What I Wrote This Week (6/19)

We’re just over a week into the World Cup and rather beginning this newsletter by attempting to make some kind of pithy comment that tries to sum up everything that’s happened, I wrote you an entire column about it.

Here’s what you got from me this week:

-How good were the USMNT against Paraguay, and what does it say about how far they might go? Even better — and even further — than you think.

-I overreacted to everything we’ve seen so far.

Here’s one thing I read:

-My print copy of Golden Goal. Friends of the newsletter and book, Alex Shephard and Miguel Salazar, made a magazine for the World Cup. It’s filled with the kind of soccer-writing we don’t get a lot of anymore — skeptical, sociological, sarcastic, still open to awe — and it’s also just a beautiful thing to have on your coffee table or in your bag. If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, go buy a copy now. You won’t regret it.

And here’s one thing I watched:

-Social media is poison, unless you have systematically adopted your Instagram behavior to make it so your entire algorithm is now, and hopefully forever, footage of random people reacting to the New York Knicks winning the 2026 NBA championship, thus making them the first-ever double-winners in the history of the league.

My first memory watching sports is watching the Knicks, year after year, and having the blood slowly drained from my brain by Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. My dad, his buddy, my aunt, and I would throw a tiny blue-and-orange basketball around the room in the hopes of inspiring a run — and it would never work.

In a way, I think this primed me to become a soccer fan. Not because basketball represented failure and futility and hopelessness but because it forced me to realize you could find meaning and happiness in things other than the ultimate realization of a goal. Things like, say, a ferret-sized head coach latching onto the legs of an opposing player with biceps as big as the tires on your mom’s car. Or the satisfaction of realizing you had solved basketball as a 10-year-old: just have the worst player on your team fight Reggie Miller at the start of every game so they’d both get ejected! Or a guy who became synonymous with spinning car rims inspiring an unlikely and ultimately doomed run to the NBA finals. Or randomly attending a meaningless Saturday-night game against the Nets in the middle of winter, only for that kid from Harvard — the one that your Peruvian roommate watched play against your school, the one that made him say something like “Yo, some little Asian dude was dunking all over us. Homeboy is a fucking baller” — to come off the bench, score 25, and turn into Oscar Robertson for the rest of the month. For a couple weeks, homeboy was, in fact, a fucking baller.

Without all of that, I don’t think I would’ve been able to love a sport where almost no one ever scores and the same rich teams almost always win. The Knicks have made so many people happy, together. Everyone, other than Victor Wembanyama, deserves to feel like they do right now.

Have great weekends, all.