Bill Walton was a one-man Venn diagram. A two-time NCAA champion at UCLA under the legendary John Wooden. A two-time NBA champion. A Basketball Hall of Famer. An inveterate winner whose high school and college teams, at one point, won an absurd 142 consecutive games. The six-foot-eleven redhead was also an unlikely...

Bill Walton was a one-man Venn diagram. He was a two-time NCAA champion at UCLA under the legendary John Wooden. A two-time NBA champion. A Basketball Hall of Famer. An inveterate winner whose high school and college teams, at one point, won an absurd 142 consecutive games. The six-foot-eleven redhead was also an...

Everyone said NO. Not this year. Not this time. Not this team. We were all wrong. But never before has being so wrong felt so right. Likely every New York Knick fan knows the exact moment when they really, truly started to believe that this could be our year—that Championship feeling. No matter what they tell you,...

We encounter charts, graphics, and statistics, and rather than interrogating them, we fold them into what we already believe, rarely stopping to ask what's actually being measured, or whether the official interpretation is the only one. We see what we see and move on. I understand the impulse. Most data is exactly...

Just hours before Game 1 of the 2026 NBA Finals, I was feeling a little confused and a lot exasperated. In Decentralized Disrespect I ranted about the apparent cluelessness of Polymarket's sentiment machine, which somehow had the Alien-led Spurs as a lock to win Game 1. That's not what happened. The Knicks won by...

There’s been a recent, fundamental cultural shift in how we process sports narratives. For a long time we relied on loud talking heads on tv to manufacture bombastic outrage or frenzied hysteria, or face-painted fan warriors to fuel deep tribal aversions. But now sports has been financialized and commodified by the...

Parents have been raising children since the beginning of time. They learned from watching their parents and grandparents, from friends and neighbors and the accumulated wisdom of a trusted whisper network that had already figured out everything worth knowing. It was a gloriously imperfect improvisation in all the...

Parents have been raising children since the beginning of time. They learned from watching their parents and grandparents, from friends and neighbors and the accumulated wisdom of a trusted whisper network that had already figured out everything worth knowing. It was a gloriously imperfect improvisation in all the...

Parents have been raising children since the beginning of time. They learned from watching their parents and grandparents and from the accumulated wisdom of a trusted whisper network that had already figured out everything worth knowing. It was a gloriously imperfect improvisation in all the ways that didn't matter...

I opened my news app this morning. By the fourth headline my mind stopped reading and started mapping. The map it made was one of contagion, a fire spreading without any formal announcement or congressional declaration or any of the official ceremonial apparatus of war, across a geography it was never supposed to...

Download PDF There is a man named Plinko who used to work as a clown on kids' night at a Ground Round restaurant in Jackson, Michigan. He was in his late forties or early fifties. His mother died of cancer, and somewhere in his grief he'd taken his name from a game on The Price Is Right. The math is there if you...

Download PDF In 1953, Samuel Beckett wrote a play where two men wait for someone who does not come. They insist he will, they reorganize their entire day around his imminent arrival, and then, when he doesn't come, they calmly agree to return tomorrow, because tomorrow, obviously, is when he will come. Maybe. They...