video simultaneously works on multiple levels of simultaneous brilliance. Take, for instance, Newton’s straight-man, relegated more to the background in this clip than he is in the original text, where he’s afforded more equal footing. This dude makes the clip, there’s no meme without him, it just wouldn’t work. The “yeah yeah” to move Newton off the cookies bit, the “come on now” to rile him back up, the coup de grace “I bet you better catch that ball.” Jazz heads talk about session drummers; we get him.

You don’t need me to tell you why this video took off like wildfire. Do you really want someone to make the big-picture societal diagnosis? That we’re all out of grace and patience to give? That the video resonates with a deep-seated ennui with the cutting-edge techno-capitalist promises that kicked this century off and have brought nothing but ruination upon society? That we’re, to borrow from Howard Beale, mad as hell? Come on now. Maybe in 2025—not today. How about this: it works because it’s funny and mesmerizing. If it’s not too late, Cam Newton should be one of the sirens in Nolan’s Odyssey.

I’ve felt that all of the subsequent products of the Newtonian content race have left me flat, but in due time I warm to each and every new edit. The video where Newton practically screams “how you look! will keep you in a jersey. But not for long…” is just good public speaking. Newton is compelling, precise, and strategic; he reserves his most absurd flairs for when he needs them most. They should cut half of law school and force attorneys-in-training to watch this guy instead.

The day will come, of course, when we’re all tired of this shit. JD Vance is going to say “cookies,” or the Nazis behind one of those gray-check government Twitter accounts will use it to justify some insane act of dehumanization. The world’s gross and technological communication is cooked. Blogs, perhaps, are all that we have left. And yet it’s also true that at some point there will be someone out there who steels themself against a grueling but ultimately necessary task by saying, in their head or aloud, “I bet you better start doing your job,” and whether they were being sincere or ironic will in that moment cease to matter, because one way or another they will have said it, and it all would have started because Cam Newton was trying to build a media empire upon the back of Keon Coleman, and to me that’s pretty beautiful.

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Best Music of 2025

1. Jane Remover - Revengeseekerz

   A record showcasing the most ambitious contemporary musician at the peak of their powers. Since Frailty, I’ve been higher on Jane’s NTS mixes than on their actual records, but Revengeseekerz is Jane Remover at their most fully realized. These songs flit from rage to emo, dubstep to what kids call shoegaze now, at a hyperkinetic clip. It’s art that captures modernity to a T: right as a melody assumes its shape, it evaporates like sand through your fingers. Music to sprint to, music for airplanes, music for sort of just geeking on your lonesome…just the best. Can’t believe I’m 30 years old and my favorite song of the year is called “TURN UP OR DIE,” but that’s the power of music.

2. oklou - choke enough

   Didn’t make sense to me until a friend told me that I wasn’t listening to choke enough loudly enough. Since then, I’ve lost days of my life to (or, rather, had mundane chores like watering my garden or driving my perfect overweight cat to the vet enhanced into something transcendent by listening to) this album. I didn’t believe in angels or that annoying ASCII shit every “modern writer” uses to scam publishing houses into book deals until I listened to choke enough. Now I know they’re real because I’ve heard them.

3. DERBY - Slugger

   Best album of the year that nobody has talked about. Common sense says this should be tedious and derivative—scuzzy softboy-coded record indebted to Dijon, Alex G, Mk.gee, all those bedroom cologne guys. Trick here is that it works. Sort of album that makes you feel like a teenager in a good way.

4. OsamaSon - Jump Out

   For a while I would box on Wednesday nights and the only album I could bring myself to box to was OsamaSon’s Jump Out, and then when I was done I would continue replaying “I Got The Fye” on my way to my post-boxing burrito. But then I lost my AirPods (ironically enough while on a run in Miami listening to Jane Remover’s Revengeseekerz for the first time—it was too hot and the Danny Brown verse was stressing me out upon first listen) and then I couldn’t box with music anymore, and after a few months of boxing without OsamaSon my resolve slowly dissipated, and now I don’t box anymore, but I still love this album.

5. Chuquimamani-Condori - ILY Travis (Chuqi Chinchay Is God & God Bless America) Mix / Edits

   Cheating here, but: Edits compiles my favorite DJ E flips from the last few years of DJ mixes, but ILY Travis is my favorite mix of theirs outright. So, splitting the baby, or I guess choosing two babies. Transportive, elated music. Nothing better.

6. Earl Sweatshirt - Live Laugh Love

   Earl’s dad album, except unlike most of the other dad albums this year, this one is good. The sort of dense rhymeplay and idea fragments you could spend years untangling, but it doesn’t sound like homework. An invitation rather than a challenge. “Get these white girls out my home like Babyfather?” Delightful.

7. Ethel Cain - Perverts

   Demon music.

8. Dijon - Baby

   First time I listened to this record, my girlfriend and I were driving in a rental car with the sort of shitty speakers that flatten even the cleanest recorded music into a tinny dirge. It sounded bad, we set the volume progressively lower, and by the end I think she had a minor panic attack—vibes were not good. The relisten took place under far more favorable conditions, and I still came away from it relatively unmoved. In fact, I didn’t really connect with Baby until about my tenth listen. Why did I listen to an album that I disliked ten times? I don’t know—sometimes in life, things just happen. The stock market keeps going up, Austin Reaves is an all star…not everything in this world adheres to basic notions of common sense. But I’m glad I did, is all. The only other good Dad record—messy, exhausting, full of life.

9. Skrillex - F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3

   Culture moves in fascinating ways—one day you pick your head up and realize you can admit that you love Skrillex.

10. Oneohtrix Point Never - Tranquilizer

    A record brimming with possibility, not least of which: a goat may become unwashed.

11. Corbin - Crisis Kid

    It’s pretty crazy that Spooky Black made one of my favorite guitar music albums of the year, but, again, sometimes that’s the way life goes. The standout track, “Carbon Monoxide,” is the best pop song of the year (at worst 1a with the really good Smerz single), but the entire record is easy to get lost in.

12. Syzy - Syzy ➜ NTS Radio - 05.22.25

    Not an album, but that’s the joy of being self-employed: you can just include things. Explosive and ecstatic mix from the most exciting electronic musician since Rustie. Listened to this mix like fifty times in a row when I wrote the blog post making fun of Jalen Brunson that convinced a bunch of you to subscribe to this humble newsletter—thank you.

13. billy woods - GOLLIWOG

    Best writer in the world, truly scary record. Won’t rehash what I wrote when I had the privilege of speaking with woods for POW, other than to say that if you haven’t listened to this, you should.

14. Los Thuthanaka - Los Thuthanaka

    Betting favorite for Pitchfork’s album of the year, so you don’t need me to proselytize about this one too much, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t suggest that this is what the future, past, and present would sound like if simultaneously overlaid.

15. SML - How You Been

    Insanely cool record from the LA jazz supergroup, which like their first is comprised of live recordings cut up Burroughs-mode into coherent, experimental chapters. Tried to pitch a review framing it as a sort of thesis on the possibility of creative existence in the era of mass surveillance and networked connection, but it didn’t land, so run with it if you’re so inclined.

16. Nick León - A Tropical Entropy

    Simultaneously some of the headiest and most fun dance music I heard this year. As a guy who lives in New Orleans, I’m inherently partial to art that’s committed to asserting a vision of a city that rejects its more odious public imagery. Awesome Miami record.

17. Armand Hammer & The Alchemist - Mercy

    Hagler and Hearns for a world where the NFL splits its ad space between FanDuel and the United States Army. A rap masterclass.

18. The Hellp - Riviera

    

19. Chat Pile & Hayden Pedigo - In the Earth Again

    First Chat Pile record I’ve really gone for—Pedigo yanks them out of their comfort zone to reveal my favorite heavy music of the year.

20. Alien Boy - You Wanna Fade?

    Sort of album that helps me understand what emo adults are on about—perfectly moody, regret-soaked, massive.

21. Barker - Stochastic Drift

22. Ninajirachi - I Love My Computer

23. Hayden Pedigo - I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away

24. Loidis - Good Work - 12 July 2025

25. Maria Somerville - Luster

    Chinese Nikola Jokic, Israeli D’Angelo Russell, Irish Grouper. Lush, wistful, total, stunning.

26. Geese - Getting Killed

    Under the radar little album that I haven’t seen anybody really put on for. Worth checking out.

27. Nourished By Time - The Passionate Ones

28. Dean Blunt - lucre

29. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Gift Songs

    Never Hungover Airplane Album of the Year.

30. james K - Friend

31. Safe Mind - Cutting the Stone

32. Wednesday - Bleeds

    Hartzman’s writing often takes me out of a song—she’s enamored with the sort of contemporary realism that I find distracting and distasteful—but when these songs hit, they really hit.

33. Shlohmo - REPULSOR

    Probably buoyed by the fact that it came out on Halloween, so I listened to the Corbin feature like thirty times in a row setting up a house party, but wasn’t brave enough to actually play it out loud for people. They probably wouldn’t have heard it anyway—lots of chats, fun party. Never Hungover Party of the Year, if we were doing that sort of stuff here.

34. Corridos Ketamina - Corridos Ketamina

35. Jim Legxacy - black british music (2025)

36. Fen Magus - Offering

    Colossal New Orleans doom music from a true Twitter goat. If you’ve ever used the “Lakers fascism” tweet to deride one of your opps, you owe it to Richard to at least check this record out.

37. Water From Your Eyes - It’s A Beautiful Place

38. $ilkmoney - WHO WATERS THE WILTING GIVING TREE ONCE THE LEAVES DRY UP AND FRUITS NO LONGER BEAR?

39. Snuggle - Goodbyehouse

    Favorite Copenhagen Music 2025.

40. Joanne Robertson - Blurrr

41. d.silvestre - Oque as Mulheres Querem

42. Addison Rae - Addison

43. Lucy Bedroque - Unmusique

    Under-discussed and joyous thrill-ride. Probably what a significant portion of rap music will sound like in five years when listeners and artists alike get a little tired of being so angry all the time.

44. Playboi Carti - MUSIC

45. Trhä - lact’eben

    Heard at the wire thanks to a sage recommendation from friend of the blog . Got teary at the final track the first time I heard it then rewound and hit my deadlift personal record—upgrade to paid before asking what it is.

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46. Deafheaven - Lonely People With Power

47. che - Rest In Bass

48. David Michael Moore - Umburkus Returns

    Coolest record of the year that nobody talked about—totally sui generis music from this old head in Rosedale, Mississippi who handcrafts all of his insane instruments. Vote with your dollars.

49. Bassvictim - Forever

    Love these kids…they’re just so insane. I think it’s a really cool idea to constantly crash out in the public eye while retaining the ability to put out music like this. Outside chance of at least one of these songs ending up in an athletic shoe advertisement in the next five years. Don’t laugh, crazier things have happened, like the 6 7 song is pretty scary and we all know what came next.

50. Darkside - Nothing

Honorable mentions: Feng - What the Feng?; Cate Le Bon - Michelangelo Dying; Destroyer - Dan’s Boogie; Panda Bear - Sinister Grift; skaiwater - #mia; the AI Tyler the Creator song; the AI Charlie Kirk song, Kevin Gates screaming at Bobbi Althoff.

Best Movies of 2025

Heavy caveats here…haven’t seen Avatar…let’s just call these some movies I enjoyed in theaters this year.

1. One Battle After Another

2. Eddington

3. The Shrouds

4. Magic Farm

5. Black Bag

6. Cloud

7. The Phoenician Scheme

8. Eephus

9. Sorry, Baby

10. Bugonia

Best Books of 2025

Not going to rank books—it’s unkind. Shout out to everyone who writes a book. Seriously, good for you. The best new book I read this year, of course, was Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s Your Name Here. Some books I enjoyed reading that came out this year: Andrew Lipstein’s Something Rotten, Jeff Weiss’s Waiting for Britney Spears, Giri Nathan’s Changeover, Grace Byron’s Herculine, Joshua Wheeler’s The High Heaven, Jeremy Gordon’s See Friendship, Sophie Kemp’s Paradise Logic. Didn’t read the Pynchon yet but heard it bangs.

Best Brooklyn Nets Draft Picks of 2025

Nets draft…disaster. Perhaps the sort of disaster from which one might recover—these things happen, Jersey Strong, etc…—but a disaster nonetheless. Still, I feel my heart softening toward some of these young men. Either way, I’m stuck with them.

The kids who play:

1. Drake Powell - The only guy who I felt unreservedly okay about on draft night has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been my favorite of the five Nets rookies. What has surprised me, though, is what exactly about his game has excited me. Powell is the first proper athlete I can remember watching play for the Brooklyn Nets—he chases offensive players around like a puppy—but it’s his eye for creation and aggressive shot-making that has convinced me he has a star leap in him. Needs to eat more and do some esoteric tendon work for longevity.

2. Egor Dëmin - Being dope, having fun, chilling, smiling. Love this kid…he’s like what would happen if you told Timothee Chalamet mid-Marty Supreme press tour that his next project was playing a Russian hooper whose ceiling is a slightly more connective Joe Ingles. Dëmin’s a weird watch—cone on defense, didn’t shoot a two-point shot for like ten games, randomly a knockdown shooter—but he observably grows each game. Love his accent, seems like he’s got a good head on his shoulders, needs to put down the Cyrillic Book of Mormon and pick up a glass of milk and some Luka tape. I feel a level of paternal care toward this young man.

The kids who don’t play:

3. Danny Wolf - I don’t want the Nets to ever play Danny Wolf. Nothing personal—I don’t see how he works at his athleticism level in the league, but that’s a head concern, not a heart one—but I think Danny Wolf is best realized as basically the Jokic of the G League. Five, ten, fifteen years from now we’ll still be posting that video of him cutting up a bunch of suburban eleven year-olds in those insane pink jerseys as a cautionary tale for how elite NBA talent is. He seems like a nice young man and I’d buy him a drink if I met him, but I suspect our conversation would feel pretty forced on both ends.

4. Nolan Traore - Guys who actually know ball instead of firing off esoteric vibes-based analyses tell me that he’s cooked…he probably is. But I like that his only observable asset is his speed—it’s sort of a good bit, like oh, like at this fast short guy who can’t do anything else. Very middle-school lunch coded. I’ve got a soft spot for the French in general. Didn’t make any sense on draft night, makes even less sense now, but let’s see if he can learn how to make a layup before we cast too many aspersions.

The Israeli D’Angelo Russell:

5. Ben Saraf - It’s so awesome that this kid started at point guard on opening night. Jordi Fernandez, who’s objectively a sort of crazy guy, like Joe Mazzulla if he never learned about aura-farming, decided that the best path to fielding a competitive team included starting a kid whose remarkably accurate draft-night comp was “the Israeli D’Angelo Russell.” Saraf can’t do anything—I’ve watched him, this isn’t just some politicized close-mindedness, I’m a free thinker here—because he can’t shoot. Decent driver, decent passer, less-than-decent-athlete, it all comes apart because he doesn’t have a shot to undergird everything else. So what we end up with is just the Israeli D’Angelo Russell. Hope I never watch him play as a Net again—or that he somehow proves me wrong and turns out good, because that would be really funny.

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• Late November: the best time of the year. A chill creeps through the year, nighttime introduces itself increasingly earlier, people start making lists. Just saw my first gift guide of the season. The Giants, Saints, Nets, and Pelicans have combined for eight wins and thirty nine losses. What’s better than this?

• Went back on Nothing But Respect to talk about body counts, things of that nature. Characteristically fun time. I like that their show keeps getting better, both in terms of their conversations and the profile of their guests, but they somehow remain contractually obligated to let me come on the mic every so often to throw out some asinine analogies and talk about all the Israeli guys on my favorite basketball team.

• For those who missed it, made my debut in The Ringer writing about why Conner O’Malley and Tim Robinson work. Taking a six month hiatus from masculinity discourse, but I’m grateful that the good folks over there let me put this on their website:

  

  If you enjoyed the piece, you should let Bill Simmons know. DM him, tag him, if you live in Los Angeles stop him on the street; let him know the people want more Ock. If you’re joining us from The Ringer, welcome to the club.

• Congratulations to Zohran Mamdani—ran into him while running through Brooklyn a few months ago, but sort of soyfaced in the picture so I couldn’t share it on the internet. There’s at least one confirmed Never Hungover reader on his team—a sign of things to come?

• Proof positive that One Battle After Another is a masterpiece: everyone’s being annoying and sharing every single scene from it on Twitter right now, but I’m still not sick of it.

• Danny Brown digicore album isn’t bad, 2slimey hurt my ears in a good way…favorite new listen is probably Loidis’ bonkers set at Waking Life. Portugal…insanely swag. My friends and I got robbed there once, but it was our fault and the thieves were quite honest in their own right.

• Fucked with Bugonia…sorry…

• Does anybody own a SMALL BUSINESS? Have had a recent manic obsession with opening a book store…don’t be a stranger.

Today’s blog is a grab-bag. Below, some thoughts on Charlie Kirk faceswaps as the meme du jour, the humiliating Twitter ‘certified bangers’ thing, the excellent new Armand Hammer record, Helen DeWitt’s Your Name Here, and some links on AI psychosis.

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Why is Charlie Kirk’s face everywhere now?

For the last two weeks, my algorithmic preferences on both Twitter and Instagram have favored a legitimate barrage of images, videos, and gifs of Charlie Kirk’s face transposed onto memes with currency among people younger than me (turning thirty in a week, after which point I’m not allowed to write, think about, or see this stuff). On Instagram, flyers promoting the “Kirk Twerk” in Salt Lake City contend with body dysmorphia-bait and gray cats on my scroll; Twitter’s For You page is, at this point, an even split between people talking about their favorite football teams like Sephiroth, people referencing their pinned tweets or bios, and Charlie Kirk as IShowSpeed, Destroy Lonely, a bullet-ridden Drake, fakemink, Michael Jordan, whiteface Young Thug, Anthony Mackie, and what appears to be a porn actress. I get how an algorithm as boorishly underdeveloped as Musk’s works: you linker for a moment or make the mistake of clicking through a post, and before long your timeline will be nothing but variations on that very post. It’s my fault, in other words. And yet still, the scale at which Kirk’s likeness has been rendered as both meme-replacement and meme in its own right is legitimately staggering.

No use litigating the finer points here—the conversations in the days after Kirk’s assassination were neither prescient nor thoughtful, and I’m not interested in relitigating or revisiting any of them. In the wake of Kirk’s shooting, Trump and his cronies leapt at the pretext for a left-wing crackdown that, as of yet, seems to have failed to materialize; psychotic right wing LARPers on Twitter promised a civil war that thus far seems to consist of trying to get people fired from their jobs. It feels noteworthy, the most meaningful sociopolitical effect of the biggest domestic political assassination of my lifetime at the two-month mark is that teenagers are derisively using Kirk’s face on memes everywhere.

The why here is pretty easy—these edits pop on socials, the sharers likely hold either politics or identities diametrically opposed to Kirk’s reactionary conservatism, they’re transgressive, and a lot of people find them very funny. People will hand-wring; not my job. The part that’s actually interesting, for my money, is the how. Kirk’s death coinciding with the rise of techno-slop as the dominant cultural form—a lot of these edits feel directly in keeping with the OpenAI Sora bullshit similarly clogging up my phone—set the groundwork for this total degradation campaign. It’s the sort of ridiculous (value-neutral) and shocking (id.) meme campaign that literally would not have been possible, like, six months ago. For all the moral panic around AI—it makes us dumber, heats the planet, corrodes public trust, makes bad people rich, might learn how to launch nukes, you know the deal—there’s almost always a baked-in assumption that AI is something we, the masses, interact with, and that its people-side effects will hinge in large part on we, the masses, maintaining some level of AI-literacy. The Kirk memes are, in this context, markedly different: not deepfakes meant to convince you that, like, Barron Trump has a beautiful singing voice or Zohran is a bad trick-or-treater, but self-evidently fake clips that retain comedic value because they are fake. Their flagrant artificiality, in other words, is the point, or at least point 1b. It genuinely feels like the introduction of a new memetic paradigm, one in which artificiality is both a functional tool for producing at scale and itself the main thrust of the joke.

AI/Twitter Lagniappe

Don’t want to linger too much on AI or Twitter—I love the way that grass bends between my fingers and the soft light of a setting sun—but would be remiss if I didn’t flag two more side attractions.

Over the last week or so, the brilliant minds at Elon Musk’s X dot com (no house rules at Never Hungover, this stuff isn’t important enough to merit them) launched the “Certified Bangers” account, both a part of the organized effort to add as many badges as possible to accounts on the site and a mark of Musk’s total victory in his quest to transform his everything app into Reddit. I can’t think about this stuff for more than two seconds before my shoulders start to fold over my chest in visceral embarrassment, so the less said the better. Quickly, then: the “Bangers” (Jesus Christ…) function seeks to “recognize the very best posts that move the timeline, ranked by authentic interactions.” That someone at Twitter thought this was a good idea is perhaps the most humiliating thing I’ve ever considered in my life, and I once shat my pants in the outfield of a little league game. The only interesting component of this disaster is that it is an unwittingly lucid articulation of what has rendered the site unusable since Musk took over in earnest. Each of the five inaugural “Bangers” is an overt engagement-farming post from accounts that make money on the basis of their impressions. At the end of the summer, I wrote about how the reorientation of Twitter toward quote-tweet slop and image dissemination had radically transformed and broken the site; this soy gambit indicates that this destruction is by design.

To heal your brain, consider two excellent recent pieces on AI from and Tom Krell of How To Dress Well fame (his new blog, , is a treat). Both pieces treat the techlash—and specifically AI backlash—in their own rights. Max and Tom have different sensibilities, prose styles, and ways of thinking through these things, but the two pieces are among my favorite pieces of writing about AI yet—skeptical without being reflexive, goal-oriented without being prescriptive, thoughtful. Both, ultimately, linger on the notion of attention as perhaps the vital form of modern currency. If ten years ago our collective panic was one of data, there’s reason to suspect that the next will form around attention scarcity. Developing, sustaining, and wisely delegating one’s attention may become the most invaluable practice for those not keen on having their entire sense of self effaced by modern technological culture. Here I am talking about “Bangers” and Charlie Kirk faceswaps—you guys go on without me.

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Platform Temperance

Greetings from Read Max HQ! This week, a collection of thoughts about a new trend in tech criticism masquerading as a lumpy and overstuffed essay…

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6 months ago · 193 likes · 33 comments · Max Read

false world | how to dress well

i guess i'll weigh in on ai psychosis

Today I’m launching a new recurring entry on false world…

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6 months ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · false world

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“You’re doing okay, and you’re going to do better”

Struck out placing a review of the outstanding Armand Hammer & Alchemist record—feels like I listened to it in 4D, in a way—but would be remiss if I didn’t highlight one of my favorite albums of the year. What better way than to consider it alongside Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s Your Name Here, the best book of the year (define year, of course, how you’d like)? The cheap comparisons only take you so far—both are works of art created by duos tethered by two of the most singular writers working in billy woods and Helen DeWitt, but where Elucid flickers around Armand Hammer records with his galactic poet sensibilities, Ilya Gridneff is sort of just an insane guy.

Let’s rewind: Mercy, Armand Hammer’s second joint effort with the elder statesman Alchemist, is equal parts propulsive and digressive, in-your-face and introspective, bleak and hilarious. I find it difficult to write about woods and Elucid because they are manifestly better writers than I. By this point, their strengths are old hat. woods jump-cuts between registers without a misplaced word, contraposing fully-sketched vignettes against parables and truisms so effectively that one chastises theirself for ever having uttered the words “the personal is political,” while Elucid dutifully contorts his dreamy visions and revolutionary poetics around his counterpart’s wry, removed barbs. As far as pairings go, peanut butter and jelly are less instructive than bones and flesh. On “Laraaji,” the album opener, Elucid conjures “tender-headed Black boys sleeping under the Ginkgo tree, dreaming of becoming ungovernable; a few traded verses later, woods wakes his tree-sleeper up defeated and alone, taking time to pay homage to the late legend Ka before comparing the miserable drudgery of daily existence to what Cleveland Browns players must feel like lining up to take snaps in December.

By now, this highwire act is what you come to expect from an Armand Hammer record. Mercy is most delightful when it showcases woods and Elucid following experimental threads and loose ideas to their logical conclusions. On “Scandinavia,” woods trades his typically regimented delivery for a drawl that bleeds his speech from one bar to the next. “Might sell you a bridge,” he jokes in this opening verse, “but it’s no regrets when you examine the metalwork.” The two trade a handful of verses, alternating about every thirty seconds, before woods homes in on his next idea, punctuating each bar with a stammered “like” (including, for what it’s worth, my favorite line of the record: “I’m nice like just ask my ex-wife’s parents, like…).

Your Name Here, for its part, is a novel written by the genius Helen DeWitt and Australian journalist Ilya Gridneff. A version of the book, which was published last month by Dalkey Archive, had been previously listed for sale on DeWitt’s website during the roughly 20 years that Your Name Here spent awaiting printing. It’s a novel as much about the difficulty of its own publication as it is about anything; though, in fairness, it is also a novel about, non-exhaustively, suicidal ideation, sex work, tabloid journalism, the war on terror, language acquisition, video games, transatlantic travel, a book-within-the-book about a society governed by lottery odds, the actual lottery, telephones, and Tom Cruise. In large part, it resists summary; Your Name Here is worthwhile as much for the form of its substance as it is for the fact of its substance. To call it a disintegrating novel would be to imply, unfairly, that it ever really starts. It succeeds more as a novel of permutations: false starts, abandoned riffs, second-person-narrators, hare-brained ideas about doing The Lord of the Rings for Arabic.

Insofar as much of the time that I’ve spent with Mercy has also been time that I’ve spent with Your Name Here, it’s been hard for me to consider them in isolation. The two works speak to me simultaneously, even if, as would tickle DeWitt, they do not speak in the exact same language. They represent, in their respective rights, the neuroses borne from experiencing mundanity and isolation in a world structured by horror; they poke around the corners of genocide, the flagging American empire’s GWOT, and the increasing technological mediation of our lives; their characters are lost innocents, cunning realpolitikers, merciless operators, and manic masterminds. Though their most overt stylistic traits resemble one another—like woods and Elucid, DeWitt and Gridneff alternate entries of their radically different prose—the function of their structural decisions is perhaps most telling. Armand Hammer work so well because woods and Elucid compliment, discipline, and challenge one another; Your Name Here works not because Gridneff’s proto-schizzed-out voice is a match for DeWitt’s, but because it is the perfect voice to demonstrate how susceptible a temporarily incapacitated artist is to mistaking the banal for the beautiful.

Buy Your Name Here here

Buy Mercy here

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Did Terry Rozier throw games because the (still alive?) Italian mob had his loved ones held at gunpoint?

Short answer: no.

Mid-length answer: it’s important, in talking about this emerging scandal, to treat the two indictments in turn. As a bit of housekeeping, it bears noting that everything to be discussed below is an allegation being made by federal prosecutors—afford them as much weight as you believe they’re worth—but repeatedly using the word “allegedly” unfortunately carries slimy connotations. And so: the dual indictments detail two separate and distinct gambling schemes that implicate the NBA-as-league in separate and distinct ways. The more eye-popping one, both in terms of narrative complexity and sheer money purportedly involved, sounds like what the Safdie Brothers would come up with if you tasked them with settling their creative differences and penning a script that imagined Jeffery Epstein as an Italian dude rather than any old pervert. In short: a bunch of NY mob families organized a series of rigged, high-stakes poker games that in part employed big names like former NBA star and current(?) NBA coach Chauncey Billups as both draws to the table and willing participants in the scam. You come to gamble and ask Chauncey Billups what it was like playing with Melo, you leave with your wallet empty, and eventually you get enough good sense to call the feds. This indictment only involves the NBA insofar as Billups is an NBA legend and coach—otherwise, its bearing upon the operations of the league is not dissimilar to learning that, say, Nikola Jokic has been redirecting ketamine ostensibly labeled for his horses to fuel whatever can be said to constitute Denver’s nightlife.

The second indictment, which all-but-names Billups but does not in face charge him with criminal wrongdoing, details what could largely be understood as a scheme of insider trading on NBA betting with the implication of some point-shaving looming in the shadows. Here, the feds allege that Scary Terry and a number of hanger-ons traded in then-private information—a team tanking here, a player genuinely unavailable here, a player purporting to be unavailable there—to establish an edge on betting markets and make a quick penny (hundreds of thousands of dollars, as opposed to the rigged poker’s $7 million). A funny detail in the indictment is that this info was not always good. For instance, the dudes got a tip ahead of the January 15, 2024 Lakers-Thunder game that LeBron was going to be ruled out due to injury, but then he played, scored 25, beat the Thunder, and lost everyone some money. The gut read here is that we’re not dealing with allegations of full-blown rigging (these were locks in the colloquial sense rather than the literal), but rather of backrooms horse-trading that disadvantaged the sportsbooks offering imperfect lines rather than the league itself. Of course, there are exceptions to this read—which, below—but one particularly cute detail from the indictment is that one of Rozier’s friends consistently bet Rozier’s over point total, which as far as I’m concerned is a wholesome if financially risky way to tell your friend you love him. If one of my friends was in the NBA, I’m sure I’d bet his over all the time—above board in my book.

Point being, these two indictments have next to nothing to do with one another. Though one of the allegations in the sports-gambling indictments is that Chauncey Billups shared inside info on the Blazers tanking a game (again, more below), Billups is crucially not charged as of now in the NBA conspiracy. Seeing as we can safely assume Billups has not promised testimony in exchange for immunity (the dude just got arrested on a separate charge), the best bet as to why Billups has not been charged in the NBA scheme is that the feds could not prove up knowing involvement in any sort of conspiracy. That being said, there’s a reason that everyone is discussing the two indictments as if they constitute one headline. It does not feel particularly bold to suggest that the FBI made their arrests on these two separate and distinct schemes on the same day to link a potentially mundane scheme with a more eye-popping one. Patel and the feds have their NBA scandal, and it would be unwise to discount their deep cynicism. It doesn’t seem accidental that arms of the US government intentionally made a move to humiliate and tar the majority-Black, ostensibly woke professional sports league, is the main point here.

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Did Sean Marks wager his salary on the Nets under? Or: is the NBA cooked?

Just because the Rozier scheme is not as scandalous as the FBI’s coordinated humiliation ritual was meant to make it appear does not mean that it’s not, in its own right, deeply scandalous. Among the allegations of insider information trading are some thornier implications, including one incident in which Rozier purportedly pulled himself from a game early in order to lock in his points under and, again, make his friends a quick buck. If true, this would not be the first time in recent memory that such a scheme took place; as the indictment notes, Johntay Porter got caught doing something similar last year (as an aside, the Porter brothers might properly be understood as the Ball family’s Wario and Waluigi). From where I stand, it’s one thing if gamblers learn early that a player will be sitting, as the only loser is an unsuspecting sportsbook; it’s another thing entirely if players are actively choosing not to compete so as to fulfill some backroom gambling scheme. What I’d say, from relatively unprivileged vantage point, is that these are the sorts of issues that legalized gambling made possible, and that in the short term this sort of scheme coming to light is going to turn basically every NBA fan schizophrenic. As Michael Porter Jr. detailed on, sigh, a podcast appearance this summer, legalized sports gambling created a remarkably easy (albeit, obviously, illegal) loophole for players, specifically those on the league’s periphery, to make their friends some quick money. Legalized sportsbetting has brought with it an overwhelming proliferation of the sorts of bets offered: your college bookie didn’t own a gun, but he would have found one if you tried to bet $10k, or even $10, on a Johntay Porter points prop. When every player is, in essence, a live market, it’s extremely easy for them to occasionally rig said market. This sort of thing is probably not happening often—again, these guys seem to have gotten caught—but I’d venture to guess that more than just Rozier, Porter, and Malik Beasley have at some point fucked with their on-court performance in the name of off-court payouts.

The elephant here is that legalized gambling has done more than just grease the wheels for this sort of thing happening. The NBA, outside of the Clippers and Warriors, is comprised of young men, a demographic that has been bombarded with gambling advertisements as comprehensively as it has with pornography, and it would make intuitive sense that more than a few of these young men have heard some intrusive thoughts accordingly. From where I stand, it’s no big deal as an NBA fan if Danny Wolf’s Michigan boys find out that Cam Thomas is hurt before DraftKings does (again, it’s a crime, but not all crimes are immoral), but it’s another thing entirely if someone’s chucking shots off the backboard to win their buddy a semester of tuition money.

There’s a sort of ouroboros here: prop gambling has turned NBA viewers insane and antisocial, which insanity and antisocial behavior will now be amplified by a real life prop betting scandal. This season, every player miscue and baffling coaching decision will be read, at some level, as a cynical ploy to make someone some money. It’s a bad thing, and will to an unknowable degree shake peoples’ confidence in the NBA as an institution and on-court product, which is a shame for someone who loves watching the NBA. The most interesting thing here though is that a lot of what’s alleged in the indictment speaks to problems of non-competitiveness already endemic to the NBA. In scrolling through the Rozier indictment, you may notice that a great deal of the supposed illegal activity took place in what is colloquially known as Mickey Mouse March and Anything Goes April. This squares with any sentient fan’s understanding of the NBA: March, insofar as it hosts late-season NBA action, is when the wheels come off. Bad teams throw in the towel in favor of securing a draft pick (because, of course, that’s how leagues go. The worst teams get the best picks so that they can extricate themselves from a cycle of misery and keep fans engaged. Surely, no rational league would allow the best teams to, year after year, secure the best talent on the most affordable contracts, right? Such a system would be absurd!), frustrated players choose to sacrifice their bodies less for lost causes, and contending teams rest players so as to keep their legs fresh for the grueling playoff run to come. For everybody except Ball Don’t Stop and the few teams still jostling for playoff seeding position, March is a joke.

This—the problem of sustaining competitiveness across a league that either disincentivizes or renders impossible genuine competition for a good deal of its teams—is something with which the NBA has long-grappled, and which has next to nothing to do with gambling. It’s in this light through which we can parse the connective tissue between the two indictments: the allegation that Chauncey Billups advised somebody that the Portland Trail Blazers would be sitting their best players ahead of a March 24, 2023 game against the Chicago Bulls. Buddy, the Blazers were 32-40, noncompetitive team that had just accidentally interrupted a six-game losing streak with a win against the Utah Jazz; I could have told you they would sit their best players. Winning would accomplish nothing; losing got them one percentage point closer to Victor Wembanyama.

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The consenus? F*** you and the consensus @ZachLowe_NBA - Cam Thomas

And he has an outstanding feel for the game: think of an Israeli version of D’Angelo Russell - Jonathan Givony

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi chi’intrate - Dante Alighieri

A funny thing about time: no matter what you do, it keeps churning. You cannot forestall the inevitable. Tomorrow morning, the Brooklyn Nets begin their 2025 season against the Phoenix Suns as part of the NBA’s preseason China Games. The NBA’s decision to send Phoenix and Brooklyn, two hapless teams forever entwined by Kevin Durant Twitter crashouts and lamentably hands-on owners, feels like a further escalation in the United States’ trade war against China.

This year’s Nets, like last year’s, will not be a competitive basketball team. For Nets fans, on-court mediocrity is nothing new—moreover, this year’s misfortune will, ostensibly redound to the team’s long-term benefit. For the second time in as many years, Brooklyn controls the rights to its own draft pick, meaning Nets fans can once again daydream about the Boozer nepo baby or the Mormon kid from Massachusetts or the other one at Kansas. And yet, despite the relative novelty of Brooklyn being in a position to be rewarded for their on-court failures after their decade in the league’s cuck chair, it feels harder than ever to be optimistic about the future of the Nets.

Last year, after the Nets paid an extortionate fee to the Houston Rockets to regain control of their draft picks, the organization appeared to do everything in its power to squander the limited opportunity they had to jostle for a strong draft position. Between Dennis Schröder’s sinister All Star campaign, Nic Claxton heroball against the sinister Philadelphia 76ers, D’Angelo Russell doing the indie sleaze revival schtick for the 2019 season, and Cam Johnson tryhardism, last season’s abortive tank job was dead before it even began. Combine that with the NBA deep state’s coup at the draft lottery—I know it was a long time ago, but still, are you fucking kidding me?—and before you know it the Brooklyn Nets were picking eighth, just two spots ahead of the Suns pick that they’d just offloaded at a BOGO clip. The few Nets fans that remain would be wise to temper their expectations regarding the likelihood of this upcoming season delivering a top pick in the draft; Jordi Fernandez runs this McDonald’s like the Navy.

Worse yet, of course, was what the Brooklyn brass made of their lemons. I watched the first hour of Draft Night on a bar television on the far side of a Tex-Mex restaurant; when I saw the tall Russian kid in the oversized suit stand up at the eighth pick, my face fell into a plate of tortilla chips. By the time I’d gotten back to the comfort of my couch, I had but begun to explain the notion of “Chinese Jokic” to my girlfriend before my favorite team drafted another flawed guard. She wisely saw herself to bed once the Nets drafted the admittedly springy defensive talent Drake Powell, narrowly avoiding my spasmodic, convulsive rage when Brooklyn followed “the Israeli D’Angelo Russell” with the somehow clumsier Danny Wolf and his sobbing brother.

In sum, the Nets spent their record-high five first round draft selections on a group of young men—Egor Dëmin, Nolan Traore, Drake Powell, Ben Saraf, and Danny Wolf—of whom four ostensibly share the same skillset and at most one will obviously earn a second NBA contract. In attempting to outsmart everyone by compiling a team of five connective players (or, if you prefer, to build the entire plane out of the black box), the Nets front office re-established itself as the laughingstock of the league. Those who had spent the year developing big boards and steeping themselves in the perverted world of NBA scouting all simultaneously became the Joker; were the Nets fanbase even slightly bigger, it would have qualified as a mass psychotic event. In short, last year shook any sane Nets fan’s faith both in the team’s ability to execute their long-term vision and in the solidity of said vision itself.

Those who choose to be sports fans have decided to invest some degree of their happiness and fulfillment into the successes and failures of extremely wealthy people who do not know that they exist. Short of getting really loud on a third down, there is basically nothing that a fan can do to change the outcome of the event that they care so deeply about. As such, fandom is an exercise in secular faith: your choice, such as you have one, is to believe and care. It’s hard for me to keep my fan’s goggles off when evaluating the Brooklyn Nets. The rationalist in me understands intuitively how and why the Nets draft was a disaster; the romantic in me sees Traore’s burst or Dëmin’s crafty passing and entertains the possibility that he’s wrong. What’s done is done, the thinking goes. If you’re a fan, why not root for the guys to work out?

The question, ahead of this season, is more like why on earth you would be a Brooklyn Nets fan. Over the years, the Brooklyn Nets have through mismanagement, misfortune, and James Harden’s brief codeine addiction turned a singular opportunity into one of the direst situations in the league. It’s enough to break a fan’s spirit, and I would not begrudge anyone who felt their connection to the team permanently severed. What’s more challenging, on both a moral and pride-based level, is everything else. It’s Joe Tsai accelerating the implosion of the Big Three due to his disdain for Kyrie Irving only to roster as mentor for the Nets’ next generation Michael Porter Jr., a live-streaming cretin whose misogynistic “just asking questions” schtick makes Theo Von look like Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s the Nets—a team consciously and transparently concerned with expanding their global reach to compensate for a lack of domestic interest—using two straight picks on Israeli or Israeli-American players (who, to add insult to injury, fucking suck) in a not-so-thinly-veiled effort to become Israel’s team during their sustained genocide upon the people of Gaza, then doubling down by playing a preseason exhibition game against Israeli club Hapoel Jerusalem. It’s unwise to look to professional sports organizations as paragons of morality; like any corporate entity, they are concerned with profit. I root for the New York Yankees, who are probably going to add a Charlie Kirk statute to monument park at the rate things are going. And yet is hard to escape the feeling that it is immoral, in some meaningful way, to continue rooting for the Brooklyn Nets. One is less inclined to separate the art from the artist, so to speak, when the art is awful too. This season, we hardly even get Ian Eagle to sweeten the pot.

If someone is unable to look past these things, I do not begrudge them. It’s not clear that they can or should be looked past. As it stands, the prospect of an upcoming Nets season inspires within me a great anhedonia. And yet, whether due to ingrained muscle memory, a hare-brained quest to make meaning of the vulgar, or the latent fan’s hope that re-emerges whenever I least expect it, I will almost certainly continue to watch the Nets this year. At best, the team will show promise and glimmers of future success. Jordi Fernandez gets a lot out of a little from guys, Dëmin, Traore, and Powell remain interesting to me at least so long as they retain elements of the unknown, and I will be rooting for high-first-round rookies for the first time in as long as I can remember. More likely yet is that watching the team will be extremely funny. It is extremely funny that contract year Cam Thomas and newly-liberated Michael Porter Jr. will share the floor with a bunch of players whose only discernible talent lies in passing the ball; it is extremely funny that the Nets are surrounding a rookie class of three foreigners, one kid who watches anime, and Danny Wolf with Dumbest Man Alive Michael Porter Jr. and Aging Hypebeast Nic Claxton. It is, when you take a step back and a deep breath, really funny that Givony called Ben Saraf the Israeli D’Angelo Russell. My money is on the deserved latter, even if some deep crevice of my heart harbors hope for the former. For the time being, though, the question of whether or not the Nets deserve either a vibrant fanbase or meaningful success remains hypothetical.

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• Don’t watch regular season baseball anymore—unsustainable once you get an email job—but the mere thought of the Boston Red Sox dredges up a therapy-resistant level of animosity in my heart. May God watch over the New York Yankees.

• Geese album: good despite being recorded in Los Angeles. No small feat. Lost in the shuffle: great new Cate Le Bon record, Nick León back on NTS…can’t bring myself to listen to the Young Thug whiteface album.

• The Louisiana State University Tigers…what’s left to say? Disaster. Meanwhile, I will be attending Giants-Saints this weekend in the Rob Lowe NFL hat.

Now, a blog (conditioned by the caveat that said blog concerns details about the plot of One Battle After Another):

Thanked Sensei Again Award: Considering One Battle After Another

My favorite sequence in One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest Pynchon-indebted triumph, comes about halfway through the movie. Bob, née Ghetto Pat, the ex-revolutionary “drug and alcohol lover” directorial stand-in, rages on his still-charging cell phone against a tight-lipped new-gen radical. His anguish, played hilariously by Leonardo DiCaprio at the height of his powers, steams from his inability to remember a sequence of code words that will get him to the safe-house toward which his daughter, Willa, is speeding with a group of French 75 militants. As Bob sputters and screams, the effortlessly cool Sensei Sergio (played, in the sort of turn I will never forget, by Benicio Del Toro) manages to find him a gun, talk him down, usher a group of undocumented families away from an impending ICE-style raid, and crack a Modelo. Willa, meanwhile, is being whisked to ostensible safety after placing her trust in a complete stranger who happened to know a series of code words the importance of which were impressed upon her by her father. Sensei models his radicalism with concrete acts of service; Willa places her utmost trust in the teachings of her ex-rad father; Bob sits on the couch and screams until he’s finally asked a question about pussy.

Is Bob a laughingstock wash-out? A cautionary tale about the pitfalls of radical action? A manifestation of the latent conservatism one typically associates with aging? Or is he, like countless would-be radicals before and after him, just a guy who followed his dick until he was in a bit over his head?

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A lot of hay has been made about the politics of One Battle After Another, specifically as to whether it’s a sufficiently “radical” blockbuster. This conversation was tired before it even began—and should have been put to bed by ’s sharp rejection of the premise in her review of the film. Of course, the $175 million budget film distributed by Warner Brothers through a campaign involving an official Fortnite crossover was never going to be Battleship Potemkin; docking it accordingly feels more like a failure of imagination than a piece of savvy media criticism. And yet One Battle After Another feels both like a miracle and a masterpiece precisely for the way that it engages with the political rather than limply smuggling it in through the abstract and the allegorical.

At risk of stating the obvious, One Battle After Another is borderline inconceivable. It’s insane that Paul Thomas Anderson directed a big-budget comedy-action movie; it’s insane that said blockbuster is in any meaningful way indebted to a Thomas Pynchon novel; it’s insane that said movie’s plot revolves around a betrayal made by an obvious Brace Belden analogue; it’s insane that the Best Picture frontrunner depicts ICE raids and extrajudicial killings as the bored trappings of a horny and resentful Nazi cabal; it’s insane that, like, my dad is at the movies watching this right now. And so, while no, of course One Battle After Another is neither politically radical nor “revolutionary,” it is something far more compelling: a propulsive, expertly-crafted thriller about the pain and joy of loving people in a time where evil has conclusively won the day.

Enough people have written about the plot of One Battle After Another (and conventionally reviewed it) well enough that I won’t bother with my own summary. Go ahead and read the great reviews from Sam (linked above), Paul Thompson in Pitchfork (still makes me giggle), Adam Nayman for The Ringer, and PTAMuse over here on his blog; they do all that exceptionally well. Instead, I’ll just go mid-to-long on a few particular areas of interest in the best movie of the year.

One Bamba After Another

It was hip for a while to tweet about how PTA, along with his cohort of exclusively male “masters of the craft,” has never filmed a picture with iPhones in it. This sort of stuff is perfect for Twitter—Lindyman gets to pontificate, pablum merchants spew about the aesthetic degradation of our times, everyone eats good. Of course, One Battle After Another embraces modern technology to the point where iPhones advance major plot details (including, at the film’s end, a Certified Unc Moment during which Leo’s Bob can’t really take a thirst-trap selfie). Old news.

More striking to me is the fact that this is the first film I’m aware of to count among its needle drops both Sheck Wes’s “Mo Bamba” and that “Shut Up And Dance With Me” song (wedding music). It’s silly, it’s vaguely “of the times,” it made me bolt up in theaters, all that. Walk with me, briefly, for a crazy dumb guy theory. “Mo Bamba” and “Shut Up And Dance” comprise half of the film’s proper soundtrack inclusions, punctuating a truly outstanding score from Bad Guy Jonny Greenwood. The other two, Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” and Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” are equal parts rousing and thematically apt. They both operate quite literally (not unlike, say, the needle drops in The Summer I Turned Pretty): “Dirty Work” to evoke the bittersweet tedium of Bob high out of his mind at a parent-teacher conference, “American Girl” as a sort of uptempo send-off for the newly-minted radical Willa on her way to some direct action. We know, then, that PTA views as part of his craft the intentional selection of songs with both musical and lyrical pertinence to the scene at hand; we also, from the casting inclusions of Alana Haim, Dijon, Teyana Taylor, and Junglepussy, know that PTA is relatively tapped in. Is it impossible, then, that at some conscious level Anderson chose to soundtrack the school dance with “Mo Bamba” to set up the major plot point of hoes (inclusive) quite literally calling Willa’s phone? Stupider yet, is it so impossible to imagine Anderson intentionally scoring the moment in which Willa puts her trust in a complete stranger with the kitschy and stupid “Shut Up and Dance?” I’ve grown somewhat obsessed with this line of inquiry for the tremendous possibility it suggests: if Anderson truly is this much of a Dumb Guy, and is nevertheless capable of operating at such a transcendent level, then what’s stopping you or I from creating something beautiful too?

The Vineland Question

One Battle After Another is, unlike Inherent Vice, far from a direct adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. That’s a good thing—Vineland would only work as a television show, and I wouldn’t want to watch the prestige Vineland show, and Vineland is TV-and-movie-skeptical enough as is. People are having fun debating the extent to which One Battle After Another is or is not sufficiently Pynchonian (points docked, as aptly observed, for the overly literal protagonist names; points added for, in no particular order: the casting of a person named Chase Infiniti, the skateboarding guys, the banana pancakes nod, Sensei’s whole shit, the kid being named “Bluto,” the chicken store name…), but the more interesting question is where, exactly, the film diverges from the inspiring material.

Anderson, of course, borrowed the general parental dynamic and broad plot points from Pynchon—with, depending on who you ask, either cosmetic or meaningful alterations to the plot’s temporal setting and the cast’s racial composition. One Battle After Another’s most fascinating divergences, though, come in the form of the custodial love triangle. Unlike in Vineland, the film’s mother figure (played by a steely and brilliant Teyana Taylor) is entirely absent from the modern-day plot; rather than hunt her as the book’s authoritarian Brock Vond did, Sean Penn’s Sgt. Lockjaw seeks to destroy any trace of their coupling by killing her daughter. It’s the sort of decision that clarifies the plot’s stakes for Anderson—transforming a politically-charged custody battle into a life-or-death rescue mission—but also sacrifices something meaningful. Vineland is a novel, among other things, about the seduction of square, fascist life: hippies sell out, revolutionaries work for the man, and the government wins less by force than by all of its opponents simultaneously deciding to throw in the towel. Vond, The Man’s personification, makes his claim that he is Prarie/Willa’s father, but seeks to possess rather than destroy her. The effect, of course, is that Prarie finds herself, like her mother, seduced by the uniform and calling out for Vond.

In One Battle After Another, Willa is afforded far less familial agency. Of course, in the film’s penultimate sequence, she stirringly chooses Bob as her father, it’s not like she has much of a choice; the guy that the DNA test purports to be her dad is a roided Nazi who tries to kill her and talks like RFK. If I had to guess, I’d imagine this choice was made in the spirit of plot economy, though it’s not impossible that Anderson was more interested in telling the story of a young Black woman trying to navigate a nation that both claims and attempts to kill her. And, yes, the discursive fallout would have been a disaster if Anderson decided to portray the fascistic wing in this film as seductive in any way. Still, it’s a decision that foreclosed a potentially more interesting film: one in which Willa is given the power of choice rather just her admittedly useful knack for survival. One Battle After Another’s personal-as-political ending, in which Willa drags her pot-smoking dad into modernity as he places his faith in the future in her, is both sweet and earned. But haven’t you heard? Assuming that the kids will be alright is so 2019. There’s a palpable irony in Anderson updating the tenets of the 90s Pynchonian blackpill just to elude the most salient question that the book has for us today: why are all the kids suddenly fucking fascists?

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Your Being Manipulated

I’ll admit it: it saddens me to see people discard Eddington like Woody in Toy Story now that the ostensibly competent Political Movie is out. My friends, you can have it all. Eddington is a deeply flawed but ambitious film about politics; One Battle After Another is a marginally flawed pop art masterpiece informed by politics. They’re doing different things and work for different reasons—"Firework” wouldn’t have worked in one, “Mo Bamba” wouldn’t have worked in another, if you want to get down and dirty about it. Eddington would be gibberish if not for its ability to spam references about things that just happened, where One Battle After Another could, more or less, have been about anything. Plenty worse versions of the film are churned out every year—movies in which our protagonists find themselves in outer space, or fighting supervillains, or whatever the hell else. One Battle After Another is exceptional in no small part for its evoking, for instance, the brutal cruelty of ICE raids and abductions, but it does not depend on its timeliness to work. If it did, it would be just another mid blockbuster. The movies can be put in conversation, surely, but only up until a point. Neither, as far as I’m concerned, disproves or diminishes the other.

Sensei Apology Form

In my last blog, I complained briefly about the emergent phenomenon by which people feel extremely comfortable expressing strong, jilted opinions about the decisions made by major corporations. Chief among the list of behaviors I was whining about was the widespread disdain I observed for One Battle After Another’s marketing campaign. Allow me to offer a rebuttal.

In New Orleans, summer is its own authoritarian regime. You shower twice a day and thrice if it is a weekend; often, you feel so tired that you cannot lift your fingers to Google “Iron deficiency signs.” When you drink beer, you sweat faster than your body is able to even receive its toxins, suspending you in a state of dewy futility like a seagull coasting in place amidst a strong gust. There is nothing to do but go to the movie theater. This summer, every time one went to the movies, they were treated to the exact same trailer for One Battle After Another (I saw the second, more action-y trailer only once, at an AMC, before The Naked Gun). Accordingly, I know every word and beat to the One Battle After Another trailer. My girlfriend and I began using “Thank You, Sensei” as a shorthand for sincere gratitude before we even knew of the film’s release date. If anyone is qualified to have an opinion on the One Battle After Another trailer, I am.

My verdict: the tonally inconsistent, unremarkable trailer works perfectly to advertise its film, and you all need to be more grateful. For those who allowed themselves to appreciate, rather than despise, the One Battle After Another trailer, the entire film felt like fan service. When Sensei Sergio (the moral center of the film, that’s another blog, but put a pin in it) appeared on screen during the “Dirty Work” montage, my girlfriend and I tearily grasped one another’s arms and whispered “that’s Sensei.” When Bob and Sensei Sergio walked into the apartment building hall at the center of the film’s best scene, we bolted upright and louder-than-whispered: “that’s the ‘Thank You Sensei’ Hall!” Don’t get me started on the payphone.

Having been bludgeoned to death by the One Battle After Another trailer deepened my appreciation for actually seeing the movie in a way that I can hardly put into words. I’ve tried my best at it, and will stop shortly. Some parting ones: it’s a funny trailer for a hilarious movie, it piques your interest without revealing the plot, a lot of you need to take a load off, and I will sincerely miss seeing it each and every time I begin to feel that indescribable feeling we get as the lights begin to dim.

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• Too busy attending weddings in the northeast to blog recently…love, the first chills of fall, “Pink Pony Club” all in the air

• The New York Football Giants and New Orleans Saints are a combined 0-4. Everything in its right place, sure, but: what gives?

• Coachella lineup: who’s to say? Not me—not my place. I have, however, enjoyed combing through this year’s Big Ears lineup. A little anemic at the top, but it’s fun to see which acts people are going buck for and dig into discographies. A motto: it’s always good to learn.

• Other new(ish) music I’ve been rocking with tremendously: Snuggle’s Goodbyehouse (what is in the water in Copenhagen?), Corridos Ketamina’s EP (they need to fix that name), Floating Point’s opening and closing sets at Glastonbury (you know what to expect by now, just really good shit).

• Culture moved on pretty quickly from the Druski whiteface thing. Makes sense—there was an assassination (not touching that), the FBI’s using ChatGPT to write NPC-style confession texts, LSU has the best defense in the country—but my two cents: better as a feat in makeup design than as a skit qua skit. Will not enter the reaction gif pantheon. Has Druski entered his Oscar-bait era? I’ve got Benny Safdie -250, but not counting Josh out,

• Tired of hearing about One Battle After Another.

• Finished Changeover. Beautiful book-object, peak sportswriting, I think I prefer Sinner now, I rock with his meekness and complicated relationship to Italianness. Call him Griddy Nathan the way he hit that shit.

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Now, two quick blogs:

You should not listen to Young Thug’s jail calls.

Young Thug has had a rough few weeks…accusations of “snitching” due to newly-circulated footage of statements made to police during the investigation leading to his winding, farcical prosecution, leaked jail calls from his years incarcerated awaiting trial, and the sort of messy online PR campaign we’d come to expect from someone who once defended James Harden by claiming he “don’t have internet.” Thugger Daily, the fan account-turned vital journalistic resource during the trial, has been deputized as part of the YSL press push; it’s an unfortunate mess. Alphonse Pierre broke it down with characteristic insight and comprehension; nothing much to add there. My two cents: I’m happy that Jeffery Williams is no longer in jail, have given up on Young Thug the artist a long time ago, nothing that happens post-release could ever change my stance on the former and very little could on the latter.

A word is in order, however, on the grist of this depressing news cycle: namely, Young Thug’s leaked jail calls. That these calls have circulated at all speaks to the particularly odious gossip-driven environment that the “music press” has come to inhabit; so, too, do suspicions that some or all of the calls have been AI-generated speak to this depraved moment. The fact of the matter is that Young Thug’s jail calls are not newsworthy. One of the many indignities that incarcerated people face is the recording of their every word (with the limited exception of ostensibly private conversations with their attorneys, but you’d be right to harbor suspicions there as well); listening to someone’s recorded jail calls should be as stigmatized as, say, viewing their leaked nude photographs.

As I wrote back when Young Thug entered his mixed guilty and no-contest pleas, the criminal punishment system relies upon a series of interlocking coercive tools to get the outcomes its stewards desire. Chief among these tools is the practice of recording phone calls made from jail, a fundamental incursion upon one’s privacy that when taken in conjunction with egregious price-gouging amounts to a total blockade on communication with the outside world for people awaiting trial in jail. Aside from the unfathomable indignity of having your every word recorded (in this respect, as in many, incarcerated people are cast as guinea pigs for our surveilled futures), recorded jail calls have the practical effect of ratcheting up convictions by serving as constant evidence-accumulation tools. If an incarcerated person gives in to the fundamentally human instinct to, say, discuss the allegations keeping them behind bars with their loved ones, prosecutors can and will play decontextualized snippets of those conversations to juries to serve as de facto confessions. Incarcerated people strategizing with their outside support systems will have jail calls used to support often baseless allegations of witness tampering and evidence destruction. It is not uncommon for hours and hours of recorded jail calls to be turned over to defense attorneys on the literal eve of criminal trials, sending teams on needle-in-a-haystack mad dashes to identify what precisely prosecutors intend to use to try and sink their clients into a prison sentence.

I concede, of course, that there are imaginable situations in which a recorded jail call might be newsworthy. A frustrated man, having sat in jail for more than a year awaiting a political prosecution, gossiping about his famous colleagues is not one of them. The widespread circulation of Young Thug’s jail calls is but another unfortunate example of the phenomenon through which people on the internet act like police officers in order to enjoy the feeling of moral superiority over whomever they have determined it is acceptable to lord that specific day. It may feel like a petty grievance—Young Thug is famous! That’s what the money is for!—but this entire, mean-spirited cycle marks a further iteration of the normalization of an invasive, vengeful schadenfreude that continues to birth a crueler and more antisocial culture. You should always resist the urge to be a cop.

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When did everyone get so comfortable complaining about products?

I used to consider “airing grievances about corporate products on the internet” with a certain type of pitiable archetype: your sweaty conservative tweeting at Schnipper’s because they forgot the fries, your incensed normie friend tweeting at United from the runway, your aunt’s undiagnosed schizophrenic friend posting on Facebook about how the Ken fight in Barbie turned her child gay, if not worse. Recently, though, the meta has shifted such that seemingly everybody feels emboldened, if not compelled, to complain about corporate execution non-stop. On the sports side, I recently watched leagues of people with whom I ostensibly share sensibilities kvetch for a week straight at the notion that RedZone, the NFL live highlight reel meant to allow adults to microdose the brainrot subway-surfer shit their kids are mainlining one room over, would feature commercials. Elsewhere, the type of people who pay for blue checks so that they can one day earn money calling Russell Westbrook trash spent multiple weeks soyfacing nostalgically for the days before NBA 2K apparently imposed grade inflation on its player ratings. Worse yet, for my money, are the collective cries from “film twitter” (tough scenes) regarding the perceived inability of Warner Brothers to properly market One Battle After Another, which hysteria’s fever-pitch translated to one of the most regrettable grassroots meme campaigns in recent memory.

I could half-ass a sweeping conclusion here—we’re all becoming stan armies? consumption is so integral to our identity-construction that we’ve forgotten to be embarrassed about it? America has entered its proto-Wall-e chud century?—but tidy endings are for ChatGPT and early-season episodes of Entourage. Instead, a call to action: stop embarrassing yourselves acting like Marvel adults.

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Below, a collection of thoughts on what I’ve been thinking (not much), writing (even less), reading (eh), watching and listening (hell yeah):

Writing:

A few weeks ago, of No Bells fame launched a new project, , that I’m thrilled to be a part of. Good writing—good writing that you pay a cup of pre-tip coffee a month for—nothing better. My first piece there is a sort of reported story live from Power Slap in New Orleans. Sports media, American carnage, The Jungle but for the brainrot mines, Hoop Dreams with CTE…it’s a good piece, and I hope you enjoy if you haven’t yet read it. First half free, second walled.

Derange

Gluttons for Punishment

Shaking Makini “Big Mak” Manu’s hand, which runs 10.5 inches from thumb to pinky, makes me feel small in the way that a starry night sky does. To the touch, Manu’s right paw resembles a baseball glove filled with sand. I briefly calculate how much money it would take me to let Manu slap me in the face, abandoning the effort once my hypothetical sum surpasses my student loan debt. At Power Slap 14 in New Orleans, Duane “The Iron Giant” Crespo will do it for $5,000…

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8 months ago · 33 likes · 1 comment · Derange and ock sportello

Thinking:

I think Twitter is making me sick. I mean this literally—my eyes hurt, my humanity curdles, I feel unfocused and hateful. I spend a tremendous amount of my time at work scrolling Twitter, doing what the kids or the psychiatrists might call ‘dissociating’ from the nasty shit I see and hear in the courtroom, and in so doing I feel nasty in my own right. I’m not the first person to feel this way, and this is neither a Medium-style breakup letter (I’m addicted, brother, I’ll keep drinking that garbage) nor a thinkpiece (it’s a blog, there’s a difference, and also sorry, I’ve been…uninspired). And still it’s worth taking seriously the exact location of my newfound spiritual rot.

Twitter is the type of service that drives you insane on its best days—we shouldn’t be hooked up an eternally replenishing torrent of contextless, catastrophic information—but since Elon Musk’s takeover it has degenerated in too many ways to count. Like, the impression-chasing Sopranos screenshot guy is a British Nazi apparently. It’s bad, and the ways it’s gotten worse have been pretty comprehensively covered. The For You page is a mess, everyone’s racist, I don’t think any of the young women offering to introduce themselves to me are actually young women, you name it. These things bother me, because I’m a regular guy who wants people to be less racist and thinks bots are bad news, but it’s not clear that I can locate my intense malaise in them alone. What’s driving me insane is all the quote tweeting.

I can’t recall whether Twitter became a quote tweet factory before or after Musk’s takeover; I tried doing some research to that end and it appears nobody has covered it. But if this semantic shift did barely predate the “X” era, Musk’s vulgar Redditization of the website has accelerated it exponentially. Over the course of Twitter’s descent into a monetized industrial engagement farm, the primary mode of content has shifted from tweets themselves to quote tweets. On the timeline, every other post is a response to some cynical quote prompt, a blowhard editorializing above a sensationalized news hit, or another blowhard editorializing above the first guy’s response to the cynical quote prompt. The type of shit that used to happen in replies (or, better yet, in internal monologues) has been externalized into a sort of constant jostling for the last, final, best word. It’s a shift that seems trivial—typing this feels bad, like really bad, like why are you writing about this bad—but also one that has fundamentally rewired the brains of people who use that website. More than ever before, Twitter is a take factory: guys trying to make rent loft prompts into the ether for their X stimulus checks, the algorithm tees up quote-tweet answers in your feed, and before long you’re sharing a thought that’s been spat out countless times by people captured within the same feedback loop and, worse yet, feeling quite satisfied about it. Elon’s bot-infested Twitter has more or less devalued the thrill of banger-hunting—we’re playing in an inflated-stats era, basically—and shifted the meta such that the new dopamine hit is located in the feeling of smug satisfaction one gets by pronouncing the final word on a subject. The net effect, of course, is a timeline full of final words, myopic certainty, and a total lack of curiosity. It’s turning me misanthropic, stupid, and reactionary. And so, a call to arms: this fall, no more quote tweets. Reject the modality being pushed by the world’s first Soy Billionaire.

Reading:

Feels like we’re in an interesting moment right now where the main discursive trends are entirely resistant to being written about insightfully. Take Kyle Chayka’s semi-recent New Yorker essay on labubu, all that matcha shit…at his best, Chayka is a perceptive synthesizer of Internet-adjacent culture for an audience that, like James Harden, does not have Internet. This piece exemplifies how those tendencies can turn mushy fast. It’s too easy to list a series of co-occuring buzzwords, retrofit some unifying aesthetic principle atop them, and then half-heartedly gesture at the unknowable nihilism of Gen Z. We have Substack for that. Part of my trouble with the piece is that it’s full of pull-quote ready, sweeping assertions that don’t stand up to even light scrutiny (“We are the Labubus, grinning ecstatically amid the wreckage of our rapidly dismantling, recombinatory era. They are our unbeautiful avatars of overexposure.” I certainly don’t feel that way!). The deeper failing, I think, is the not-uncommon tendency to assume that our culture follows from memes, a perspective that haunts the bulk of Internet-y trend pieces. Perhaps transcending the trap of Just Listing Things requires taking seriously the possibility that real culture and material conditions set the terms of memetic conversation rather than the other way around. The best pieces, of course, are the ones able to diagnose and wrestle with the secret third thing shaping both the world around us and the one on our screens. But the older I get, the more exhausted I am by the copy-and-paste approach to writing about society’s most compelling concerns: what do Labubus mean? Is it manipulative for a man to listen to Clairo? What political valence might we attach to being into sandwiches?

To the extent that I’m going to keep reading about things legible only to people who spend too much time on their phones, I’d rather these pieces look more like Patrick Redford’s quick hit on Michael Porter Jr.’s distinctly Nelk-ian obsession with These Females. I’ll obviously be writing more about Michael Porter Jr.—I’ve been in a suspended state of disbelief about the future of the Brooklyn Nets that is perhaps better blamed than anything else for my complete inability to write this summer—but Patrick smartly applies his signature (Redfordian?) style to the sort of modern moron he so frequently diagnoses. Here, Patrick’s able to walk a tightrope, capable of both treating dumb shit like dumb shit while also mining for meaning the cultural apparatus that so frequently elevates dumb, harmful shit to its swampy surface. Culture is getting uglier, stupider, and distinctly more chauvinistic, and today’s best culture writers are the ones able to look that degeneration in the face without having to hedge their bets on the possibility of an aesthetic plan just outside of their view.

At the end of the day, though, your phone is best used as a means to see videos of cats. Tao Lin’s essay on his cats, which ran in the most recent Harper’s, is a delightful and deliberate meditation on the wonder of caring for and living alongside a pet. The piece works specifically because it does not have a point—anyone who’s lived with a cat knows they have souls. It’s just a well-written, expertly paced product of deep reflection that has enhanced my relationship with my own cat as profoundly as did the tweet I saw the other day where a cat who wanted lasagna burned its human with the Kubrick Stare.

Watching:

Pretty quiet summer at the movies, and I haven’t yet played with the Vineland characters in Fortnite. I did watch the monkey pop star movie on a plane recently and tear up a little bit: it’s hard to explain, but the monkey works, though I still couldn’t name a Robbie Williams song.

Between Weapons and Eddington, it’s been the summer of schizo-cinema. Neither Eddington nor Weapons are formally challenging movies—even Eddington’s third-act disintegration holds your hand a bit—but both seem preoccupied with rendering the phenomenon of mass delusion. I’m lukewarm on Weapons, which did as admirable a job in recent memory of trying to hold together the plot mechanics of a buzzy horror movie once the mystique of the central monster wore off, but which held itself back a bit by leaning on its one-character-at-a-time episodism. Once the wind-up ends and you more or less know what you’re getting, Weapons is most interesting as a primary document of right-wing psychosis: parents sicced on nervous teachers, hapless administrators blind to abuses transpiring underneath their noses, child sexual abuse, children with agency, period, basements. Weapons challenges the “prestige horror” vogue that renders the actual mechanics of a plot secondary to their allegorical purpose, and it’s stronger for it. The film could have been tighter, more propulsive, and a bit more psychotic, but if nothing else it gets credit in my book for portraying, rather than cheekily inverting, the stuff of reactionary suburban nightmares.

Anybody who’s seen Beau Is Afraid understands the extent to which Ari Aster is preoccupied with, well, Oedipal concerns. Eddington, then, is Aster’s attempt to represent the primal scene undergirding contemporary neurosis. At the risk of contradicting my distaste for trend pieces that simply name signifiers, I found Eddington’s tight first half delightful even if it amounted to little more than a barrage of “remember whens?” Filmmakers like to pretend that COVID never happened—hell, half of them are still too afraid to make movies will cell phones in them—which affords Aster a bit of a first-to-market advantage. It’s quite possible that I only have the appetite in my life for one film that depicts a tense masking standoff, but my guess is I’ll never find out.

A lot of hay has been made in an attempt to perfectly diagnose Aster’s ideological designs in putting together this film, a conversation I find tiresome and misguided. Art is meant to be interpreted, not solved. To that end, it feels like a testament to successful design that ideologues across the political spectrum can apply an interpretation to Eddington that results in the film confirming their priors. I’ve read accusations that Eddington is a display of both-sides-ism; I’d respond that it’s actually just indeterminate. Eddington works as a movie about 2020 because it effectively and lightheartedly stylizes a moment during which intense uncertainty, pressure, and isolation transformed even the most level-headed people into conspiratorial zealots (as a conspiratorial zealot in remission, I say this with love and understanding); I view it as a mark of success, then, that the film appears to have re-activated these instincts in the hearts and minds of its viewers. Eddington is not necessarily a psychotic film, but it is a film about a moment in time during which many acted psychotically that has the effect of making its viewers feel psychotic. It succeeds on these terms.

Listening:

Everyone’s a dad or in love now, it seems. My favorite dad record of the summer is Earl Sweatshirt’s Live Laugh Love. My favorite love record of the summer is Chuquimamani-Condori’s two-part wedding mix “ILY Travis (Chuqi Chinchay Is God & God Bless America)”

• The folks at Never Hungover would like to extend a warm welcome to those who joined the club in the wake of the swag crisis blog. Things are dire, Jalen Williams just scored 40 points in a Finals game, all we have is each other.

• Went back on with the fellas a few weeks ago to talk said swag crisis two or so weeks ago. If you enjoyed the blog, you will enjoy the conversation

  Nothing But Respect

  The Subprime Swag Crisis with Ock Sportello

  Ock Sportello returns to discuss his excellent blog about the NBA’s swag crisis. We talk to him about why he wrote the piece, why he thinks it resonated with the basketball blogging community, and why the streets yearn for Free Darko. We also try to make sense of the swag crisis, how it fits into broader culture, and how he’s responsible for Mina Kimes …

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  a year ago · 6 likes · 3 comments · harry, Patrick, and ock sportello

• I have a piece in the upcoming Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly. It’s about B.G., like the former Hot Boy B.G., and the peculiar album he released this year which, as a term of his federal probation, he had to clear with the federal government before releasing. Subscribe, hold it in your hands.

• If you’re in New York, I’m reading tonight with at Seventh Heaven at roughly 8pm. Come hang out, allow me to buy you a drink, I’m sure we can get the Finals game on a TV, I don’t know, the etiquette on these sorts of things escapes me, we don’t have stuff like this in New Orleans.

• Conversely, if you’d rather buy me a drink, you can always consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

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Now, a blog:

There’s a scene in Eephus, Carson Lund’s indie darling baseball movie, that I haven’t quite shaken since seeing it. A group of mostly old men, significantly smaller than the one with which we start the film, pull around and turn on their cars so that they might play their final game of rec baseball into the night. By the time this scene arrives, the movie has already begun to drag, which dragging is by design. It’s a movie about amateur baseball, which means it’s a movie about men who don’t quite know how to say goodbye to one another.

Men are lonely. Haven’t you heard? They have fewer lasting connections than ever. They are sublimating sexual frustration into violent, radical politics; they golf because toxic masculinity taught them that it’s gay to go for a walk; they will train for an ultramarathon before they go to therapy. They are listening to podcasts. At this juncture, the notion of the lonely American man threatens to subsume the actual possibility of male loneliness—can you really be alone with this much attention lavished upon you? The lonely man drives clicks, helps explain troubling sociopolitical developments, is good for a laugh. Is he real? I don’t know, man.

Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship is the 2025 film most explicitly concerned with the quandary of male loneliness; it is also the one with the least to say on the topic. Friendship is not a bad movie. I saw it in a full theater, and my audience-mates laughed from the moment Tim Robinson entered the frame. I saw it with a male friend, and afterward we asked each other things like “what did you think?” It was a nice experience, which is high praise from a person who considers I Think You Should Leave one of the most corrosive viruses plaguing the modern imagination.

Briefly—Tim Robinson plays a Tim Robinsonian suburban loser who works at a company concerned with making your phone more addictive; he, at the urging of his cancer-survivor wife (Kate Mara) accepts an invite from his cool neighbor (a delightful Paul Rudd); Robinson is immediately taken by his new friend’s job (weatherman), hobbies (anti-mayoral punk band), and social life (extant), but botches a group hang in, again, Robinsonian fashion, prompting an adult friend breakup. The notion of an unc breakup is, per DeYoung, the cornerstone around which the film was built. Point being DeYoung clearly identified in the image of a friend break-up a story worth telling; it feels only appropriate to evaluate the movie accordingly.

Friendship trips over its own feet not for its failure to say anything about male friendship at the universal level—though, of course, it does fail on this front—but for its inability to establish the stakes of its titular friendship even at the level of the specific. The viewer cannot empathize with Robinson’s solitude because he is fashioned not as a vulnerable loser but as an irredeemable narcissist. Friendship amplifies the shortcomings of Robinson’s comedic range, whose constant courting of the absurd feels risky the first time you see it and like a safety blanket the thirtieth time. Robinson’s ouvre ostensibly skewers the American middle-manager suburban loser, but his default character is so far removed from anybody’s lived experience that his satire becomes tongue-tied. Watch a pony repeat its one trick too many times and you’ll start to doubt its ability to say anything about equestrian nature.

I’m being harsh—Robinson is still hilarious in the movie, and it’s not like he wrote it, even though for all intents and purposes he might have. The problem is more that Rudd’s squad doesn’t feel worth hanging with, much less sticking up with a stolen gun. Friendship is more concerned with keeping the laughs coming—which, kudos—than with rendering anything like a felt, human relationship. In other words, it fails to establish either internal stakes or external relevance. Friendship’s loneliness is not fearsome, and its fellas are not worthy. It’s a classic bait and switch: come to laugh at yourself, stay to laugh at the freak.

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Writing about friendship requires a certain level of vulnerability because meaningful friendships depend on a certain level of vulnerability. Vulnerability necessitates the risk that you’re going to embarrass yourself. Take the recent New York Times Magazine piece, “Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?”, in which the author admits turning to Joe Rogan and David Goggins amidst bouts of unexpected middle-aged loneliness. Who am I to judge? I’ve formed illusory bonds with similarly faceless voices on my phone, and I wouldn’t let a clinical psychologist see my Instagram explore page. Everyone does what they can to make due. And yet…and yet, the impulse to universalize one’s experience is as tempting as it is misguided, not least when done in the name of pathologizing an entire gendered cohort. Men, like people, resist being explained away with the wave of a hand.

The most striking portrait of male companionship set to screen this year is also the bleakest. In Joel Potrykus’s Vulcanizadora, friendship is recast as a literal suicide pact, the horror and sorrow of which being it only half works. Potrykus plays a pathetic, sniveling man-child named Derek who might not have been out of place in last year’s Rap World who finds himself brimming at the opportunity to hike out to the beach with his sullen, distant buddy Marty (a brooding Joshua Burge). Derek attempts to please like his life depends on it; Marty, in the rare moments he decides to speak, reveals that it sort of does. Marty, you learn, has just been bailed out of jail on arson charges by his sad sack pal. Their hike is meant to end with each of them donning metal faceclamps, placing explosives in their mouths, and lighting one another’s fuse. Marty is convinced that neither of them have anything left to live for and depends upon Derek to finish the job, where Derek is willing to do anything so long as he can spend some time with his friend and hear a jail story or two. You get where this is going: as the resolute Marty grows more insistent upon effectuating their death pact, Derek wavers, negotiates, attempts to back out. They both have something to live for, you’re meant to understand, because they have each other. Derek begs for mercy, Marty begs for deliverance, then only Derek’s head explodes and the boys go 0-for-2.

In the wake of Derek’s death, the film abandons its taut balancing act between sincere laughs and unwatchable agony and settles into something like ambient misery. Marty sulks around his small Michigan hometown reduced to a basically infantile state. His initially imposing silence, which one might mistake for a removed sort of cool, melts into a pitiable vulnerability before sinking into something even lower than that. Vulcanizadora, like Eephus, start by playing stilted male friendship for laughs and devolve into films that by their end are downright difficult to watch. Both structural disintegrations appear to be by design, which means they’re worth paying attention to. Death looms over the shoulders of each film’s friendships; the most these guys seem to have in common is that they’ve got to die one day, and over the course of their respective films they come to realize that if they can find a justification to spend time together they might be able to at least meet death on their terms.

It’s a metaphor, man—or at least it is if you want it to be. These films resist the urge to make some big sweeping statement about the way men have been conditioned to interact with one another. Good—who the hell would want to watch something so didactic? It’s old hat by now: men can’t say “I love you” to one another without affixing a neutering “man,” “bro,” or “dude” to undercut their sincerity; guys watch sports because they can’t just talk about their feelings; dudes seem to need a justification to hang out. You’ve either lived it, or you’ve seen it on your phone, or it couldn’t interest you less. Vulcanizadora and Eephus stand out where Friendship shrinks because they are movies that adopt the logic of male friendship rather than ones preoccupied with commenting upon it. You don’t always get to pick your boys, and your common ground may be perplexingly narrow, but even as the night creeps on and the wheels start to fall off it always proves close to impossible to say goodbye.

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Tyrese Haliburton, the star point guard of the Indiana Pacers opposite Brunson in the Eastern Conference Finals, is both similarly and objectively a winner; he, too, is a fucking loser. His consistently improbable jump shot looks like one you’d chastise your child for not having fixed yet; he dresses like a Sonic The Hedgehog villain. To punctuate the biggest moment of his professional life, he reprised Reggie Miller’s iconic choking celebration by appearing to actually strangle himself—his was perhaps the first-ever on-court soyface in NBA history. Looking, as I often have, to the Western Conference in search of organically-farmed aura is similarly distressing. Anthony Edwards, perhaps the most authentically cool player in professional basketball, is pitted in an alternating series of humiliation rituals against Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and his troupe of sycophantic court jesters, leaping in coordinated joy at his most anodyne post-game musings. For as long as I can remember, the NBA has served as a cultural North Star. These NBA playoffs portend a crisis of cool.

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Quickly—like stop reading this, grab your phone, and set a timer to ten seconds. Now: quickly, who is the coolest person in culture today?

If you thought of someone, good. Now, ask yourself: is this person “in culture,” or are they on my phone. Would my parents know who this person is? Would—say—my friends who aren’t addicted to their phones? If the answers are, “the latter, no, no,” then your answer does not count.

I am wont to ascribe outsize importance to the nicotine delivery system du jour. Perhaps there is no significant cultural or political dimension to how, at any given moment, people get a buzz. Yet I can’t help but feel subjected, over the past few months, to an all-out assault of writing about Zyn. I have read, in Max Read’s instantly canonical terms, how shared Zyn addiction has come to group together the lamest young men on the internet. I have learned, per Carrie Battan’s incisive reporting, the irony of these attempts to code Zyn use as masculine. I have read about young men banding together on Reddit to quit Zyn. I have read these Reddit threads myself, because I have toyed with talking myself into these apparently harmless pouches to ease the moments during which life without nicotine starts to drag; I have come so far, at times, as to convince myself that the only thing to worry about with these pillows of nicotine salt are their aura, rather than health, ramifications. I have talked to friends who appear to be in Zyn’s vise grip—friends who would not be caught dead with the sort of people who tweet about dating in New York City from burner accounts. Zyn is in. Neither the perceived political or the real public health ramifications of this fact concern me. All I care about, for purposes of this blog, is what it means for the vibe.

Calling Zyn pouches “uncool” is a misdiagnosis not just of magnitudes but of kind. Zyn’s early American adopters were surely uncool, but the product itself is noteworthy precisely for its nothingness. In a moment where Instagram starter-pack-brain has convinced young phone users, consciously or otherwise, that they and the people around them are the sum of the objects they carry with or on them, Zyn stands as perhaps the first negative staple. Ignore, momentarily, the hockey puck-shaped container, the outline of which protruding through your pants immediately reduces you in my mind’s eye to one of my high school-aged cousins at Thanksgiving dinner. Consider the pouch.

Cigarettes are, regrettably, sexy. The twist of smoke, the alternatively sleek and threatening phallus…let’s not belabor it. That cigarettes look cool is a sort of universal truth; if it elides you, it won’t after two drinks. Vapes, in their assortment of shapes, sizes, colors, and flavorings, occupy a sort of spectrum of goofy, but goofy’s fine. Goofy, crucially, is something. The Zyn, once tossed into the mouth, disappears. There is no spit, no observable difference in the user, no activity. Literally nothing occurs. The Zyn is a sort of invisible IV drip eliciting in its users a functionally negligible buzz. From the standpoint both of experience and presentation, Zyn use ought form no closer fraternity among its users than their shared status as people who breathe air would.

Zyn is safe, if not in the FDA-approved sense. Virtually undetectable and in all likelihood healthier than other nicotine-delivery mechanisms (I don’t like talking about things so transactionally, but this warrants an exception), they transform an ostensible vice into an addiction divorced from its attendant risk. They represent a sea change: a nearly ubiquitous product that people expect, on some level, to be cool, but which by virtue of its safety—defined, of course, by its essential lack—ends up a sort of disturbing nothing. They remind me, in other words, of the current cohort of budding NBA superstars.

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I’ve joked with friends that the last decade of unsustainable, genetically-modified aura farming in the NBA has depleted the topsoil and established the preconditions for a swag dust bowl. The NBA’s crisis of cool concerns culture around it insofar as the NBA, more than anything else, is in the business of selling cool. All professional sports leagues exist to sell advertisements, but the NBA is itself a sort of advertisement for its aesthetics, personalities, and sneakers—if there’s an NBA deep state, the Nike headquarters is where they conspire. The league is, not coincidentally, the primary intermediary between many among its multiracial fanbase and Black American culture. It’s one thing if Patrick Mahomes is a dork; Jayson Tatum being lame is another question entirely.

That the budding faces of the league are profoundly uncool is relatively uncontroversial, notwithstanding Anthony Edwards as the exception that proves the rule. Jalen Brunson nods impishly as Josh Hart wins the internet; Tyrese Haliburton spits out strings of mimetic signifiers like a large language model trained on House of Highlights clips; Shai Gilgeous-Alexander drolls on as his Rosencrantz clip-farms with a Gatorade bottle; Donovan Mitchell’s messianic meat has been exposed as an exaggerated, angle-assisted bulge; Jayson Tatum’s Kobe Bryant cosplay led him to an achilles tear in a Day-Lewisian bit of method acting; Jalen Green is bad at basketball; Zion Williamson’s anime-inspired bellybutton tattoo is but a footnote in his series of aesthetic mishaps; for Ja Morant, I can only wish well. Around every corner, the European slob menace lurks with what a perceptive reader of the blog has aptly named “unconditioned Slavic indifference.” At the risk of sounding alarmist: the sky is falling.

The better, more elusive question: why? Here, it’s easy to lose touch. I write this less than 48 hours removed from Jay Williams publicly speculating that the drought in American-born MVPs owes to “cancel culture;” prognosticating about the ills plaguing the American basketball-development apparatus predisposes people to hysterics. And yet, a theory: the instant cohort of NBA stars-in-waiting exemplify the ways in which our intensely mediated, image-calculated cultural moment has substantially eliminated risk by purporting to have charted and documented all possible paths. In arguing that the current crop of corny heirs suck because they have expected stardom their entire lives, forcing them to approximate its trappings, the above-mentioned anonymous reader analogized to the way in which Charli XCX’s 360 video smacked of reverse-engineered downtown cool while (with Chloe Sevigny’s limited exception) lacking the authentic article. I’d suggest that contextualizing the NBA’s impending aura crisis requires us to train our attention on an adjacent Manhattan neighborhood.

Cue this month’s government-mandated The Cut rage-bait, Brock Colyar’s “It Must Be Nice to Be a West Village Girl." (I joke—in truth, it has been too long since everybody read an article at once. I’m happy that The Cut is back.) By now, you’ve either read the piece, determined it was none of your business, or both. My standing to discuss the article is…attenuated…from New Jersey, have never lived in New York City, a guy, extremely limited disposable income (editors, I am available for freelance assignment; readers, you can give me some of your money if you’d like).

Still, the West Village Girl piece seems to fall on the interesting side of the eternal debate: is this a New York-specific trend piece, or a piece about a trend happening to manifest itself first in New York? Idea being: a bunch of young, ostensibly upwardly-mobile (ed note: this part isn’t true, family money greases the wheels for the young men and women alike in this neck of the woods, but we already knew that) women have descended upon the West Village in a uniform of white tees and light-washed jeans, toting matcha lattes by day and Aperol Spritz’s by golden hour. This annoys the older cohort of West Village residents committed to fetishizing the “weird, cool” neighborhood of their valiant first-wave gentrification push, who resent the girls for their apparent homogeneity; the girls, whose moodboards are more Sex and the City than Village People, don’t really give a fuck.

Here’s where the story gets interesting: Colyar, a reporter who has covered some unsavory young people in the past, resists the temptation to pen a hacky hit piece. Instead, they nestle into an understanding of being basic—of dissolving easily into, yes, a start pack—as something like ego death. Per one of the interviewees: “Basic isn’t a bad thing…there’s a reason everyone wants to be like that.” Elsewhere, being basic is presented as a sort of group safety mechanism. Colyar appears to see the same sort of beauty in the basic as someone else might in a flock of birds arrowing across the night sky; the birds in a v-formation aren’t being very unique or quirky, either. If anything, it’s the self-styled “cool” West Village residents in the piece who come across as grating, resenting their more homogenous successors for exposing the neighborhood’s fundamental lack of risk. I would be remiss, at this juncture, if I didn’t note that this basic ground zero is bordered in part by the newly christened “Jalen Brunson Boulevard” on 7th Avenue and West 11th Street and “Josh Hart Street” on 6th Ave and West 3rd.

The average citizen—I, the girl reading this—has the right to be basic; as mentioned above, the rapidly expanding memetic universe of our phones threatens to sand off all behavior as basic to someone. If you want to begin so closely identifying with certain brands that they begin to constitute, well, your own brand, that is your god-given right. It’s nobody’s business. And yet still, basic needs lodestars as sheep need shepherds. The plague of basic, corny, uncool NBA superstars, then, suggests the impending collapse of aesthetic signifiers. The West Village girls have Carrie Bradshaw; young men have Jayson Tatum copying Kobe Bryant copying Michael Jordan, a swag Disintegration Loops. I’m kidding, sort of. I don’t actually think that Jalen Brunson’s hairline or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s mirror-rehearsed aura compilation-fodder are going to trigger the equivalent of the subprime mortgage crisis in American cool, that there’s going to be an “if we’re both here, who’s driving the car?” moment when we realize that the people meant to establish the terms of cool have grown up on the same slop bullshit as us, that the implosion of the symbolic order will plunge Americans into a swag Tower of Babel. It’s dissonant, is all—that at the most otherwise volatile moment of my life (geopolitically, economically, name it), risk has become so totally cleaved from the process of image-production. But no matter. The point I’m getting at is that the crop of NBA stars-in-making suggest the ongoing mass West Villagification and Zynning of culture, an aesthetic min-maxxing whereby identies are formed through the most legible, least risky behaviors. Like the girls, these stars are all knocking off the previous generation’s iconography that they learned from their phones; like the boys, these guys attempt futilely to excavate transgression from the utterly anodyne. The long arc of history bends toward basic.

All that being said: on May 16, 2025, ten men escaped the overcrowded, hellish Orleans Justice Center. I do think that’s pretty cool.

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First some loose ends: missed two weeks of blogging after committing to a sort of weekly output. It’s fine, you’re not paying me, I wouldn’t want you to, sometimes it’s nice being lazy. Since last intruding upon your inbox I had the extremely good fortune of getting to sit down with billy woods at Passion of the Weiss, which has been a dream of mine for quite some time. I guess it’s something of a joke, every eager writer excitedly sitting down with woods, but I was moved by how gracious he was with someone who basically had no idea what he was doing. My favorite aspect of the conversation, which only slightly conveys in the copy, was how frequently I offered an interpretation of one of his lyrics that was objectively, plainly wrong. He was cool about it. You can read the conversation, and my thoughts on his excellent new record, here; I’m happy with how it all turned out and hope you enjoy.

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Now, Magic Farm, the sophomore effort from the now 2/2 Amalia Ulman. I loved this movie—that’s it, I loved this movie. Should it work? You read the promotional plot summary and tell me. There are countless versions of the film hinted at within it that would, most likely, not have worked. You can extrapolate, from interviews Ulman has given (including this great interview with my friend Jack), that these inferior iterations of the film may actually have been her entryway into it. High-level overview: a sort of Vice-but-for-Tik-Tok ‘creative agency’ fly down to a small Argentinian village in search of a local musician who performs wearing bunny ears, only to learn that the village he’s from (San Cristobal, if memory serves) is as generic a name in South America as Smallville in the Unites States. The operation consists of Chloe Sevigny, playing a version of herself as clouted elderstateswoman/mother figure, Simon Rex as a tonally perfect Dov Charney allegations type, Ulman as reluctant interpreter between moron and small-towner, Alex Wolff as a remarkable send-up of a softboi multihyphenate (the film’s best gag includes Wolff’s business card, which requires three lines of text to list all the cities from which his creative operation operates), and Joe Apollonio in a role that transforms in real time from the film’s moronic punching bag into its emotional core. That was a lot—the actors are great, and the roles are largely remarkably written. The bit, basically, is that these solipsistic hipsters decide to fabricate a trend that compels apocalyptic Christians to dance to saccharine cumbia while wearing gift bows on their heads, because they are “gifts from God;” as the attempt to build out this fake story deepens, the characters find themselves further called into the internal life of San Cristobal. Throughout the film, the crew in their blinkered pursuit of a fake trend miss countless genuinely compelling stories, most of all the town’s routine dousing in glysophates by agribusiness jets, plumes of herbicides demonstrates to cause birth defects and poisoning the town. At one point, the Americans themselves are sprayed; the potential complications to Ulman’s character’s unborn fetus are the only memory of the practice that the group bring back with them to the States.

The above-linked interview seems to suggest that Ulman first started thinking up this film upon learning that her real-life Argentian grandmother went blind due to glysophate exposure. Downtown Erin Brokovich might have landed with a thud; a film about how the downtown kids are too busy looking at their phones to see the Brokovich underneath their noses succeeds completely. Even still, praising the movie can make it seem didactic. It’s not—it’s just funny, contained, and ambitiously directed. If the last decade of hacky millennial television was undone by terminally Twitter-brained writers’ rooms, Magic Farm is somehow a film enhanced by its being Instagram-poisoned. Ulman knows what she’s doing, and she’s good at it. The idea of Alex Wolff in a huge shirt playing some cautionary fuckboy tale is enough to make you rip your eyes out; Wolff analogizing the process by which women synchronize their menstrual cycles to “when you put fruit together and they rot faster” is another thing entirely. At the risk of lumping together former Ion Pack guests—life is about more than this, surely—Ulman succeeds in conveying generational archetypes in a way that feels vivid and engaging rather than rote because, unlike an Honor Levy, she is able to do more than simply point out the way in which It Do Be Like That. Magic Farm transcends the sort of “recognize this guy? how about her?” sleepwalking that so much art made by those in my generational cohort falls into—what we might call starter pack cinema. Here, you recognize the characters, but then you’re asked to engage with them; better yet, they’re dropped into a random Argentinian village.

Ulman’s handle on her characters and world allows her to explore some rich thematic terrain. If in Dark Waters, Mark Ruffalo’s crusading environmental attorney is disciplined throughout his crusade for justice by corporate power and the coercive reality of unpaid bills, Magic Farm’s would-be journalists respond to a more diffuse, arguably subtler series of dictates. There’s a case to be made for Magic Farm as one of the first foundational texts of the clout-chaser, pivot-to-video era. You don’t go after DuPont because they employ everybody in town; you don’t report on multinational agribusiness poisoning Argentinian villages because that thumbnail just doesn’t fucking scale. Are any of the cancer-stricken locals alleviating the weight of their collective grief through ayahuasca? Now, that’s a story.

It’s a smart point that she doesn’t berate you with. Medium, message, right? Blunter yet: the whole “character goes looking for one thing and finds something else altogether” arc may no longer apply to a generation too busy scrolling their phones to look up and see the second thing in the first place. Do with that what you will—the film isn’t homework, and President Trump has issued a 100% tariff on ‘phone bad’ pieces after reading all of your Substacks.

Point being: it’s not often that New Orleans gets movies like this, ironically enough at the same venue that, two weeks prior, hosted an electric performance from ‘punk cumbia’ group Son Rompe Pera (merch line trucker hats: “Cumbia is the New Punk”). There’s something there about the continuity between a film that positions cumbia as a sort of music that the misplaced hipsters can’t quite get (“is there a way to make this sound less like a…duck?” asks a frustrated Apollonio) and a cumbia performance made specifically legible to hipsters…but that’s for another day. I’ll leave my praise for a restrained film restrained in kind.

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To the extent that you’re worried about this sort of thing, we can get spoilers out of the way: A) The Shrouds concerns a Cronenbergian stand-in whose grief in the wake of his late wife’s passing leads to his developing a budding high-tech graveyard empire offering next-of-kin the ability to watch their loved ones’ bodies decompose in real time, whose respectable, stylish obsession spins into the paranoid as he begins to notice microscopic growths on his wife’s decaying bones and his flagship graveyard is vandalized. The plot meanders—think a thriller on Xanax and two glasses of red wine—the widower-protagonist sleeps with not one but two beautiful women (which, good for you, David), before the film more or less dissipates in a way not dissimilar to Slothrop’s disintegration in the back portion of Gravity’s Rainbow. B) The Rehearsal, two episodes into its second season, is somehow even more labyrinthian: Nathan Fielder casts the viewer as co-conspirator in a patently unbelievable, outrageous quest to blow as much of David Zaslav’s money as possible.1 Where this season purports to have a more overt mission statement than the first—Fielder is concerned with preventing airplane crashes by putting airplane first assistants into Rehearsal-style role-playing scenarios to seemingly build their confrontation skills, having determined that the majority of passenger jet crashes stem from first assistants’ inability to stand up to boorish or sloppy pilots—it’s already begun to veer into the metatextual territory one has come to expect from Fielder. C) In the first round of the Western Conference playoffs, the Timberwolves beat the Lakers four games to one. Anthony Edwards further established himself as the American basketball aura-bearer, Rudy Gobert perfected a redemption arc, LeBron looked old, JJ Redick crashed out, and Luka Doncic gained roughly five pounds.

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Before going any further, I feel a need to clarify that I am not, constitutionally speaking, anti-conspiracy. I am, relatively speaking, a pretty insane person—a guy whose worldview might be understood as “slightly less crazy than his girlfriend thinks he is, slightly more crazy than she’d like him to be.” Put otherwise: I believe the CIA killed John F. Kennedy, but I won’t, like, talk about it at a party anymore. Like many others on what is ostensibly “the American left,” (yikes) I developed a passing interest in parapolitics in 2020 in the wake of my own politics failing, a sense of aggrievedness toward what I identified as bodies of power, and tremendous boredom. Podcasts, regrettably, had something to do with with it. It’s less that I now disbelieve that certain structures of power exist and exert tremendous influence over daily life and more that being able to, like, go to bars again has led to my being way less doctrinaire and way more normal about it.

I say all of this to say: I think unfettered access to the late-algorithmic internet has led to a minor schizophrenic crisis among internet users. I’m not going to support this assertion with examples—you either see people suggesting that Druski is a deep state asset or you don’t, and if you don’t you really should not bother yourself with this sort of stuff—because reading through Twitter or Substack doesn’t make me feel good anymore. The dominant mode of thought as mediated on the internet is a certain smug conspiratorialism: everything, by the current framework, is evidence of Something Else, Something Bigger. As an overarching principle governing day-to-day take-craft, this instinct has an obvious allure. Certain modes of social-mediated communication prioritize and encourage sharing opinions on not just something but everything; smug conspiratorialism provides take artists with a sort of North Star. The same way a baseball fielder knows where to throw the ball if they find it coming their way on any given pitch, the social media user given to this sort of lazy paranoiac mapping can see the direction toward which all takes must flow. It’s why the Savannah Bananas cannot just be a goofball exhibition event you find distasteful, but must in fact be evidence of the slopification of everything, to cherry-pick just one instance.

Because I spend a lot of time on the corners of the internet that concern themselves with basketball, I find this lowbrow conspiratorialism particularly offensive come playoff-time. If March Madness fosters upsets and unpredictability, the NBA playoffs are more a grueling endurance sport through which the best of the best sort themselves; along the way, though, enough unforeseen left turns take place that there is in any given year a perfectly reasonable argument that the championship winners were, in fact, frauds who should be ashamed to hang that particular year’s banner in their arena. The playoffs, at their best, are operatic, sweeping, epic; they pit aura vs. the slob menace, youth vs. age, post-industrial grit vs. financialized grifting, and the Boston Celtics vs. liberal democracy. For some reason, though, it pains the overwhelming majority of online basketball fans to acknowledge this beauty; instead, they insist, with a cowardly tongue in their cheek, that the playoffs are rigged by Adam Silver. Basketball fandom’s smug conspiratorialism manifests itself first and foremost in a certain assuredness that calls will be made, interests will be protected, and markets will be prioritized that robs all joy from the actual discussion or viewing of basketball. With the zeal of a true believer, the superiority of a teacher’s pet, and the critical facilities of a sophomore, the fervent basketball conspiracist cares more about what games Scott Foster is refereeing than he does the privilege of witnessing fleeting greatness expressed at the highest level. Basketball conspiracies, like all of the laziest conspiracies, mistake the first principles of media and power analysis for some shady, unsubtle cabal.

Insofar as the Lakers are what basketball conspiracists what the CIA is to conspiracists writ large—deeply evil organizations that have actually participated in organized criminality, shaped the world in their wretched images, and put crosshairs on the heads of men in Dallas, yet still not the secret cause behind everything that happens at any given moment—it satisfied me greatly to watch their season end last night. Against mounting evidence that the Lakers were incompletely assembled, mismatched against the Wolves, and unable to compensate for either their glaring hole at center or their newly acquired superstar’s inability to defend, conspiracists condescendingly maintained that certain calls had been put in, that the league would not let their golden franchise or their golden boy go down early, that anyone seeing what was in front of them was falling for The Script. Let the death of the Lakers prove conclusively that these cynics were wrong; though they would be well-advised to lean into actually experiencing the joy of surprise as it manifests itself in even the most rigorous sporting format, my guess is that they will move onto another, equally tired agenda.

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Let’s call it a score settled. From whence, then, the sympathy for the conspiracist? The Shrouds offers a pretty sensible place to start. This is undeniably an odd movie…the first fifteen minutes feel as much the lead-in to a high-end porno as they do a late-period film from one of cinema’s greatest auteurs…and yet once it finds its rhythm, or more accurately once its rhythm imposes itself upon you, it reveals itself as one of the richest texts in recent memory. With plenty of love to Sinners—blockbusters are back, and we’re better off for it—The Shrouds is (say the line, Bart!) the true overstuffed film for our times. It’s not so much that Cronenberg bites off more than he can chew—conspiracy, international espionage, grief, technofuturism, AI, white men fetishizing Japan, jealousy, desire…—as much as it is he never intends to chew on anything. In The Shrouds, any number of explanations might suffice for the events as they transpire; fittingly, many explanations are in fact offered. Cronenberg, perceptively, chooses to fashion each said explanation with just enough weaknesses to render it insufficient. Structurally, then, The Shrouds emulates modern life in the way that it is concerned to the point of becoming overwhelmed while resisting any and all satisfying conclusions.

Among Cronenberg’s many successes with The Shrouds is his careful, caring rendition of the conspiracy theorist. Karsh, the directorial stand-in and protagonist, is despite his earthly success a man utterly confounded by the world changing around him. Karsh’s grief is literal—The Shrouds, mercifully, avoids the metaphorical flourishes that have sandbagged recent horror—as, presumably, was Cronenberg’s own in the wake of his late wife’s passing in 2017. And yet still, perhaps there’s a unifying theory of conspiracy here: conspiracy as a way of making sense of the world in the wake of intense grief—a cousin of paranoia, a child of obsession. Cronenberg does not disdain his conspiracy theorists as much as he turns his viewer into one, walking the audience into tidy explanation after another before abandoning the whole endeavor. You get it, is the point. And so, in the spirit of compassion, I’ll advance a theory: perhaps every conspiracist is in fact a griever, even if that which they grieve is nothing more than the world that made sense to them.

If I’m lucky, I’ll get the chance to write at further length about The Rehearsal somewhere, so I’ll keep my thoughts here light: The Rehearsal is one of those serendipitous happenings so wonderful and (in the truest sense of the word) unbelievable that I feel the need to evangelize on its behalf. If the rationalists we’ve all heard so much about recently obsess over how an all-powerful AI will treat those who didn’t work to ensure its dominance, I secretly worry when we no longer get shows like The Rehearsal that those of us who did not sufficiently celebrate the show will be in some way punished. The fact that HBO gave this man the budget it did to create a show about how to keep airplanes from falling out of the sky just before airplanes did in fact start falling out of the sky is one of those historical accidents I’ll bore my children with.

But, let’s stay on theme here: conspiracy. Fielder is not explicitly concerned with the notion as such, but you can understand the show as a sort of meditation on the forces that inspire the instinct for conspiratorial thinking within us. Fielder’s elaborately-staged rehearsals create a sort of Truman Show-ian inverse for their subjects, who rather than uncovering a conspiracy meant to stage an artificial life around them are actually invited to build their own fake life. Of course, there’s this elephant in the room, which is the inescapable feeling that no matter what Fielder is the one getting over on the person he’s interacting with. But, still, The Rehearsal is a show populated not by conspiracists but by some of the least critical people Fielder could find— their willingness to take Fielder at his word and cooperate with his insanity is what makes the whole thing work; this week, I watched a man confess casually to having been banned from every major dating app and SeekingArrangements for something that he insists “wasn’t anything illegal.” But as with every other Fielder creation, the show inevitably ends up being about Fielder—more than anything else, about Fielder’s professed desire to understand the random mechanics of the world by obsessively mapping them out in his rehearsals. Of course, this is a comedy, and Fielder’s wit is an acerbic one, so you’re well-served being careful with his stated values…it’s when Nathan is at his most seemingly sincere that I’m most wary of being made a fool by him. And yet still The Rehearsal revolves so successfully around this universal human desire—the desire to know, honestly, how something’s going to go—that it works as something more profound than a cynical prank-fest. Point being: we all want to know what is going to happen, right? Maybe not always—of course not always, actually, because knowing everything that happens means knowing that one day even we will die, and that’s such a horrible thing to contemplate that it can set a funk over your whole day and that’s if you’re lucky. But before, like, asking someone on a date or making a risky move at work or investing in a volatile stock market or choosing how to spend a night, yeah, it would be great to know how it will end up, because we could avoid humiliation and save our precious time and in a meaningful way be safe from the unknown. Fielder gets this—he jokes at his own expense about it, but he doesn’t need to. It’s a sentiment that stands forcefully on its own. And so why, if we’d all like at some level to eliminate the randomness, or at least the prospect of unknown negativity, from our lives, dies The Rehearsal work only as a sort of morbid comedy? Well, of course, because trying to eliminate the sort of risk that makes us human—the sort of risk necessarily entailed by interacting with other humans—is to make us something less than human. All plan and no spontaneity isn’t just boring, The Rehearsal suggests: it’s insane. It can’t work—uncertainty can’t be eliminated. Try, and you’ll only fold in further upon the byzantine prison of your own making.2

Point being: at their most sympathetic, conspiracies are themselves attempts to eliminate uncertainty by rationalizing the unknown and drawing the connections between the naturally disparate. Of course, some things people call conspiracies are in fact descriptions of reality, others are close enough to be harmless, others are inconsequential, and others yet are so harmful that they ruin Thanksgiving forever. This is just a blog about a movie, a show, and a basketball series. And yet all three lead to an inescapable conclusion: no matter how confounding the world around you becomes, a retreat into totalizing paranoia robs you of an essential component of human experience. At their smuggest, conspiracies offer an easy way to control and explain one’s experience of the world; as nearly every adult knows, a well-lived life requires doing hard things.

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An apology: In my new year’s effort to pitch more traditional, fleshed-out writing to editors, I have more or less forgotten how to blog.

A resolution: In the name of blogging more, with fewer essayistic pretensions, I am going to try and occasionally put a few things I’ve been thinking about recently in conversation, hopefully with the world around them.

A plea: I’ve resisted writing about the Substack House Style for some time, because tackling that feels like the sort of thing I’d regret almost immediately, but: at its worst, Substack writing sustains itself by putting things in conversation. If my writing veers into the too-far-gone, turbo-cooked Substack register, I’ll stop doing this, but I need you all to reel me in.

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A blog post: Somewhere in my notes app, I have written down a quote attributed to William S. Burroughs: “if you want to see the future of America, go to an airport.” I’m fairly sure he didn’t say this, because when I google it nothing comes up. Where did I get this notion? A dream? A podcast? It doesn’t matter. The point, whether or not such a formulation was ever actually articulated, is that the center of the formation’s gravity has shifted. A different articulation: if you want to understand America today, go into a smoke shop.

I’ve been thinking about Ezra Marcus’s story in New York Magazine about the rise and fall (?) of Galaxy Gas and the flavored nitrous epidemic since reading it at the start of the year. As someone who has mercifully aged out of whippets and as such experiences them only through Twitter memes and Kanye West’s ongoing psychotic break, I experienced a distinct sense of dread while reading about the way in which smoke shop owners in Atlanta sussed out demand for nitrous oxide, applied the flavored vape playbook, contracted out Chinese development and distribution via WhatsApp (perhaps the only compelling argument for tariffs), and manufactured a genuine drug craze among a predominantly young, Black cohort that had largely stayed away from one of the most destructive drugs known to man. It’s an insane article, and not one I’m going to perfectly summarize, and you should read it. Its greatest success, though, is the way that it establishes the smoke shop as the predominant engine of innovation, economic activity, and grift in contemporary America. Smoke shops have always been incredibly sketchy, a sort of permanently-fluid business model that demarcates the line between legality and criminality at any given time; at smoke shops, one finds the least legal legal things, the most legal illegal things, and the illegal things most likely to be legalized in the next five years.

Since 2020’s mass delirium, smoke shops have come to serve as a brick-and-mortar articulation of the entire scam economy’s logic. Smoke shops are sleazily, gauchely decorated, they reek of incense, their fluorescent lights accentuate the bags in your eyes and bring you deep shame for having set foot inside them; their attendants have on offering the vapes they can legally sell and, in the back, the vapes they could sell until last month. Cell phone repairs, Bitcoin ATMs, screen-printed sweatshirts of Daffy Duck smoking loud. The main reason I stopped vaping was neither financial nor physical, but because I feared that setting foot in one of these establishments after turning thirty would have substantial karmic consequences. Since, roughly speaking, the mass regulation of Juuls, smoke shops have transformed themselves from seedy vice-merchants into genuine economic innovators; almost no business-owner is asked to navigate shifting rules and regulations as much as a smoke shop owner in the flavored, disposable vape era. The Galaxy Gas story demonstrates how the fluidity with which smoke shop owners have learned to dodge regulation and move on from the most recently banned vape to the newer, more garish one has instilled within them a real, hard-nosed entrepreneurialism; if the pre-2020 smoke shop operated with a tacit governmental permission, the modern smoke shop forces the issue, exploiting every loophole and unregulated vice imaginable. They feel, in other words, like contemporary America does: scammy, sleazy, dirty, flouting every rule of decency and common sense one previously had.

This weekend was the Crescent City Classic, a 10K that winds from the Superdome to City Park though one of New Orleans’ most picturesque, tree-lined avenues. Perhaps it means nothing that, whereas last year I ran it with no music, this year I pressed play on Skrillex’s F*CK U SKRILLEX YOU THINK UR ANDY WARHOL BUT UR NOT!! <3 at the race’s start? But this is the sort of thing I have been mining for reason recently, the sort of thing you parse for its significance when you’re basically middle-aged and have your shit pretty much together but for some reason cannot stop listening to a brand-new dubstep album. You ask: do I need to establish an ironic distance from this? Do I need to cast my affection for this record in a sort of nostalgic, Spring Breakers-y light? Do I need to write a thinkpiece? Hopefully, a blog post will suffice: I can’t stop listening to the Skrillex album not only because it is punchy and delirious and effective and never overstays its welcome, but because this is the sort of music you listen to when you live in a smoke shop.

Let not the Skrillex record’s timeliness detract from its being a genuinely wonderful album. For a work of art truly of its time, insofar as it is both steeped in contemporary logic and deeply fucking stupid, look no further than Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion. The less said the better—you will either like this movie or you won’t, and you’ll know which type of person you are about 20 minutes into the film, and if you are in the latter category you should take the rest of your time back (life is short, and you need to learn to do these things). For what it’s worth, I thought the Burial score was good if not revelatory, I thought the gimmick was fun at first, and the Venetian Islands houses were beautiful; when my girlfriend and I went to Miami a week or so after I watched the film, I kept saying “baby invasion” while driving past expensive homes, and I think she loved that. Baby Invasion wants desperately to be of its time, which is why it should have been an Art Basel installation rather than a feature film. All Korine is, for better or worse, masturbatory; Baby Invasion is gooning. A defender might say: seethe! Cope! Baby Invasion is nihilist, online, a mirror to modern society. To which I’d say, no, dumbass, the film obviously fails on its own terms, and if you don’t believe me, look at the chat. Where Eugene Koylyarenko’s Spree features a genuinely verisimilitudinous live chat, Baby Invasion’s stream of comments is off-base to the point of distraction. The second worst thing you can do as an artist is use generative AI, which to Korine’s credit he does effectively here; the worst is have 40-year-olds write comments like they are trolls. Baby Invasion’s undoing is not its nihilism, but its cringe.

And yet, Baby Invasion remains an important document—or, at least, a document—of our current delirium. Korine, one of American film’s premiere shockster-provacateurs, operates not unlike a smoke shop owner, meaning not unlike the modern American Man: his meta is figuring out what he can get away with. Sometimes, permissiveness creates wonders; as I type this, I’m listening to Skrillex himself dare to sing a Fall-Out-Boy-esque chorus on his record’s penultimate song, and I’m smiling. More often, though, you wish for an adult in the room to tell everybody to stop. In Smoke Shop America, the adults in the room sell flavored whippets instead.

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Depending on who you ask, I am either 2 months younger or 10 months older than Playboi Carti; either way you cut it, I am about 7 years past the age at which point it feels acceptable to share one’s opinion about Playboi Carti’s music on the internet. Or so, at least, I had been led to believe when I pressed play last Friday on MUSIC, torn between my being buoyed by a full night of sleep and my sense of survivor’s guilt that I, rather than any of my broccoli-haired interlocutors who had stayed up all night in anticipation of the album’s release, would hear it first.

The blistering buzzsaw “POP OUT” felt like a sort of baptism by fire into the most rabidly anticipated event album in recent memory; every generation, it seems, gets the “On Sight” it deserves. Before I had time to collect my bearings, I had made my way through the A-side of an album that seemed to metamorphose roughly ten times in front of my eyes, toggling through robotic slide-whistles and operatic choirs, joy-dimming Travis Scott ad libs and boisterous Swamp Izzo shit-talking, a laugh-out-loud preposterous fan-edited intro and, well, the Shai aura edit song. By the time I had reached the deliriously blown-out, almost breathtakingly avant garde “OPM BABI,” I felt I had been fully initiated into the brainrot purportedly the hallmark of the generational cohort beneath me. MUSIC, upon these first few listens, was totalizing, overpowering, nonsensical, and endlessly captivating. Listening to MUSIC felt like those moments when your phone or computer so completely occludes the world outside it that your scrolling induces a sort of flow state; time evaporates, external stimuli fade into the distance, and your mind is able to jump from corner to disparate corner effortlessly, so long as the dopamine keeps flowing. You pick your head up, you realize you have listened to a 30-song album, and you take a moment to regain your bearings.

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It’s tempting, with a record as promising yet confounding as MUSIC, to wash your hands a bit; to call yourself unc, to fetishize youth by proclaiming the record is for the kids, to undercut your making sense of the record with a certain ironic detachment. Both the album and its attendant fanfare make these things easy. But where Playboi Carti’s first three records strike the balance between obvious timelessness and immediately recognizable paradigm shifts in popular hip-hop, MUSIC appears to offer no such path forward. To observe this is not to accuse the record, or Carti himself, of failing—one artist can only be expected to shift the zeitgeist so many times—but rather to see clearly what it is and is not. MUSIC is not bold, well-conceived, or intentional enough to mark a step forward for even the most committed Carti clones; what, compared to Whole Lotta Red, would its program even look like? Rather, it is best understood as a sort of crystallization of a moment in culture: what we might call the Eternal 2017 with 2025 tendencies.

The clearest sign that MUSIC identifies itself more as a victory lap than a meaningful step forward is its geriatric guest list. While some of the record’s personnel decisions feel like dispatches from a more just universe—the biggest album of 2025 being hosted by Swamp Izzo feels, all things considered, like a minor miracle—MUSIC’s features are among the most ill-conceived aspects of a work so simultaneously compelling and ill-conceived. Throughout MUSIC’s A-side, Travis Scott is deployed at increments seemingly strategically intended to suck the air out of the album’s budding momentum. Hearing the platonically uninspired “PHILLY,” I am reminded of the time a visibly drunk Uber driver picked my girlfriend and I up at 5am while playing an AI-generated Travis Scott album on Youtube to which he knew all of the words (the line I’ll never forget being “she just want my money and my dick, ya-ha”); the AI-generated album was significantly better. Elsewhere, Lil Uzi Vert continues his years-long struggle to find his footing and Future overwhelmingly sleepwalks through verses. Most heartbreakingly, Young Thug phones in a clunker inexcusably entitled “WE NEED ALL DA VIBES,” an interminable three minutes nestled within what otherwise would be the album’s strongest, most coherent stretch. Somewhat miraculously, Kendrick Lamar finds a way to neither annoy nor feel out of place; elsewhere, the The Weeknd-assisted ballad “RATHER LIE” buts in like a YouTube ad. It’s hard, in other words, to shift the paradigm when seven of your record’s thirty tracks include either Travis Scott or Kendrick Lamar. Not one guest on MUSIC is able to upstage, challenge, elevate, or even constructively complicate Playboi Carti, a failing inextricable from the fact that this parade of a-listers who somehow retain a chokehold over popular rap music are closer to the Michael Rubin white party stage of their careers than they are to anything approaching artistic vitality.

It would be entirely unfair to accuse MUSIC of being more of the same, because Carti is too talented and singular an artist to make something one could consider “the same.” Even at his least inspired, like the above-mentioned Weeknd pop swing, Carti is capable of the sort of tone modulation, structural inversion, and stylistic freakout that occasionally takes your breath away. MUSIC is unfocused, but it does not drag. What it does sound like, however, is an elevated version of the rap we have come to expect since, roughly speaking, 2017, when Migos’ Culture marked the subsumption of the budding, frenetic, outre Atlanta rap world into streaming culture’s frictionless, venture-capitalistic approach to record-building. For the first time in MUSIC, Playboi Carti seems to have made a record dictated by the mode of culture around him rather than one that will challenge or shift that culture; MUSIC is a record without a unifying stylistic sensibility, one evidently slapped together at the last minute, and comprised of a track list assembled without any obvious logic or organization. At its best, MUSIC pushes these hallmarks well beyond their logical extremes. MUSIC is rife with turbo-charged, inverted tropes: Carti’s deep voice ad libs against his baby voice, the way in which “MUNYUN” dissolves into a flurry of ad-libs and Swamp Izzo tags, the hat-tip samples of “COCAINE NOSE” and “LIKE WEEZY,” the grandeur of “OLYMPIANS” and the previously-mentioned high-water pandemonium of “OPM BABI.” And yet whether or not MUSIC, like the records we have come to expect in the Long 2017, does in fact exist to throw a bunch of tracks at the wall and see what sticks, the reality is that it looks an awful lot like the records that do.

In what I consider a seminal piece of rap criticism, Andrew Nosnitsky articulated the instinct pervasive among both rap artists and fans in the internet era to self-consciously chase “classic” status. In the piece, Noz establishes a sort of divide between the self-consciously, striving modern classic and the record that, over time, comes to be understood as a classic for the way in which it exemplifies a discrete moment or scene within rap music. With an artist like Carti, and in a media environment as degraded as ours, it can be easy to rush to anoint; at the same time, enough people were wrong about the generation-defining Whole Lotta Red that we may well also see a hushed hesitation—a sort of moratorium on serious critical proclamations until we can assess whether or not MUSIC in fact shifted youth culture. MUSIC, at the end of the day, is not that complicated. MUSIC is good, and it may be great, but it is not in a meaningful sense new; Carti’s is a more capable, polished, and inspiring vision of the long 2017 hegemony, but it is one all the same. If MUSIC is ever viewed in an ostensibly classic light, it will likely be for what it marked the end of: it may well be that MUSIC is the last great event album, insofar as it represents popular rap’s last great album-maker’s departure from the album as such. And so we might put to bed, once and for all, the joke that there is an age limit on enjoying Carti’s music: I recognize MUSIC because I have been hearing a worse version of it for the last eight years.

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Also went on again with the boys and talked about Marcus Smart as collateralized debt obligation. Fun as always, like and subscribe…

Nothing But Respect

Mid Level Exceptionalism with Ock Sportello

Ock is back to give us boots on the ground vibe analysis of the Super Bowl. Plus we talk trade deadline, the nba’s growing middle class, Legion Hoops war against consensus reality, the first MAHA trade, and the end of the sportsball era…

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a year ago · 2 likes · harry, Patrick, and ock sportello

I have been making a sincere effort to not let the things I see on the internet impact my mood as much as they currently do. The internet, and specifically Twitter as it is currently constituted, has meaningfully hardened my heart against the world around me. It is easy to lay blame at the feet of algorithms, conspiratorial forces, and the dictates of engagement-based-profit—all do, of course, shoulder some blame. But to the extent that this regrettable situation might be made reversible, I—and likely you, the person reading this—need to take some accountability for how exactly I spend my attention and regulate my emotional reaction to the stream of stimuli I subject myself to for hours on end.

All of which is to say: I’m not exactly happy to be writing about what the proliferation of meme-farming quote graphics across the sports internet portends for humanity’s relationship to itself in the social media age. My hope is that this post can serve as a sort of exorcism.

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Yesterday, the Bleacher Report Twitter account posted the sort of content that has become standard fare for aggregation-bait social media accounts. The post, which was accompanied by a caption so as to conform with conventions, featured a proprietary Bleacher Report graphic stylizing a quote pulled from, jaw-droppingly, the gambling podcast hosted by the veteran NBA player Morris twins.1 The quote, purportedly Markieff Morris’s reaction to learning he had been traded: “Who the hell want me?”

On its face, this quote is the sort of mildly amusing esoterica that one might collect by sifting through hours of the refuse generated by the NBA player-podcast-industrial-complex. It is both inessential and harmless. What’s insidious about the whole episode, rather, is the quote graphic generated as if by course. The graphic, which shows a mildly disaffected, disoriented Morris over the text, was generated as a naked attempt to introduce a new bit of language into the memetic lexicon. Put simply, it is meme-farming. Despite this farming being so overt as to make even naming it sort of vulgar, you don’t need to take my word for it. Look, instead, to the quote tweet from “sports content creator” and Bleacher Report employee Molly Morrison: “had to give y’all a little gift before valentine’s day.”

In just about 24 hours, the “who the hell want me?” graphic has accumulated 95 thousand likes, 7.5 thousand bookmarks, and 4.9 thousand reposts. The first quote tweets I see as I click in this moment: “This one might go to the moon,” “we’ll be seeing this quote graphic for years to come,” “sometimes you see a graphic and start visualizing the use cases in your head like a highlight reel,” “2 days before feb 14th. Impeccable timing. What a graphic,” and “incels on feb 14.” I stop repeating these responses not because I encounter even a single exception to prove the rule, but because making the point starts to feel tedious. The whole process is offensive precisely because it is obvious. Still, let’s name it: Bleacher Report, specifically the Twitter-addled human beings who are responsible for its editorial decisions, such as they are, de-contextualized and rendered into graphic form a quote from an NBA player for the explicit purpose of other Twitter users seeing the graphic, thinking to themselves that the graphic might serve nicely as garnish on a Tweet about single people on Valentine’s day. Whether you consider this astroturfing, meme-framing, or communitarian seeding, the point remains the same: watching someone successfully create a meme in real time is as off-putting, embarrassing, and upsetting as walking in on someone in the bathroom. Simply: it is something you know happens, and yet not something you are meant to see.

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As someone whose algorithm skews significantly in the direction of sports conversation, my sense of humor has been to some extent seeped in quote-graphic memetic language for the last half-decade. The first sport quote graphic I recall seeing portrayed French soccer superstar Kylian Mbappe’s (as it turns out, widely applicable) promise: “I will be there no matter what.” Insofar as most sport-world memes tend to find their roots in soccer Twitter, it comes as no surprise that this trend first became observable to me in the soccer context. Before long, the Mbappe quote graphic became a part of my internal monologue and daily vernacular, as real and legitimate a form of communication as words like “hello” and “goodbye.” Much to the chagrin of my loved ones, there was a roughly two-year period during which the image served as my sort of one-size-fits-all RSVP.

Of course, there were others. An aged Vince Carter, beating his chest: “I got one more in me.” A humbled Shaquille O’Neal: “I owe you an apology. I wasn’t really familiar with your game.” Darvin Ham on LeBron James: “I just want to ride him.” A funereal Mark Jackson: “What happened to the game I love?” A personal favorite, from David Aldridge lamenting Kyrie Irving’s idiosyncrasies: “We have lost the impact of shame in our society.” These images colonized my brain and lexicon in as real and complete a way as, say, emojis have. It would not be an overstatement to say that they materially reconstituted the ways that I perceive and shape reality insofar as they became both a lens through which I viewed the world and a hungry burden upon my meaning-making abilities, demanding that I find more situations upon which a quote graphic meme might be fitted. These graphics were stupid, surely, and they almost certainly marked a step back from, say, standard linguistic development in adult humans, but they exemplified the intoxicating draw of any great meme. To deploy, or understand, a sports quote graphic was to feel both like a member of an irony-fried, erudite, intertwined online community and a sort of pioneer singularly able to push language and humor forward. A balanced meme, in other words, allows you simultaneously to belong and to stand out.

And yet the joy in sports graphics as a genre of humor was that they were necessarily being repurposed toward inconceivable ends. They were neither self-aware nor self-referential. And so somewhere along the line, what once felt like a sincerely delightful form of memetic humor degenerated into the lowest fate of internet activity: a ceaseless, churning content mill. The combination of pay-to-play blue check accounts, the moron Elon Musk’s prioritization of images over text-based posts (one suspects he is too ketamine-sick and stupid to focus on words for all that long), and the banger-hunting-motive that has put humorous creativity in a chokehold all seem to have swirled together to inundate timelines with lazy, uninspired quote graphics from the least funny people on the planet. Perverted by the forces at play—by heavy hands, by late-adopters, by people who can’t tell when a party’s over—the modern quote-graphic-industrial-complex has laid bare the slop incentive that animates the contemporary internet’s operating logic. The point with much memetic humor is no longer to signal belonging to any discrete community or to genuinely attempt to offer a semiotic innovation; rather, it is to be led to the same water, over and over again, and to watch the number go up as you do it. Get ready to learn Chinese, buddy. Hawk Tuah. Big dog. Who the hell want me?

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I’m talking, as much as I’d like not to, about the Hector Banana-bread psy op. Cutting to the chase so that you and I can forget this as soon as possible: this week, a Reddit poster named “Rafe_Cameron_OBX” posted a sort of riddle to the Reddit page “NBATalk” in which they purported to crowdsource the name of their boyfriend’s favorite NBA player in furtherance of a surprise birthday gift. The post’s style reads as immediately earnest; the poster offers up bits of biographical information about her boyfriend before leaving the breadcrumb that every basketball internet drone has made their recent obsession: they purport to vaguely remember the name sounding like “Hector Banana-bread.” People decided that they must have meant Victor Wembanyama, they offered an update claiming to have ruined the surprise by confirming that Wembanyama was, in fact, the Banana-bread in question.

I don’t care about the post in and of itself, which smacks of being written by a 21 year old and is, as such, none of my business. What I care about is the way that NBA Twitter, by which I mean to say the videos, pictures, and occasional words that my phone shows me because Elon Musk has figured out that I like professional basketball, has come together to collectively soyface about Victor Wembanyama’s totally epic, Internet-winning, best-thing-you’ll-see-all-day new nickname. Point being, the stupid Banana-bread post and nickname broke containment almost immediately—there are now explainers, jersey edits, and troves of AI slopaganda. The whole ordeal will be forgotten in a week’s time, maybe less, and so there’s no good reason that I should find a harmless, corny joke so grating and existentially frustrating even if it’s momentarily inescapable. And yet it feels like the Banana-bread meme is worth discussing if only for how shamelessly it exemplifies the way in which banger-hunting totally disintegrates the internet-mediated mind.

The thing, you see, is that the Banana-bread Reddit post is totally fake. The inciting post’s untruth is the sort of thing one can sort of intuit in their bones (I’ve found there is a sort of corniness threshold beyond which any anecdote on the internet must be fake—we might call it “The Ruthkanda Line”), but if you’re in the business of needing proof: among the original poster’s extremely limited Reddit post history is another obviously fake provocation regarding their boyfriend. In that one, which was posted to the Reddit page “NoStupidQuestions,” the poster again assumed an earnest posture to ask whether it was odd that their film major boyfriend spent 9 to 15 hours a week watching Oppenheimer.

The Oppenheimer post is, as far as I’m concerned, conclusive evidence that the Banana-bread post was meant to go viral insofar as its existence permits only two interpretations. The more likely theory is that this poster is the sort of person who likes to ham up traditional gender roles as they have come to be codified on the internet in order to hunt viral content—I’ve taken to calling this “boyfriend mad libs.” By this account, the Banana-bread-poster fabricated both posts whole cloth in a way calculated to best scheme online engagement: one positioning them as a clueless, earnest girlfriend to whose aid men could run, another as the eye-rolling custodian of a stereotypically autistic boyfriend. The other possibility, however, is far grimmer: that both wildly popular Reddit posts are in fact based in reality, meaning that this person is in the business of massaging their life experiences in the manner most reasonably likely to create bangers on the internet. Either way you slice it, this poster is a banger-hunter. As of this week, they are a successful one.

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A definition: banger-hunting is the act of posting something, usually lowest-common denominator engagement-bait, in the hopes that it ripples throughout the internet in the form of likes, reposts, screenshots, and references. A banger is not, spiritually, something that has gone viral. Numa Numa went viral. The dreadful tweet about liking pancakes being misinterpreted as hating waffles is a banger. Point being: if something going viral is a serendipitous oddity, a banger banging is its very function.

Since Elon Musk purchased and then failed to sue his way out of purchasing Twitter, the number one shift in the site’s discursive practice (outside of the preposterous rise in overt racism) was one toward mass banger-hunting. Twitter, and the engines of culture downstream of it, operates by a new logic now: accounts make money based on their engagement, the accounts that pay for engagement get boosted in the algorithm, the algorithm boosts engaged-with tweets more than it used to, and the people who pay for engagement tend to chase engagement through the type of tweets they might expect to go viral. As wrote in his newsletter , Elon’s Twitter algorithm is more or less Reddit plus paid engagement. And so it should come as no surprise that this new Twitter gives rise to Reddit-ass humor like Hector Banana-bread.

Garbage Day

I remembered how awful it is to go viral

I Gave Into The New Twitter Algorithm And I Went Way Too Viral…

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3 years ago · 133 likes · 15 comments · Ryan Broderick

In other words, Elon’s Twitter has become a banger-hunting wasteland due to a combination of algorithmic design and structural incentives. And yet still, while banger-hunting can resemble bag-chasing, the two are not coterminous. People banger hunt because having a post bang feels good to them in some meaningful way; they receive from it a psychic wage separate and distinct from whatever cold-hard monetization they have simultaneously managed to wring. Case in point: the Banana-bread-poster did not, as far as I can tell, have a path to monetizing their banger-hunting. They did it for the love of the game.

Which, I guess, brings me to the point of this analysis. On the recent , toyed with, then began to sincerely adopt the notion that Hector Banana-bread was an elaborate psy-op by the basketball deep state—in other words, a shady cabal of both Nike and league higher-ups—to manufacture consent for Wembanyama as the emerging face of the league. As fun as this line of thought is to engage (the official Never Hungover position is that every conspiracy theory is real), the reality is far bleaker: banger-hunting culture encourages its participants to act simultaneously as brands and shareholders. In other words, whether or not a banger is secretly a corporate ad campaign is a sort of false dichotomy. Banger hunting turns all of its adherents into little Don Drapers, trying to suss out what will make the algorithm and its subject tick not to keep an account but because that’s what they do to feel—what?—fulfilled?

The thing about the Ellen selfie, as much of a meme as it’s now become, is that it did represent a vibe shift. Ellen said, in public, some version of “let’s make this bang,” and Internet users stepped up to the task. The post was retweeted not because of its inherent worth, but because retweeting it made one a part of something. That the photo was full of, and posted by, celebrities was incidental to the fact at hand: people liked making something bang as much as they liked authoring the banger. Banger-hunting has territorialized Twitter because it is, regrettably, a participatory sport. To retweet an incipient banger is to become a sort of investor—not, of course, in the payout to come, but in the perhaps more powerful brain-scratch that reposts and likes somehow deliver.

Put simply, to exist now on the Internet is to live in the wake of one of the greatest feats of cringe, hack humor ever recorded. And so it’s okay to feel like you’re losing your mind watching everybody clap like seals about Hector Banana-bread or whatever the meme du jour might be at any given time; such humor is an unwelcome reminder that we have all been transformed into little Ellens.

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Since the Brooklyn Nets squandered the greatest talent pairing in NBA history and clarified for me that organized sports are but one arm of a fascist propaganda machine meant solely to sell advertisements and embolden reactionary hordes in the Boston metro area, I have been forced to find a new personal justification for following professional basketball. LaMelo Ball, in his unbridled, untethered mania, has made this surprisingly easy. LaMelo plays basketball as if he were in the process of inventing a new, basketball-esque sport in real time; his creativity is endless, reckless, and at its best only tangentially in furtherance of winning games for his team. LaMelo’s game is unmistakably frivolous, but in as bleak a world as ours there is a sort of radical joy to be found in frivolity.

I have long struggled to articulate what precisely I adore about LaMelo’s unmoored, nonsensical game. For a while, I settled on labeling his style “nihilistic,” a term that traded precision for legibility. Lamelo-as-nihilist makes more sense coming from his detractors. Take friend of the blog (and co-host of the excellent new hoops podcast Nothing But Respect, which I’ve been on twice now, which episodes you should listen to, but really listen to all of them, they’re all good), Defector’s Patrick Redford, who saw in LaMelo’s recent antics not a glimmer of salvation but sheer bleakness: “This,” tweeted Patrick,” is dead-eyed, nihilistic blueberry mango vape hoops.” As best I can tell, though, Patrick’s real gripe is that LaMelo’s whole deal is “zoomer bullshit.”

Nothing But Respect

Ock Klosterman with Ock Sportello

Ock joins the show to talk JFK, documentaries, and Survivor. Jk but Ock is back to talk with us about Patrick’s excellent piece about the Hawk Tua Rug Pull, The Brooklyn Nets, Harry’s problem with the NBA Christmas commercial, Young Thug, and music journalism. It’s like if Klosterman went to the new school…

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a year ago · 3 likes · harry, ock sportello, and Patrick

In an attempt to explain what LaMelo Ball’s antics mean to me, then, perhaps it will be necessary to advance a theory. It’s not that I disagree with Patrick that LaMelo is zoomer bullshit personified; I just think that’s a good thing. LaMelo, you see, is the platonic Zoomer hooper. Like any true messiah, he stepped into his role in something like a prophetic fulfillment. The Ball brothers, forced into the spotlight by their overbearing, bombastic, and ultimately vindicated father, exemplified a cohort of celebrities ascending to fame as the machines that created traditional millennial stardom came undone, in many ways modeling a sort of proto-2020s model of fame. But if the Ball family retained some level of knowability, their youngest, LaMelo, was a complete cipher. LaMelo was a Zoomer before the phrase quite existed; to watch him score 92 points in a high school basketball game, routinely drain half court shots like a broccoli-haired Babe Ruth, cherry-pick like an asthmatic old head, and dribble like Julian Newman was a sort of baptism by fire into the brainrotted world of Zoomer hegemony. It’s not really worth waxing poetic about LaMelo’s arc from Chino Hills to, inexplicably, Lithuania, Ohio, and Australia, because LaMelo is about as far from poetic as a talented athlete can be. Nor, for the record, is LaMelo’s style prosaic—it’s more that he defies the written word. Like any truly Gen Z phenomenon, LaMelo exists in the realm of the image, the clip, the reel, the loop. He is, and for as long as his life has been lived in public, always has been on some bullshit. My favorite highlight package of LaMelo’s, for instance, is an entirely off-court compilation of his pathological, reckless speeding out of the team garage and past a light that, for whatever reason, is always red.

But there is a risk, I fear, of making “zoomer” synonymous with “nihilist.” It’s easy to ascribe the generation with this particular affect. While home for Christmas recently I played Fortnite with my zoomer brother and watched Peter Griffin, wearing a Skibidi Toilet backpack, doing the griddy to NBA Youngboy after killing me with a shotgun; I am no stranger to the argument that the zoomer brain is fried beyond the point of holding or ascribing meaning. But the reason zoomers appear as nihilists en masse to the generations their senior has more to do, I suspect, with their generational clear-sightedness. Inextricable from the Gen Z experience is an acknowledgment that both the future and the systems leading us toward it are irredeemably cooked. From the outside looking in, this acknowledgment can look an awful lot like nihilism; for many, it manifests as nihilism plain and simple. But what LaMelo Ball models is that there is a way to recognize that the end is near that does not necessitate believing that nothing matters. All exemplary Zoomer art, from Xaviersobased and Nettspend and pluggnb and (forgive me) dariacore to LaMelo Ball spamming reverse 360 degree dribbles at the top of the key and then saying, of Kemba Walker, “I’m gang, he gang…I fuck with his family,” is necessarily about rejecting pre-existing, rapidly decaying value systems—something that can look an awful lot like the careless throwing up of hands. So, too, must this art be absurd in a way that can often be confused with stupidity. The beauty in great Zoomer art, though, is its ability to channel rot, despair, and hopelessness into a sort of maximalist affirmation. LaMelo, like any great Zoomer, teaches us that hopelessness need not be joylessness, that one can dance alongside the march of progress and throw up some bullshit seemingly designed in a lab to hospitalize any given member of the old guard with rage. If the alternative is an ever-intensifying, soul-deadening pursuit of homogenous efficiency, then there is a real, radical beauty in LaMelo’s compulsion to ignore any dictates beyond his own wish-fulfillment.

Or, to put it more concretely: we all know that the fucking Celtics are going to win the championship again anyway, and any time really spent sweating standings and outcomes and all of that stuff that we’ve come to understand as important in basketball is really doing nothing more than investing importance into a season that is obviously going to end in making the worst people happy, and what’s the harm, really, in rooting for the most charismatic and nonsensical players in the league to just throw up some of the craziest bullshit you have ever seen instead.

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The Never Hungover Best Music of 2024

1. Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee

   Enough words have been written about this record, most have missed the point completely, but it’s not my job to set the record straight. The consensus best album for a reason—a completely hypnotizing, transportive masterpiece from probably the best guitar musician of a generation.

2. Syzy - The weight of the world

   Better Rustie music than the Rustie comeback this year, as sad as it is to say. No-holds-barred, cringey vape-trick dubstep, maximalist, joyous, totally ridiculous. I’ve lifted to this album at least twice a week for the past, what, seven months, and while I’m kind of fat at the moment and am nursing a hurt shoulder, I was jacked at some point, and this album is why.

3. LUCY - 100% PROD I.V.

   Takes a few tracks to click-click, but once it does it’s the most accessible and ear-wormy LUCY yet. “Celebrate you now like anniversary” immediately enters my anthemic pantheon. I can’t believe this is what teenagers get to listen to now.

4. Joshua Chuquimia Crampton - Estrella Por Estrella

5. Chuquimamani Condori - Find Me (NTS Mix)

   The JCC record deserves all of the flowers it’s gotten—totally, subtly brilliant stuff—but his sibling’s NTS mix from earlier in the year has gone almost completely under-discussed. Find Me is the musical equivalent of all of those Chuquimamani-Condori instagram stories of desert horizons, cowboy hats, Glocks, stuffed animals…it’s the mix that made the whole “country revival” thing make sense to me before Beyoncé dropped that awful album and got Trump re-elected. The three-song sequence of The-Dream’s reference track for “1+1,” Parker McCollum’s breakup/addiction anthem “Handle On You,” and a country/Crampton flip of Olivia Rodrigo’s “Driver’s License” is the best musical moment of the year.

6. How To Dress Well - I Am Toward You

   “Crypt Sustain” is the best How To Dress Well song I’ve ever heard, but the record is full of subtle brilliances—Vini Reilly-esque sketches, heady soundscapes, real earworms. Unc still got it.

7. Thou - Umbilical

   Brutal, punishing, sick, best heard live, which hearing it live is sort of inescapable in New Orleans, which, sick.

8. Nala Sinephro - Endlessness

   Totally beautiful, makes me feel smarter. Perhaps it actually makes me smarter. Will make you smarter.

9. Verraco - Breathe… Godspeed

10. Mk.gee - Two Star & The Dream Police

    I didn’t want to like Mk.gee…matter of fact, I actively disliked him. Thought this music was vibe-bait, Jai Paul ripoffs, tidily packaged moodboards from a pretty young phenom. The name sucks, too — Google how it’s pronounced. But the guy won me over. He’s from New Jersey, his musical wrinkles have real heft to them, he often flirts with sincere brilliance. Even if the record gets sleepy near its end, the first three tracks here would have been the best EP of the year, “ROCKMAN” is miles ahead of the already very good stuff we have here, in short I’m happy I bought some stock.

11. POLO PERKS <3 <3 <3, AyooLii & FearDorian - A Dog’s Chance

    Never thought I would get emotional to raps over Israel Kamakawiwoʻole’s “Over The Rainbow.”

12. SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE - YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING

    Messier than ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH, in the non-complimentary way, but still under-appreciated. It sucks that their van keeps getting stolen, this band deserves more than they get.

13. Bladee - Cold Visions

    It’s a testament to Bladee that he could make this album feel like my business, despite my being 29 years old.

14. Jane Remover - jane_remover_cheatcodez.zip (NTS Mix)

    Hard to pick one, had to pick one. Jane Remover’s monthly NTS mix is a consistent deliverer of my favorite moments, visions, flashes of the year. She also, see above, helped me realize the greatness of Mk.gee through her otherworldly flips of his music in mix after mix. New Jersey artists understand one another, it’s not really something I can boil down for you all.

15. LAZER DIM 700 - Injoy

16. DORIS - Ultimate Love Songs Collection

17. xaviersobased - with 2

    Better than the other one.

18. 454 - CASTS OF A DREAMER

19. Dummy - Free Energy

    Stereolab everywhere for those with eyes to see.

20. Loidis - One Day

21. Fabiana Palladino - Fabiana Palladino

    Just makes me so happy to see Fabiana put out a record like this. For as long as the Paul Institute has existed, Fabiana has been proof to me that the group/label/organizing principle could be more than just a retreat for the Paul brothers…timeless, lush, enchanting music for foggy ballrooms.

22. Klein - marked

23. Charli XCX - Brat

    Brat, brat, brat. Where to begin? Or, rather—what to do with you? Music is just music, right? You hear the song, and you like it or you don’t, and/or it challenges you or it doesn’t, or whatever the case may be, but you form an opinion based on the song itself. Right? You, a serious person, aren’t to judge a book by its cover. But, bear with me, why can’t we? Aren’t covers a completely legitimate way to judge a book, seeing as they are how they communicate with prospective readers? If taste in 2024 is predominantly a form of identity-construction for the taste-haver, isn’t it legitimate to shy away from taste-items that tell the wrong story about ourselves? Maybe we shouldn't—but we do. So it’s better to be honest about it. Here I am, being honest about it: I liked Brat a lot more when it was sold to me as an album about drugs and imperfection and parties. I liked it before it blew up—sue me. I don’t think I’m special for this; I read Pitchfork, I make less money than I think I should, I’m the exact target audience for this sort of music. Consequently, I like it a lot less now that I associate it with the Democratic Party, Kamala Harris, bespoke throw pillows, and the all-consuming cringe machine. Maybe that’s unfair, but life’s not fair.

24. d.silvestre - d.silvestre

25. Torus - Summer of Love

26. Alan Sparhawk - White Roses, My God

    Does for me what Kim Gordon’s rage album seems to do for others. No, I’ll take it further—I think it’s completely insane and heart-stoppingly beautiful that Alan Sparhawk processed his lifelong partner’s death with music that sounds like this. Insane, complimentary.

27. Floating Points - Cascade

28. Dani Kiyoko - The Kids Want Sutechi

29. MJ Lenderman - Manning Fireworks

    Basically the Brat dilemma, but for straight men. Meaning I feel even more authority to speak on this one. MJ Lenderman makes good music—people focus on the wrong songs, “Wristwatch” verges on the unlistenable, but there’s brilliance here—that people cannot act normally about. Why? I don’t have an answer, this isn’t a rhetorical question. Why can’t people act normally about MJ Lenderman? Why does he have to be a vehicle for people to test out their ideas about belonging, masculinity, friendship, and identity through limp memes on the internet? Do you think he likes this? I bet he doesn’t. Favorite song here: “You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In.”

30. Still House Plants - If I don’t make it, I love u

31. Blood Incantation - Absolute Elsewhere

32. The Hellp - LL

    Feel bad that I like this, because they seem kind of annoying, and maybe their music is annoying, but if it is it’s the type of annoying I like—referential without being derivative, fun first.

33. Jessica Pratt - Here in the Pitch

34. Ka - The Thief Next to Jesus

    A great, great talent gone too soon.

35. Chanel Beads - Your Day Will Come

36. Christopher Owens - I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair

    Women dies : Patrick Flegel releases 2024 masterpieces :: Girls dies : ______________________

37. DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ - Hex

38. Cash Cobain - PLAY CASH COBAIN

39. Helado Negro - PHASOR

40. prettifun - FunHouse

41. The Cure - Songs Of A Lost World

    Saw The Cure live—they started their North American tour in New Orleans, for no obvious reason—and was floored by the extent to which they still had it. So I wasn’t surprised that this album sounded so authentic, fresh, and felt…but still, it’s pretty crazy.

42. Caribou - Honey

43. BossMan Dlow - Mr Beat The Road

    I-formation, skilled bully, Zach Randolph raps. Have listened to this record before multiple jury trials.

44. Body Meat - Starchris

45. MIKE & Tony Seltzer - Pinball

46. 2hollis - boy

    Publicly liking this record will not age well. I know it—it just won’t. And, so, I’m sorry.

47. Astrid Sonne - Great Doubt

48. Erika de Casier - Still

49. Nicolas Jaar - Piedras 1 & 2

    I love Nicolas Jaar’s music, even if at times I find him indulgent—at the end of the day, he went to Brown—but this whole radio show is completely brilliant and unique.

50. evilgiane & Slimesito - EVILSLIME

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The Never Hungover Best Movies of 2024

1. Megalopolis

   Most movies I saw in 2024 were silly but marketed as serious, to their detriment—Longlegs, The Substance, Trap, Civil War, Anora. Some—Furiosa, Conclave—were surprisingly good. Some of the best—The Beast, La Chimera, Rap World—might not even count as “2024 films;” we get things on a delay in New Orleans, it’s sort of the cost of doing business. Challengers was, well, its own thing. And then you have Megalopolis. Sometimes, especially on the internet, sharing opinions can be a tricky bit of business. It’s natural to want to zig where others zag, to make yourself stand out by going against the current, or to cloak your vulnerability behind a shield of irony. I want to make it clear that, when I talk about Megalopolis, I am not doing any of those things. I want to make it clear that I think Megalopolis might not be a “good” movie, but it is beyond the shadow of a doubt a great movie; I want to make it clear that I think it overflows with ambition and love and the sort of genuine mania that makes art so intoxicating; I want to make it clear that when I laughed I felt I laughed with the movie, and that when I was moved I was moved authentically.

The Never Hungover Best Books of 2024

The only book that I read in 2024 that 1) I liked without reservations and 2) was published in 2024 was Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte. If you read anything worthwhile, drop a line.

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The Never Hungover Best Moments of 2024, unranked

• Joe Biden and Donald Trump Chinese Song TikTok Deep Fake

• Stephen A Smith calls Jason Whitlock a fat bastard, apologizes to pastor

• Damar Hamlin fake punt

• Nets fan crashes car on Twitter Spaces screaming about Spencer Dinwiddie

• Italian cop shuts down the tunnels

• Boeing assassinations, malfunctions

• [Not going to put this one in writing, DM me for a voice note or email me at ocksportello@gmail.com]

• Azealia Banks criticizes Lorde’s “hateful, ugly, misanthropic facial language”

• Porter brother escapades

• Those three straight articles from The Cut

• Donald Trump works shift at McDonalds

• Jason Tatum plays zero minutes in Olympic game

• Kanye nitrus

• Shaun King, Lil Jon separately convert to Islam

• Joe Biden pardons Hunter Biden

• Yongxi “Jacky” Cui gets lost in the Barclays Center

• Camilla Cabello releases “I LUV IT,” featuring Playboi Carti

• Brooklyn Nets trade Mikal Bridges

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