Banish Expectations Expand Wonder
Bill Walton was a one-man Venn diagram. When you trace the circles of his life, they seem to belong to different people. He won championships, followed the Grateful Dead with religious devotion, got himself arrested for protesting the Vietnam War, and became, against every reasonable expectation, one of the most beloved sports broadcasters who ever worked the microphone. Start with basketball. At…
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 what it claims to be, and folding is faster than thinking. Most of the time nothing…
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, no matter what you've heard, the believer class remained very thin even after the…
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 ten. The wisdom of crowds, it turns out, is not always wise. Sometimes it's just…
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 rapid ascendance of prediction markets, into the cold, algorithmic calculation of…
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 and an inspired one in every way that did. Kids were raised like this for…
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 reach. Taken together, these headlines paint a terrifying picture. The post-9/11…
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 want to do it. I'll wait. Plinko didn't have a driver's license. The restaurant…
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 hope. Waiting for Godot is less a story than a structure of expectation stretched…
I’m half-working, half-staring out the window, when the opening synth line threads through the room. That pulsing, driving riff curdles my insides before I understand why. My body goes warm. An involuntary smile spreads across my face. This song matters to me. It hits me with the force of something lived, something personal. A redheaded girl is running for her life, searching desperately to find a…