My step-daughter has lost something. Her garage door opener, a notebook, or a permission slip that’s due tomorrow. She doesn’t ask me. She asks her mother.

She’s on a work call and texting another work colleague before she heads into the office. However, two minutes later, she walks into the kitchen and tells her where it is. She’s right. She’s always right.

I’m clueless. By my own admission, I’m the sitcom dad in sweatpants who can’t find the milk in the fridge without help. My wife runs the operating system. I run a few applications.

This is the part of motherhood I’ve been thinking about all week, with Mother’s Day on Sunday.

This isn’t about cooking dinner or handling the kids. It’s the thing underneath all of it. The noticing.

She knows which account is used to pay certain bills. She knows when everyone needs to go to the doctor. She knows when her daughter is going through a rough patch and how to ask about it without making it weird. She knows the woman at her office who’s carrying the team and never gets credit for it. She knows because she pays attention. That’s the whole trick, and it’s not a trick.

We talk a lot about what mothers do. We talk less about what they see. The seeing is the work. The doing flows from it.

A mother’s attention is so reliable that the whole household gets to relax into not having to pay any of their own. I don’t have to remember when the laundry gets done or when the dog is due for shots, because someone else is remembering for me. That’s not a small grace. That’s the thing that makes a home function. To be fair, I need to be much better at paying attention and keeping up with what’s actually happening around my house.

Her absence makes the labor visible. Her presence makes it invisible. That’s how good she is at it.

Every household has someone like this, and in most of them, it’s still a mother. She’s the one the kids go to, the one her colleagues lean on, the one her husband needs when he’s having a bad day. She’s the one her siblings call at 10 p.m. when they need advice. The receiver of everything.

It’s labor. It’s just unwaged.

What I want to say on Sunday, and what I usually fail to say well, is that the noticing is the love. The remembering is the love. You can buy flowers, cook breakfast, and write a card, and those things are nice. But they don’t quite reach the work itself, because the work isn’t an event. It’s a quality of attention sustained across years.

So this Sunday, if you’re like me, try saying the specific thing. Not “thanks for everything,” because everything is where the meaning goes to hide. Try “thank you for remembering to pay the water bill, because if it was up to me, I’d surely forget.” Try “thank you for helping me be a better husband, step-father, and son.” Try the actual thing she did that you didn’t have to do, because she was already doing it for you.

The mothers in our lives have been paying attention this whole time.

The least we can do is return the favor.

Be seeing you.

The Illini at the NBA Combine

The NBA Draft Combine runs May 10-17 at Wintrust Arena. Three names from this year’s Final Four team are on the invite list: Keaton Wagler, Kylan Boswell, and Andrej Stojakovic.

Wagler’s the lock. The consensus All-American and Jerry West Shooting Guard of the Year is a top-10 projection. He won’t have to scrimmage. The interview rooms are basically a formality, but I’m not savvy enough about the NBA to know which teams need what Wagler provides. In the draft, he’ll go something like 4-8, which is great.

Boswell is the one I’m watching. He averaged a double-double at the Portsmouth Invitational a few weeks back and made the all-tournament team. He’s projected late second round right now. A strong week in Chicago could only help his stock.

Stojakovic has until May 27 to make up his mind, and the smart bet is that he comes back. The three-ball still has to come around (please shoot 500 threes all summer), and another year with Underwood is worth more than a contested 50th pick. He’ll get valuable feedback and then work on his game all summer.

“Sweet Transvestite” on the Tonight Show

The first time I heard the Rocky Horror soundtrack, I was at a neighbor’s house. He had the LP from the movie and we played it like it was a normal album. We were kids. We had no idea what we were doing.

A year or two later, the old show Night Flight ran the “Time Warp” section of the movie. Just dropped it on the screen with no setup. I had no idea exactly what I was seeing. I still hadn’t seen a single frame of the actual film, but I knew the song.

I was transfixed.

Here’s the confession. I have never been to a midnight showing. Not once. No rice, no toast, no shouting at the screen. For somebody who loved those songs that long, that’s an embarrassing gap. I should fix my “virgin” status.

The revival opened last month at Studio 54, which is the perfect address for this kind of show. Luke Evans is Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Stephanie Hsu is Janet. Rachel Dratch is the narrator. Juliette Lewis is Magenta. Michaela Jaé Rodriguez is Columbia. The production picked up nine Tony nominations, including Best Musical Revival.

Last Monday, they took it to The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. They did “Sweet Transvestite.”

I have to admit that’s my favorite song from the show. Has been forever. It’s also the song most likely to make somebody clutch their pearls, and that’s part of why I love it. Written in 1973, it still has teeth.

Luke Evans walked it out on The Tonight Show stage in full regalia and pulled no punches. They put it all out there. It was glorious.

Rocky Horror dared you to be weird in public. It still does. The people who showed up at midnight in 1976 weren’t trying to be respectable, and the ones lining up at Studio 54 right now aren’t either.

Forty-some years of knowing every word without seeing it is long enough, though.

WKRP Comes Home

Baby, if you’ve ever wondered.

A radio station in Cincinnati just changed its call letters to WKRP this week. Yes, that WKRP. The one where the turkeys couldn’t fly.

Here’s what I love about it. The show was set in Cincinnati, but was never broadcast or filmed there. The call letters bounced around. Most recently, a low-power nonprofit in Raleigh put them up for auction this spring.

Grant County Broadcasters won the bidding. They took 97.7 FM and started playing the same kind of music the show used to spin. They ran the theme song on a six-hour loop before flipping the switch Monday morning.

Most of the time, nostalgia is just something we feel sorry for ourselves about. Every once in a while, though, a fictional place gets to become real, and a station that should have existed all along finally does.

That’s pretty cool.

May the Fourth

Two things stuck this Star Wars Day.

The first one I’m still thinking about. Chris Preksta posted on Threads about a trick. Turn down the saturation. Bump the contrast. Switch the audio to Japanese with English subs. The Phantom Menace becomes the best “Space Kurosawa” movie ever made. I haven’t tried it yet, but I think he’s right. Strip out the color and Liam Neeson’s accent, and what’s left should look a lot closer to Hidden Fortress. Lucas always said he was riffing on Kurosawa. Turns out the riff was buried under the color grade.

The other thing is a quieter trend. Nielsen released Q1 viewership data for Disney+, and the sequel trilogy is just... not there. No Force Awakens. No Last Jedi. No Rise of Skywalker. Fans watched 637 million minutes of Star Wars content on May 4 alone, and the most-streamed films were A New Hope, Phantom Menace, and Rogue One.

I’m not sure what any of this means. My guess is that a lot of Disney execs are banking on The Mandalorian and Grogu in a couple of weeks.

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The moment my neighborhood got broadband fiber-optic internet, I opted in and had it connected to the house. It was $76.99 a month. I then added YouTube TV at the crazy cost of $64.99 a month. Comcast had been charging me well over $200 for a cable package and internet, so the financials checked out.

I was paying $20 a month for Netflix, which seemed reasonable. Fast forward to today, and I’m paying a lot more for Netflix and the other streaming services I can’t live without, plus all the other subscription services I need for music, audiobooks, podcasts, passwords, cloud storage, writing, editing, reading, and, now, large language models.

For just my audio and video services, I’m paying way more than $200 a month. It’s gotten a little out of hand.

What I keep getting stuck on is that I canceled cable to escape exactly this predicament. In the 2010s, the problem was that the bundle was the enemy. Bundles forced you to pay for what you didn’t want. The future was à la carte. The future was choice. The post-Tivo/DVR world let me watch a show whenever I wanted to. Scheduled air times and network lineups were a thing of the past.

Not counting my internet provider, I have eleven different bundles now. Sigh.

This week, Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders approved a $111 billion merger with Paramount and Skydance. If regulators sign off (Federal probably, but the states are going to sue), one company will own CNN, CBS, HBO, two of the five biggest movie studios, a piece of TikTok, and who knows what else. It will essentially be the largest concentration of media power in U.S. history. They will be able to set a ridiculous price point that many people will pay. The cable bundle is reassembling itself in front of us. The pieces are smaller. Now they individually bill you instead of bundling in one place. Still, the architecture is essentially the same.

As much as it fell on deaf ears, the Comcast salesperson wasn’t trying to trick people. She was telling the truth. Bundles exist because all-you-can-watch is what most people want most of the time, and because nobody is going to log in to seven different apps to find a movie they sort of feel like watching. The bundle was correct. No one wanted to hear it. I know I didn’t.

So we got what we asked for. We got choice. And what we discovered is that “choice” is not a feature. It’s a job. It’s a tab open in your browser. It’s a shared family Netflix login that a dog sitter from two years ago is somehow still using. It’s wanting to watch that awesome movie or TV show you heard about that everyone needs to watch, and spending hours trying to figure out which service has it.

A byproduct of this streaming era is that it has trained me to watch less. With cable, I’d flip through channels and land on something. Some of my favorite movies came to me that way, by accident, on TBS at 1 a.m. with the commercials cut in funny places. Now everything is searchable, sortable, and queueable. I know what’s available. I have it all. Everything everywhere all at once.

And don’t get me started on the subscriptions I have on YouTube Premium that I can easily scroll through and kill an evening without even trying.

I don’t think any of this is going to get better. The bundles will reassemble. The mergers will close. The streaming economy will solve for what it’s always solved for: making your money disappear and your decisions automatic. The next iteration will be smoother. I’m sure I will pay for them.

There are people who sign up for services for one show and sign out when they are finished. They are constantly keeping up to date with their streaming packages. Maybe, if I were single and living alone, I could do that. Today, ain’t nobody got time for that.

This current landscape of streaming services has also brought back something I thought might actually be dead — piracy. Not that I have tried to download a whole season of, I dunno, Game of Thrones lately, but it is super easy to do so.

What I want is something smaller. I want fewer apps. I want to know what I pay for. I want to easily find the movie I want to watch and not have to search all my streaming services to find it. I want one bill. I want to lose track of an evening because something good was on, not because the algorithm correctly predicted my mood and tucked me in.

I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get what I want.

Be seeing you.

The Minnesota Fighting Illini

The Minnesota Timberwolves have a couple of former Fighting Illini basketball players on their roster, Terrance Shannon, Jr. and Ayo Dosunmu. Both stepped up in the first round of the NBA playoffs to take down the Denver Nuggets.

Last Saturday, Dosunmu scored 43 points off the bench. Thirteen of seventeen from the field. Five for five from three. Twelve for twelve from the line. Forty-two minutes of work, a 27-foot pull-up to put the game away, and an arena chanting MVP at a guy who joined the team two months ago.

Thursday night, Shannon delivered a breakout performance, helping the Timberwolves close out the series. Just like Ayo, he had to start because the Timberwolves have been bitten by the injury bug. He scored a playoff career-high 24 points while adding six rebounds, one assist, and two steals. He shot 9-of-20 from the field and was perfect from the free-throw line.

Watching their individual highlights from the games was just like watching both in an Illini uniform. I keep thinking this is exactly how it looked to anyone who watched them at Illinois. It’s cool to see these two players excelling in the NBA and representing Illinois.

I don’t really watch much NBA, but the highlights (Dosunmu, Shannon Jr.) are fun.

Artemis II Timeline

Most weeks, the internet is a place that takes things from you. This week, it gave back. Hank Green pulled together every NASA photo from the Artemis II mission, all the videos posted to Instagram and YouTube, the official mission schedule, and the public API that tracks the Orion spacecraft's location at any given moment, and he stitched them into an interactive timeline. You scroll through ten days of crewed flight to the moon and back. You see what they saw, when they saw it, where they were when they saw it.

NASA uploads its photos to Flickr with the EXIF data intact. Flickr preserves it. NASA also publishes the spacecraft trajectory through an open API. Three pieces of public infrastructure, free for anyone to use, were sitting there waiting for someone to combine them. Hank Green did.

A King in Washington

I did not watch King Charles address a joint session of Congress this week. Apparently, he was funny.

I’m not particularly invested in the British. But there is something about a 77-year-old king, who buried his mother three years ago and is himself recovering from cancer, walking into the U.S. Capitol to ask a country to keep its word.

He also gifted Trump with an original brass conning tower bell from the HMS Trump, a British Royal Navy submarine from World War II. Buckingham Palace described the bell as a "symbol of friendship.” However, a handful of internet users put forward an amusing theory that the King had actually issued Trump a veiled insult. In the UK, a very common expletive is to call someone a "bell-end" — a term for a stupid, annoying, or contemptible person.

For my money, it’s possibly the most elegant royal trolling in living memory and Trump, moronic as always, loving every second of it.

Gerry Conway, 1952-2026

Gerry Conway has died at 73. If you didn’t read comics in the 1970s and 1980s, you might not know the name. You know the work.

He took over Amazing Spider-Man at 19. He wrote “The Night Gwen Stacy Died” at 22, which most comic historians treat as the moment the Silver Age of comics ended and the Bronze Age began. He co-created the Punisher. He created Ms. Marvel. He created Firestorm, Killer Croc, and Jason Todd, the second Robin. He wrote the first Marvel/DC crossover, Superman vs. Spider-Man. He did all of this in his twenties.

I’m getting to the age now that the people I looked up to, or at the very least admired, are leaving the stage. I don’t like it one bit.

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A Saturday night in Cincinnati. Sixth inning. Eugenio Suárez stepped in against the Red Sox with C.B. Bucknor behind the plate. Strike three called. Suárez tapped his helmet. The screen showed the pitch missing the zone. Ball. Next pitch, another strike three called. Another tap. Another miss. Suárez had challenged his way out of two consecutive strikeouts on back-to-back pitches, and the stadium lost its mind.

John Sadak on the Reds broadcast, delighted: “The loudest cheers of the game, the Reds have hit two homers, come on back-to-back challenges.”

Cheers for a correction. Cheers because an umpire just got publicly told he was wrong. Twice. In a row.

This is Major League Baseball in 2026.

A few weeks into the season, the ABS challenge system is working. Each team gets two challenges. The batter, pitcher, or catcher taps his cap. A graphic plays on the videoboard. Seconds later, the answer appears. Fifty-three percent of the time in spring training (1,800 challenges), the umpire’s call got overturned. More than half the time a player felt strongly enough to burn a challenge, he was right and the ump was wrong.

I’ve watched this unfold off and on for the first few weeks of the season and I keep arriving at the same question. If the technology is the final arbiter of balls and strikes and can make the call in real time, what are we even doing?

Here’s the argument for the status quo. MLB tested full ABS in the minors and found a clear preference among fans, players, and managers for the challenge system over the full robot-ump version. People want to preserve some human element. Pitch framing is a real craft. Some catchers have built careers on it. Going full robot would wipe that out overnight.

I hear it. I don’t care.

The human-element argument meant something when the alternative was nothing. When there was no Hawk-Eye, no 5G network, no animated zone on the scoreboard or on TV. In 1955, a bad strike call was just part of the game. You griped about it, the announcer chuckled, and the game moved on. Nobody knew for sure, so everyone agreed to pretend the umpire did.

We don’t need to pretend anymore. We have the exact pitch location. We have it in real time. We’re putting it on the board every single time a player asks. The league has quietly admitted, by literally building and using the system, that the human-element argument is over. Every overturned call is the league saying out loud, we had this wrong and here’s the proof.

The challenge system for balls and strikes is dumb. MLB doesn’t need it. The correct answer is there with every pitch.

I don’t get the current process. So managers only get two challenges? Why? We’ve decided that two incorrect calls are worth fixing and the rest are fine. What? A hitter gets rung up on a pitch four inches outside in the third inning, his team is out of challenges, too bad. Sit down. The zone was wrong, but the zone is also whatever C.B. Bucknor, currently the worst umpire in the major leagues, feels like today. That’s not how any other job works.

To be fair, most umpires are fine. Most of them are good. But the system we’ve built makes every one of them look worse than they are, because now we see the misses. Every challenge that gets overturned is a little public shaming on a forty-foot screen. Kevin Brown, calling Orioles-Twins on Sunday after Ryan Helsley successfully challenged a ball-four call into a strikeout, yelled “He’s arguing with the robots! You can’t defeat the robots!” when Derek Shelton got tossed for protesting. It was funny. It was also a perfect summary.

So, here’s where I land. Take balls and strikes away from the plate umpire. Give them to ABS. Every pitch. Let the umpire stand there and do the rest of the job, which is plenty. Plays at the plate are his. Checking a swing with the crew chief on a tricky appeal is his. Running the game, keeping pace, handling the weird stuff, all him. That’s real work. That’s the part the robots can’t do.

The pitch framing argument is the one I take most seriously. It’s a real skill. Catchers like Austin Hedges and Sean Murphy have spent their whole careers learning to steal strikes. Taking that away takes something real away from the game. I get it. But we’re already taking it away, two pitches at a time, on the catcher’s own challenge. Let it go.

This isn’t anti-umpire. It’s the opposite. Stop asking them to be the one thing they can’t be, which is perfect on something that can actually be measured. Leave them the judgment calls. A tag at second. A trap in the gap. Catcher’s interference. Whether a runner went around on a full-count check swing with the game on the line. Those calls need a person. Balls and strikes don’t. Especially now with ABS, balls and strikes just don’t need the human element.

Baseball has always been a game that loved its traditions until it didn’t. The mound moved. The DH arrived for both leagues. The pitch clock showed up and, shockingly, the game didn’t devolve into chaos. This one’s easier than those. The technology already exists. The league already trusts it.

The only thing left is to stop asking a guy in a chest protector to squint at a 97-mph cutter and guess.

Be seeing you.

First Light

When you watch the official title sequence for 007 First Light, you might be fooled into thinking there’s a new Bond movie coming.

It’s not a movie, but close enough.

The video game features the original song “First Light,” written and composed by Lana Del Rey and David Arnold. It’s got the slow strings and the punchy horns, and it slides a bit of the old Monty Norman theme into the end of the chorus. I think the song is a fantastic addition to the Bond soundscape. Not better than Adele’s “Skyfall,” but way better than “No Time to Die” by Billie Eilish.

Watch the title sequence again. It’s silhouettes and explosions and abstract smoke, the choreography and visuals someone figured out in 1962 and nobody has improved on since. Perfection.

The Onion Owns Infowars

After 18 months of court fights, the deal is done. The Onion has acquired Infowars. Alex Jones can cry all he wants.

Obviously, satire and comedy won’t fix what Jones did. Nothing can. But watching the machinery that tormented the Sandy Hook families get repurposed as a joke against itself, with a judge’s approval and the families’ blessing, is maybe the closest thing to real justice we’re going to see this year.

Stuck in a Time Loop (or is he?)

Will is stuck in a time loop.

At least, that’s what he thinks. His life is mundane enough that it takes him a while to notice the days repeating. So he tells Elise. She doesn’t believe him, but she helps him anyway. With her encouragement, he finds a way out.

That’s the surface.

Watch it again and the loop starts to come apart. I’m not convinced it was ever a loop. Clues are planted early and they aren’t obvious. You’ll finish the second viewing holding a theory you didn’t have after the first. You might not be any more certain.

I love these kinds of videos.

Truvia Vanilla Liquid Sweetener

I need to tell you about Truvia Vanilla Liquid Sweetener.

I say “need” because this is the kind of product you find and then it just becomes a part of how you do things. You put a single squeeze in a cup of coffee and it tastes like perfect vanilla coffee, not the chemical wince you brace for with most of these kinds of sweeteners. This one tastes like vanilla. Not vanilla-flavored-something. Vanilla.

Additionally, I have added it to an open can of Coke Zero and enjoyed a Vanilla Coke Zero. I’m open to other uses.

A quick disclaimer: I’m not getting paid for this. If Truvia wants to send me a case, I will accept it in the true spirit of journalism.

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After several weeks of college basketball coverage, I thought I’d change it up. I mentioned at the start of this Substack adventure that I’d throw in a few short stories from my upcoming collection, Captured Ghosts. Here’s one about a super spy and bird poop. I hope you like it.

Alex St. John was a spectre.

Recruited out of the Navy SEALS by Special Tactics and Reconnaissance, he became a “Spectre.” He loved the abbreviation. Technically, Special Tactics and Reconnaissance do not exist. He was a spook, an apparition, a ghost. He was a non-person. No one called him Alex. His call-sign was Prospero given to him by a commanding officer who loved The Tempest.

The United States government had plenty of special agents. Prospero was an extra special agent.

He joined the Navy at 17 with a clear goal to become a SEAL. He had spent far too many years being bullied for his skinny legs and braces. After serving several tours in Afghanistan, earning two political science degrees and one in chemical engineering, he was sent to Fairbanks, Alaska, where Special Tactics and Reconnaissance had a secret training facility. Two years at the facility had changed him physically and mentally even more than his SEAL training. His mind was as sharp as a diamond blade, his body lethal with or without a weapon. He was sophisticated and charming. Plus, he was straight out of central casting for male lead roles.

His age was 33, and he was in the most prime condition of his life. He was trained to be a killing machine, but far more than just that. He mastered every martial art, was an expert marksman in practically every form of gun, rifle, or artillery. He could speak thirteen languages fluently, and he beat Magnus Carlsen in chess when he secretly took over for the Bella Grey AI during an exhibition. His knife-throwing skills were slightly better than his ax-throwing. He free climbed El Capitan and replicated Alan Eustace’s skydive from the edge of space. He could hold his breath for twenty minutes which helped immensely when he was freediving in Kona on the big island looking for lost Japanese treasure. He was a world-class athlete, driver, and lover. He could teach philosophy to co-eds and code a catastrophic bug in your promising new start-up application.

Prospero was an Olympic-level swimmer at 200 meters. He could slice through hundreds of meters of water as easily as a hot knife through butter in full SCUBA gear. This time though, he was using the mini-sub. It wouldn’t do to have his wetsuit wrinkle his Tom Ford suit or his Turnbull & Asser shirt and tie.

He was supremely confident in his abilities and was hyper-focused on the mission at hand. Nervousness was a feeling abandoned decades ago. After all, the fate of the world was on his shoulders.

His destination was the private island of billionaire Zander Grossman. An invitation-only party was happening on the island in his extravagantly furnished house. The party was ostensibly for his non-profit environmental organization, PureSky. He had invited hundreds of global warming experts and environmentalists of all stripes to his home to talk a little business and gamble at the poker tables he had set up in his ballroom. It may sound non-threatening and maybe even humanitarian. However, the celebration was anything but altruistic. Grossman wasn’t someone who wanted to stop global warming. He was all about speeding it up.

The mini-sub silently reached the beach, and Prospero stepped onto the sand. He wore the Crockett & Jones Highbury shoes, which weren’t precisely beachwear. He checked his watch, a Seamaster Diver 300M Co-Axial enhanced with half a dozen ways to kill someone, and saw his timing was impeccable.

He pulled his Glock 19 from inside the waistband holster and inspected it. It was reliable, durable, and hidden. He placed it back into its holster and retrieved the forged invitation to the party he was crashing.

He made his way through the underbrush and trees. His mission was to scale a 60-foot cliff face, dispose of any guards, and make his way inside the Grossman estate by blending into the crowd. From there, he was to contact Grossman and make a wager at the poker table that would pique his interest. He knew Grossman would not back down when challenged. Prospero was a master card player in various games, including poker, blackjack, and baccarat. During his training in Alaska, Special Tactics and Reconnaissance flew up a string of World Series of Poker winners for him to play against. Of course, he beat them all.

The plan was not only to beat Grossman but humiliate him in the process in front of his guests. If he also impressed Grossman’s number two, the statuesque blonde model, skier, and polo player, Gisele Satine, all the better. Being the gracious host, Grossman would undoubtedly invite Prospero to stay as his guest offering a room and asking for the chance to win back his earnings. He could not refuse such a fantastic offer. Naturally, Grossman would send a few armed guards to his stateroom in the middle of the night to rough him up and take him to Grossman’s “playroom,” where Prospero would endure hours of torture. Escape would be easy either through Satine or using the laser in his Seamaster. He would confront Grossman, learn of the nuclear weapons drilled into the arctic, and dispatch the billionaire and blow up the control room, cutting off access to polar ice cap melting weapons. The mini-sub could hold two people if they lay on top of each other.

Prospero put the thought of him and Satine in the minisub with nothing but a bikini and his La Perla Grigioperla Lodato blue swim trunks between them out of his mind. He turned his focus on the next objective—scaling the cliff face. He found an excellent spot to start his ascent at the base of a tidal pool. With plenty of handholds, even in the pitch darkness, Prospero climbed up and barely caused a sound as he hopped over a shin-high guardrail made of large rocks.

Grossman trained Rottweilers, so Prospero was on the lookout for guard dogs. He kept low, looking for spotlights and guard towers. He saw nothing. The house was 300 meters away behind a large row of 15-foot-high pines, and he could faintly hear the party in the distance.

He stood up and straightened his tie. Without a sound, a giant white blob landed on his left shoulder. He immediately felt it and instinctively touched it with his right hand. It had a striking color scheme of white and black.

A bird had pooped on Prospero, ruining his expertly tailored suit jacket. He looked up, expecting to see the perpetrator of this indignant act, but was met with more bird poop, this time landing on his face, penetrating his eyes, and completely disorienting him. It threw him off balance just enough for him to stumble on the loose rocks and pitch forward over the tiny wall at the apex of the cliff.

He cracked his head on the rocky edge of the tidal pool and gently slid down into its deepest point. He would never be recovered.

Zander Grossman was killed by Gisele Satine, a secret undercover agent of MI6, before the nuclear warheads could be detonated.

Captured Ghosts is coming soon.

Be seeing you.

Run it Back

Brad Underwood’s pitch to his Illinois roster after the Final Four run was three words. Run it back.

This week, most of them said yes.

Tomislav and Zvonimir Ivisic, plus Jake Davis, are coming back. Of course, David Mirkovic made it official, too. Lastly, Andrej Stojakovic is returning to the Illini for his senior season. That’s five returning players who all started at one point during the course of last year on a team that got to the Final Four. Aside from out-of-eligibility student-athletes like Ben Humrichous and Kylan Boswell, the only real departure is Keaton Wagler, who’s a projected top-ten pick, and even he said that decision was “a very tough” one. You don’t hold on to a top-ten pick. Nobody does.

But look at what Illinois is holding.

Those five players alone accounted for 56.2% of the Illini’s minutes last season, 56.6% of the Illini’s points last season and 58.7% of the Illini’s rebounding last season. This is a team that knows where the seats are in its own locker room.

Isaac Trotter said on Twitter, “Illinois becomes just the third team in the portal era to make a Final Four and bring back at least five rotation players.”

They added one transfer as of this writing: Providence transfer guard Stefan Vaaks, an elite shooter and playmaker. He’s the Wagler replacement. The incoming freshmen are all ready to contribute, with one being a top 35 player in the country (Quentin Coleman) and another (Zavier Zens) being Wisconsin’s 2026 Mr. Basketball. Speaking of Wisky, I’d like Wisconsin guard John Blackwell to join from the transfer portal to make this squad the preseason favorite to win it all.

I’m not booking any tickets for the Final Four in Detroit quite yet, but this upcoming year could be amazing.

Blue in Green on Loop

Miles Davis recorded “Blue in Green” in 1959 for Kind of Blue. The original runs five and a half minutes. Someone who goes by READ TO THIS on YouTube stretched it to two hours, and that version has become the sound of most of my writing this year.

Bill Evans’ piano opens with a chord that feels like someone taking a slow breath before they start a hard conversation. Then Miles comes in, muted, barely pushing any air. Nothing about it is background. It isn’t ambient sound. It’s music just patient enough to let you think.

What I like about the two-hour version is that it removes the moment where a song ends. You sit down, you press play, and, at least for me, the focus comes. An hour later, you look up, and you’ve written something.

If you try it, do me a favor. Don’t have it on while you answer emails. Save it for the kind of work that actually requires you to be alone with a sentence.

The Losing Streak

I try not to spend much time with this newsletter on the president. Most of you didn’t sign up to hear me work through the news cycle, and there are plenty of people doing that better and louder. But Fred Kaplan wrote a piece in Slate this week that I can’t quite stop thinking about, and it’s worth five minutes of your time.

The short version. Trump had the worst weekend of his second term. Viktor Orbán, his favorite European ally, lost his reelection bid in a landslide after sixteen years in power. The Iran peace talks in Islamabad collapsed after one day because Vance, Witkoff, and Kushner flew in, delivered a list of demands, and flew home when Iran said no. Lastly, Keir Starmer, the British prime minister who has tried harder than anyone to stay on the president’s good side, publicly said he was fed up.

Gee, aren’t we all?

The Blog

Quick housekeeping.

If you like Saturday Night Five, there’s a microblog version of this brain happening over at seanmcdevitt.net. The posts there are almost always short little bits of thought or ideas. It’s mostly about whatever caught my eye that week and wouldn’t let go. One day it's a quote I like, another it’s an interesting video.

Bookmark it. Share one you like. All good.

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It was REO Speedwagon two weeks ago. Tom Petty last week. Today, it’s the Rolling Stones.

“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is a song about the gap between desire and necessity. The message is that life won't hand you everything you chase after, but that what you actually need has a way of showing up if you stay open to it. There's a stoic, almost spiritual acceptance woven through the track.

Last Saturday night at Lucas Oil Stadium, Illinois lost to UConn in the Final Four, 71-62. The Illini shot 6-for-26 from three. They shot 6-for-11 at the rim, and that number feels generous because it doesn’t account for the shots that grazed every part of the iron and still didn’t fall. Andrej Stojakovic had a putback that rolled around the entire rim and hung on the back of it for what felt like five seconds before spinning out. Two possessions later, Solo Ball’s three-pointer bounced off the rim three times and rattled in.

That’s the kind of night it was.

I’ve been writing about this team for weeks now. I wrote about rolling with the changes when they were tearing through the bracket. I wrote about the waiting when the Final Four was only a few hours away. Today, it's looking back with a wistful smile.

It was awe-inspiring to see the streets of Indianapolis covered in Illini colors both Friday and Saturday. It was overwhelming inside the stadium, with more than half of the 72,000 fans clad in orange and blue.

I was lucky enough to be in Lucas Oil Stadium on Saturday and watch a team I love play one of the worst offensive games I’ve seen them play all year, on the biggest stage they’ve been on in two decades. And I don’t want to write about it, but I’m going to, because I want to get it all out.

And I want to remember.

The country’s most efficient offense scored 62 points on 1.02 points per possession. That’s the second-worst mark of the season. The worst? Their loss to UConn back in November. Dan Hurley has Illinois’ number. He just does.

It was such a good game, even though the shots weren’t falling. The defense was good enough to win. They held UConn to 35.5% shooting. They outrebounded them 44-37. They forced two scoring droughts longer than five minutes each. During the second one, Illinois went on a 10-0 run and cut a 14-point lead to four. With 1:38 left, Keaton Wagler hit a driving layup to make it 63-59.

It was right there.

Then Silas Demary Jr. ripped away an offensive rebound and Braylon Mullins hit a three that broke every Illini heart in the building. And there were a lot of Illini hearts inside that building.

There’s little doubt this was a national championship caliber team that didn’t have a very good day. Sometimes that’s the way the ball bounces.

They didn’t get blown out. They kept fighting.

I know what it’s like to cheer for a team you love come up short. I watched the cheating North Carolina Tar Heels take down the last Illinois team to reach the Final Four. This one is different. The 2005 team was the best in the country all year, and everyone now knows that the North Carolina squad didn’t even have eligible players in the starting rotation. This team lost to a program that’s won two titles in the last three years and knows exactly how to win in April. UConn didn’t steal anything. They earned it, and Illinois couldn’t make a shot.

So what do we do with all of it?

We remember. Wagler’s 46-point game at Mackey Arena. Stojakovic’s two-way destruction of Texas Tech. Tomislav Ivisic smashing the guitar trophy in Nashville. Zvonimir Ivisic’s poster dunk against VCU that made his brother’s face go full cartoon. David Mirkovic being David Mirkovic with his cowboy hat and his upcoming dangerous summer. Out-Houstoning Houston in Houston. Cutting the nets in the Elite Eight for the first time in 21 years.

The future is bright. Mirkovic should be back. Stojakovic could be a top-15 player in the country. Tomislav Ivisic played his best basketball in March and has more to give. Ty Rodgers is returning. Jake Davis is likely coming back. And there’s a recruiting class coming in with Quentin Coleman, Lucas Morillo, Ethan Brown, and Landon Davis that could give this program another run. Wagler is almost certainly gone to the NBA (He wouldn’t dare come back, would he?). The cupboard isn’t bare. It’s loaded.

The portal opened this week. Underwood and his staff know how to build a roster. They proved it this year. There’s no probation coming. No coaching scandal on the horizon. Just a program that made its third modern-era Final Four and has the infrastructure to get back. Soon.

Next season, a new banner goes up, and All-American Keaton Wagler’s jersey will sit in the rafters, too. These guys will come back for the anniversaries. They’re Illini legends now, no matter how Saturday turned out.

You can’t always get what you want. But sometimes what you get is a team that made you feel more than you expected to feel, a season that reminded you why you care about this stuff in the first place, and a future that looks like it might actually deliver on the promise.

Mick was right about the second part, too. You get what you need.

Be seeing you.

Easter Greetings from the Commander-in-Chief

On Easter Sunday morning, the President of the United States posted an expletive-filled threat to Iran on Truth Social. He promised to destroy their power plants and bridges. He ended the post with “Praise be to Allah.”

On Monday, he doubled down at a press conference, saying the entire country could be taken out in one night. When a reporter asked if targeting civilian infrastructure would be a war crime, Trump said the real war crime was allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

I don’t have anything clever to say about this.

A president openly threatened to destroy a civilization on the holiest day of the Christian calendar, and roughly half the country shrugged.

The View from Artemis

NASA’s Artemis II crew flew around the Moon this week and the photos are already some of the most extraordinary space images I’ve ever seen. The crew captured a shot of the Moon fully eclipsing the Sun from the far side, and it’s the kind of photo that makes you stop scrolling and just stare.

We waited 54 years to send humans back to the Moon and they’re sending back pictures that justify every second of it.

The AI Writing Witch Hunt

Joan Westenberg wrote a piece this week about the growing culture of accusing writers of using AI, and it landed with me. The short version: a debut novelist named Mia Ballard had her career destroyed after Reddit and YouTube decided her book was AI-generated. Her publisher pulled it. Her name was ruined. She says she didn’t use AI. Maybe she’s telling the truth, maybe she’s not.

Westenberg’s point is that nobody actually knows, and the tools people use to make these accusations are garbage. OpenAI shut down its own detection tool because it was worse than a coin flip. Stanford researchers found detectors disproportionately flag non-native English speakers and neurodivergent writers. The whole thing feels like a moral panic dressed up as quality control.

Mediocre writing is not proof of a machine. I think about this more than I’d like.

Remarkably Bright Creatures Trailer

I listened to the audiobook of Shelby Van Pelt’s novel earlier this year on my wife’s recommendation. She’d been telling me about it for a few weeks. I wasn’t sure a book narrated by a giant Pacific octopus sounded like anything I’d be interested in, but after hearing a snippet and diving in, I was totally wrong. It’s a story about grief, a mystery, and a quiet argument that paying attention to people is the best thing you can do for them.

The full trailer dropped this week, with Sally Field as Tova, the widow who works night shifts cleaning a small-town aquarium. Alfred Molina voices Marcellus, the octopus, and that casting alone tells you the filmmakers understood the book. Marcellus is the most perceptive character in the story. You need a voice that carries warmth and weight at the same time, and Molina has that. Lewis Pullman plays Cameron, the drifting young guy who shows up looking for family.

I’m looking forward to watching it on May 8.

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Last weekend, it was REO Speedwagon. This week it’s Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with “The Waiting.”

As the lyrics go, “The waiting is the hardest part.”

It has two meanings for me. Waiting for Illinois to get to another Final Four and waiting for the game this evening to start. In my waiting, I think back to the previous seasons of the modern era that made it to the Final Four: 1989 and 2005.

I wasn’t following college basketball that closely in 1989, but Illinois had made six straight NCAA Tournaments before making the Final Four. In 2005, they’d made five straight. I’m not sure about after 1989, but after 2005, the feeling in Champaign was that it was the start of Illinois Basketball having great teams year after year.

That did not happen, and Illinois remains the best program never to win a title. Sigh.

Things worked out about as perfectly as possible for Illinois in the tournament this year. As nice as it would’ve been to be in the Midwest region, the path the team ended up with was the most ideal and, honestly, may have been a blessing in disguise, as the squad plays better in road environments.

Illinois was in the South Region as a #3 seed and the bracket broke favorably:

• Penn without Ethan Roberts and TJ Power coming off sickness.

• VCU upsetting North Carolina, then starter Nyk Lewis went down in the first minute.

• The matchup against a Houston defense that hadn’t beaten a top 15 NET or KenPom opponent all season.

• Iowa upsetting Florida and Nebraska.

• UConn upsetting Duke and allowing for a rematch.

• And now Illinois is favored by sports prognosticators to beat UConn and reach the championship game.

Even better, the path involved beating Fran McCaffery, Kelvin Sampson, and Iowa. Now there’s a revenge game with Dan Hurley and UConn, and potentially a revenge game with Michigan. All while Bruce Pearl has to sit in the studio and talk about this great Illini team.

This upcoming weekend could settle all family business. I can’t wait. (Dan Hurley is Carlo Rizzi in this scenario.)

Maybe, just maybe, it’s the start of something big.

. . .

Getting to the Final Four requires things to go right for weeks. The bracket is designed to break you. You can be the best team in the country and lose because a college kid made a bad pass and another college kid made a three from practically half-court. It happens every year. I watched Iowa do it to three different teams. Nothing in this tournament is given, so I was anxious before the Elite Eight game.

Illinois started off horribly against Iowa, and I was stressing out. Our dog, Rocco, was reacting to me, a little whiny, and acting like he needed a walk. I needed a walk too. So, we headed out. During the game.

I followed a little bit via my phone, but I mostly did not see how the game was going. Rocco and I took the long way around, stopped several times to check things out, chase a few birds, say hi to some other dogs, and generally stretch our legs. We came back to the house, and I was immediately told that the team started playing better when I was not watching. Made perfect sense.

I sat down and watched a couple of plays. I watched Iowa sink a couple of three-balls, and I immediately got up, walked right out the front door, and walked around my neighborhood block a couple of times.

I came back in the middle of halftime with Illinois down by four. I settled in and hoped for another second-half explosion.

Neither team could get any separation. Finally, Tomi had a short jumper that went from front rim to front rim to front rim... in with 6:30 left. He then blocked a shot on the other end. Illinois came back down, went right back to Tomi, he scored again, and suddenly, Illinois is up five with 5:43 left.

I wasn’t sitting anymore. I was pacing and doing the whole “C’mon” under my breath. We extended the lead. Keaton Wagler had 20 plus points. Ultimately, he matched Iowa’s Bennett Stirtz nearly shot-for-shot. Andrej Stojakovic shut off Stirtz's shooting space and forced the ball out of his hands. He didn’t score for the final nine minutes of the game.

Illinois closed out the game at the free-throw line and officially dispatched Iowa to win the South Regional, with Wagler earning Most Outstanding Player honors of the South Region.

First Final Four in twenty-plus years. There may have been a few tears.

. . .

Brad Underwood’s team beat Houston in the Sweet 16 in Houston. And then they handled a hot Iowa team, 71-59, and Keaton Wagler, my best friend, played 37 minutes, scored 25, and looked like he’d been winning NCAA Tournament games his whole life.

Now it’s UConn, the two-time defending national champions. Tarris Reed Jr. is averaging nearly 22 points and 14 rebounds in this tournament, and UConn won its Elite Eight game on a shot that defied probability by every measure. Hurley and this team know how to do this. They’ve done it twice.

The game won’t be easy, but Illinois has been the best offensive team in the country all season. The defense, which was a real concern heading into March, has been unrecognizable and effective in the tournament. They’re not the same team they were in November.

Teams that figure themselves out in March are the ones you remember.

The 2005 team is my touchstone for how this can go. I’ve watched the Illinois versus Arizona Elite Eight game ending dozens of times. Deron Williams tying the game in regulation. Dee Brown going a thousand miles an hour. Roger Powell hitting a shot with his eyes closed. That team had that special something. Something you could feel through the television.

Over the course of this NCAA Tournament, this one does too.

I’m closer to 60 than I want to admit, and I’ve been watching Illinois basketball for decades. The last time they were in the Final Four, I was in the tail end of my 30s, and I thought: this is what winning it all feels like, this is what I’ll be able to tell people about. And then cheating North Carolina happened.

This year’s team is peaking at exactly the right time.

Saturday night in Indianapolis. Two games to immortality.

Be seeing you.

Yeah. I think she’s back.

The full trailer for Supergirl dropped this week, and I’ve watched it three times. The song running through it is “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted” by Jimmy Ruffin, and whoever made that choice understood the assignment completely.

Milly Alcock’s Kara is a survivor of Krypton who, unlike Clark, actually remembers what it was like there. She drinks. She leaves Earth. Apparently, Krypto gets hurt, and the plot, with Supergirl as John Wick, is not what I expected. That’s a different Supergirl than we’ve had before, and I’m here for it.

Side note, Jason Momoa was pretty much born to play Lobo, a character I normally couldn't care less about. Hopefully, he’s in it a lot.

June 26. I’ll be there.

To the Moon, Artemis II

Artemis II launched April 1 from Kennedy Space Center, carrying NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a free-return trajectory around the Moon. It will be the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972.

It is not lost on me that they chose April Fool’s Day to launch this mission.

I watched the rocket's feed from the pad at Cape Canaveral, and I felt something I didn’t expect: awe. We’ve been waiting a long time to go back.

Godspeed, Artemis II.

Bread Elastic Laces Are Not a Joke

A year or so ago, I read a review of Bread elastic shoelaces. I spent a few bucks on Amazon and put them on my everyday Nikes. I have not gone back to regular laces since. The fit is perfect every time. There’s no fussing with them when I’m half-awake heading out the door at 6 a.m. to do my YMCA workout.

These are great. That’s all.

Cardinals Baseball is Up and Running

The Cardinals opened at home this year for the first time in a while, hosting Tampa Bay at Busch Stadium last week. They took the series two games to one, putting up 22 runs in three games. The pitching was a mess, but the offense looked alive in ways I hadn’t fully expected from this group. JJ Wetherholt hit a walk-off in the series. Jordan Walker is apparently drowning out the noise and playing well. Nolan Gorman hit a home run that I watched on my phone a few times.

It’s a rebuilding year. I know that. But baseball is back, and the Cardinals won their first series, and that’s a good start.

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Yesterday morning, for some strange reason, I kept hearing one song over and over in my head.

“Roll with the Changes” by REO Speedwagon.

REO Speedwagon, who formed in Champaign, Illinois, in 1967, and who named themselves after a flatbed truck they learned about in a University of Illinois history class, wrote one of my favorite songs. It has one of the best keyboard/guitar solos ever recorded. God bless, Gary Richrath.

All I kept hearing was the chorus: “(Keep on rollin’) Ooh roll with the changes / Keep on rollin’ (Keep on rollin’, keep on rollin’).” I’m not sure why it got stuck in my head, but it probably has something to do with what I want this Illinois basketball team to do.

Keep on rolling. Don’t stop. There’s more road ahead.

Of course, if you’d ask me six weeks ago, I’d have a different story to tell. Six weeks ago, I was a bad fan.

I had made a deal with myself somewhere in that foggy stretch between the Michigan State overtime loss and the early exit at the Big Ten Tournament. I decided that nothing this Illinois team did in the regular season would count unless it was validated by the NCAA Tournament and getting to the Sweet 16.

I knew it was a terrible way to watch basketball, even as I was doing it. This team won 15 Big Ten games. They finished 13th in the country. They played through injuries and the weight of expectation and still earned a 3 seed. This year has been one of the best regular seasons I’ve watched as an Illini fan, and I’ve been watching a long time. But I’d let excitement harden into expectation, and expectation into dread, and somewhere along the way I stopped having fun watching a really good basketball team. Those overtime losses just wore me down.

First up, the NCAA Tournament game against Penn.

Illinois put up 105 points in the first round. That’s the most any Illini team has ever scored in the history of the NCAA Tournament. The previous record was 96 points, set back in 2001. They poured in 65 second-half points, which shattered the previous record for most points in a half in tournament play. That record was 53. The winning margin of 35 points is the second all-time in program history.

Thirty-seven field goals, third all-time. Fifteen three-pointers, second all-time. Forty-eight rebounds, fourth all-time.

And then there’s David Mirkovic.

He dropped 29 points, fourth most ever by an Illinois player in the tournament. Eleven field goals, third all-time. The 17 rebounds he pulled down are the most any Illini player has ever had in an NCAA tournament game. Let that sit for a second. Not James Augustine. Not Brian Cook. Not Roger Powell. Mirkovic. He owns that record now.

For one of the first times in a long time, Illinois came ready to play. They looked like one of the best teams in the country.

And belief started to creep back in.

Round two was against a pesky VCU squad. I was nervous as the game started. Getting to the Sweet 16 was what I had considered a successful season. It didn’t help that I had a house full of guests watching the game. My wife made fun of me as I twirled a FamILLy rubber wristband like it was a rosary.

I continued to be nervous until Zvonimir Ivisic blocked a dunk, ran the full length of the court, took a feed from Kylan Boswell, and dunked the ball so emphatically that I jumped from my seat.

The score was 46-32. Fifteen minutes left. The game was technically not over. But it was over, and everyone in that building knew it. What broke something loose in me wasn’t the dunk itself. It was the reaction. His brother Tomislav’s face. His teammates on the bench. The pure joy of it.

Man, I needed that.

The Illini handled VCU the way good teams handle opponents they’re better than. The defense was relentless. VCU shot 35 percent and scored their worst offensive total of the season. Brad Underwood earned his 300th career Division I win. And next up was No. 2 seed Houston in the Sweet 16.

I told myself I was going to enjoy every second of it.

The game against Houston was advertised as a Final Four-caliber matchup. It delivered.

The first half was a lesson in defensive stops. Both teams combined for 46 points, the lowest-scoring opening half of any tournament game in 2026. Illinois was holding Houston to almost nothing, and Houston’s defense, which came in ranked second in the country, was doing the same to the Illini. Andrej Stojakovic sparked two separate runs off the bench and gave Illinois a 21-14 lead at one point, but Houston ended the half on a 6-0 burst, with Kingston Flemings drilling a three at the buzzer. Illinois led 24-22 at the break.

The second half started, and Illinois went on a blistering 17-0 run over about seven minutes. Jake Davis scored five points during the stretch. Mirkovic and Ben Humrichous capped it with back-to-back threes. When Houston finally ended the drought, almost seven minutes had passed since they’d scored. The lead was 44-26 with 12 minutes left. That run, by the way, was the longest any Houston team had allowed in eight seasons. The Cougars never got the game closer than seven points after that.

Wagler had 13 points and 12 rebounds, a career-high on the boards and his first double-double of the season. Mirkovic added 14 and 10. Wagler and Mirkovic are the first pair of freshman teammates to each have a double-double in the same NCAA tournament game since freshmen became eligible in the 1972-1973 season. Stojakovic finished with 13. Tomislav Ivisic chipped in nine points, three rebounds, three assists, and had a dagger three.

Final score: Illinois 65, Houston 55.

Houston shot 34 percent from the floor. They got two free throw attempts the entire game, a number so small it’s almost hard to believe. Illinois owned the glass 43-34. On a night when the Illini didn’t shoot it particularly well themselves, they completely dictated how the game was played.

This was the best win of the Brad Underwood era. Arguably the best NCAA Tournament win since the 2005 Arizona comeback. Underwood’s nine tournament wins at Illinois now tie him with Bruce Weber and Harry Combes, three behind the program record held by Lou Henson. When people were questioning whether Underwood could lead a deep March run, Thursday night was the answer.

Up next is Iowa, who shocked No. 1 seed Florida and then No. 4 seed Nebraska in the other South Regional semifinal. Ben McCollum and the Hawkeyes have surprised everyone. Illinois beat them 75-69 in Iowa City back in January, building an 18-point lead before Iowa made it close late. Expect more of the same. Illinois has the size, the depth, and the defense to handle this matchup.

The Flying Illini, who made the Final Four in 1989, became mythic partly because of what they did in March. The Dee-Deron-Luther team from 2005 almost went all the way. Teams get remembered for how they finish. Keep winning. That’s all that separates this roster from being talked about in the same breath as those teams forever.

This team is more talented, top to bottom, than any Illini squad since 2005. Wagler is a consensus freshman All-American and the best freshman player ever at Illinois. Mirkovic is a monster. Stojakovic gives them a reliable third option. Ivisic is a 7-footer who has hit 102 three-pointers over the past two seasons, which is the most in the nation at that height. Hometown hero Boswell is the floor general. They have size and shooting, and now they defend at a high level. They are complete.

Against Houston, in a hostile building, against one of the best defensive teams in the country, they found a way to win. Before the game started, I firmly believed the winner was going to the Final Four. I said it out loud the moment the final buzzer sounded.

The winner was Illinois.

They’ve got Iowa later today. I’ve watched this team work through injuries, too many overtime heartbreaks, and a regular season full of highs and lows. I watched them come into the postseason and blow up record books against Penn, then turn around and suffocate one of the best defensive teams in America. They are playing their best basketball right now.

The Final Four is in Indianapolis. I think this team will find a way to be one of the last teams dancing.

“Roll with the Changes” is about accepting what’s in front of you and moving with it rather than against it. It’s the rare arena rock song that doubles as decent life advice. I spent six weeks fighting this team’s season in my head, demanding outcomes instead of watching basketball. That’s over now. I’m rolling with it.

Watching them these last two weeks, something has shifted. My bad-fan anxiety is gone. What’s left is this: I love this team. I love watching them play. And I think they’re about to do something this program hasn’t done in 21 years.

Be seeing you.

Harry Potter and Philosopher’s Stone Trailer

HBO dropped the first teaser trailer for its Harry Potter series, and the surprise at the end is that the show is coming on Christmas Day, not sometime in 2027 as everyone had assumed.

The show stars Dominic McLaughlin as Harry, with John Lithgow as Dumbledore, Paapa Essiedu as Snape, and Nick Frost as Hagrid.

The plan is one book per season, seven seasons total, using Rowling's original title for the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, rather than the American title that the movies went with. I assume each season will be renamed as if this series is really season long adaptations of each book.

Lithgow as Dumbledore feels weird. Additionally, the controversy around Essiedu's casting and Rowling's involvement as executive producer isn't going away.

I still haven’t decided if I’m going to watch this.

Cardinals Opening Day

The Cardinals opened the 2026 season at Busch Stadium on Thursday and got a win. That was nice.

The roster going into this season is mostly youth-focused, with new President of Baseball Operations Chaim Bloom starting his first full year running the front office and top prospect JJ Wetherholt breaking camp with the big club. Nice home run, kid.

This is a rebuild year dressed up in Cardinal red. I don’t say that as a criticism. Sometimes a rebuild is the honest and correct thing to do, and the fans who show up over the course of 162 games deserve to know what they’re rooting for: a future that isn’t here yet, and a present that might surprise you.

Grandma's Vanilla Creme Mini Sandwich Cookies

I want to be clear that I’m talking about the specific Grandma’s brand mini vanilla creme sandwich cookies that come in the little blue bag, typically found near the checkout lane or in a vending machine, and that I am not embarrassed about any of this.

There is something scientifically correct about the ratio of cookie to filling in that product. It is not too sweet. It is not too dry. The miniature scale means you eat six before you’ve registered that you’ve started. The vanilla creme is not trying to be fancy. It has one job and it does that job with the confidence of something that has been around since before you were born.

I could write about a more respectable snack. I chose not to.

Introverse Review

I sent my review of Basement Alchemy and the new album Introverse to Shai Pelled (who is basically Basement Alchemy) and he sent a nice note back about how much he loved it and that he’ll share it with his audience.

It made my afternoon.

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Here’s a bit of harsh truth. Occasionally, I used to find new music through Instagram Reels. I know. I know. But it was during the phase when I was constantly watching Reels.

More than a year ago now, the clip that caught my ear was maybe thirty seconds long, with a guitar riff that had a specific texture that felt both enormous and intimate at once. The guy started singing, and I was impressed. It was a slow-burning alt‑rock track with big harmonies. I stopped scrolling.

The song was “Zero to One,” and the artist was Basement Alchemy.

I learned very quickly that Basement Alchemy is the project of Shai Pelled, who started the whole thing in a London basement with a microphone and some YouTube covers. By the way, his covers of The Cure’s “Lovesong,” Linkin Park’s “Burn it Down,” and R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” are amazing. The origin story matters more than it might seem. All of what you hear in his original music carries that sound of one person figuring out what they want to say and then doing it.

He’s a one-man band.

It’s the same ethos Wolfgang Van Halen brought to his personal musical project, Mammoth. The difference is that Basement Alchemy has been doing it longer, with less fanfare, and with a catalog that deserves significantly more attention. I’m trying to change that.

His debut record opens with a song called “The Optimistic Road,” which could be the title of his whole musical endeavor. There’s a string arrangement underneath a rocking riff that makes it feel cinematic. Critics have drawn comparisons to Queen, A Perfect Circle, and Tame Impala. He cites the Beatles and grunge in general as influences. He works in the space where those influences meet rock and pop. I’d call it 1990s alternative rock pushed into the 2020s.

One of my favorite things from last year was The Basement Alchemy – Live from the Basement. The video was one of the coolest watches I had seen in 2025. I love how he not only played every instrument but also crafted the video to look like a full band, even though it’s just one guy playing everything.

Which brings me to his latest album, Introverse. I’m writing this having spent time with an advanced copy. I’m one of a few hundred people who were able to get a signed physical CD months before the release, and I’m honored to say I’m acknowledged in the liner notes for my early faith in Pelled. I want to be honest because this isn’t a puff piece from someone with a vested interest in hype. It’s a genuine listen from someone who has followed this project and wants more people to find it.

The album sits in the lineage of Basement Alchemy’s previous work, In Spirals/Heads, In Spirals/Tails, and especially Changing Colors, while feeling like a natural evolution rather than a reinvention. If Changing Colors was the album where everything clicked into place (and in my opinion, tracks like “Miracle“ and “Zero to One” remain the high-water mark of his catalog), Introverse feels like the morning after a breakthrough. It’s settled and inward-looking. The title says it all.

The sonic fingerprint is early Collective Soul, filtered through a modern indie-rock lens. The first single, “How to Have a Good Day,” is the best song of the collection. It’s the album’s most melodic song with the most accessible sound and a fantastic riff. I hear the Beatles influence here and it’s completely natural. “My Mind” wears its Collective Soul influence (The “Shine”-era riff is unmistakable) on its sleeve and is better for it. “Are You Real?” might be Shai’s best vocal on the album. He effortlessly moves from his straight singing voice to his head voice.

The B-sides gifted with the early copy, “Retired & Re-Energized” and “Underneath the Light,” are strong enough that I wish they’d made the proper album. That’s a minor complaint, but I do hope he adds them as singles after Introverse comes out officially in October. In the meantime, I just made my own playlist and added the tracks like it was 2012, and I’m making yet another playlist in iTunes.

After listening to the full album for a few days, what stays with me is the ambition underneath the intimacy. These are songs that want to say something and reach for something larger. Just like the rest of the entire Basement Alchemy catalog, Introverse feels like the work of a singular creative genius.

In fact, I think that’s the whole point.

Be seeing you.

Three Reasons Illinois Makes the Final Four

Since Selection Sunday, I’ve been sitting in my feelings about Illinois Basketball. So, here are my three reasons why Illinois makes the Final Four.

Yes, I’m going out on a limb writing this before their game against VCU tonight. Deep breath. Here we go:

One: This team has been built for March. The Illini have gone through enough adversity this season to know how to respond when things get hard. Tournament basketball rewards teams that don’t panic. This group doesn’t panic.

Two: Keaton Wagler just won Big Ten Freshman of the Year. You don’t win that award without being something special. A freshman who performs at that level in a conference that hard is exactly the kind of player who outperforms expectations in the tournament, because he has nothing to prove and everything to gain.

Three: The bracket will break right for someone. It always does. This is a team capable of beating anyone in the country on a given night. That’s all you need.

I’m not predicting a championship. I’m predicting a run. There’s a difference, and right now it feels significant.

Please let this be the year…

Bruce Pearl

Speaking of Selection Sunday, I dislike Bruce Pearl. I’m not the only one. To be fair, I hardly ever give him a second thought, but then there he was doing his schtick on CBS.

Will Leitch wrote a whole column in The Athletic apoplectic about Pearl on the Selection Sunday show. This is the meat of it:

As someone who grew up an Illinois basketball fan in the 1990s, I’ve been trying to solve the Pearl riddle for most of my life, from all the way back when he was an assistant coach for Iowa, where, frustrated that he was unable to land prized recruit Deon Thomas (who is now 55 years old), he doctored allegations in such a venal, chaotic way that it ruined several people’s lives and careers for decades, including his own. (The definitive account of the Bruce Pearl-Deon Thomas fiasco was reported by Daniel Libit at Deadspin more than a decade ago; the scandal led to Pearl being cast out of the sport for nearly a decade before clawing his way back from Southern Indiana and Wisconsin-Milwaukee to Tennessee and ultimately Auburn.)

What I couldn’t understand about Pearl, for years, was how cheerfully shameless he was. No matter what happened to him, no matter what he was caught doing, Pearl always, always doubled down. He always assumed it would all work out for him.

This struck me as no way to live. It was less about the obvious moral failings involved — though there was that — and more about how this sort of strategy seemed so clearly doomed to fail. The old joke about Pearl was that while every other successful coach was driving 80 in a 65 mph zone, Pearl was driving 125 mph. Sure, he’d likely get caught at some point, but not, the way he saw it, if he simply got where he was going before you did.

But that can only work so many times. After too many scandals — and Pearl has so, so many — polite society has no choice but to cast you out. You can’t outrun the police car forever. Eventually, the world finds you out.

Nope. Pearl was right, and I was wrong. Pearl knew that he didn’t need to hide his deeds from the world. He just needed the world to catch up with him — to realize that pretending there was some sort of society that held us all together was a chump’s game. Pearl broke every rule. But he was smart enough to realize the world was starting, it turned out, not to care about rules anymore. Nobody checks for speeding anymore. Nobody cares!

Why is this guy the face of college basketball?

Brand New Day

The Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer dropped this week and I’ve watched it a couple of times now, which probably tells you everything you need to know about where I’m at with this.

Four years after No Way Home wiped everyone’s memory of Peter Parker, we find him doing the only thing that makes sense: being Spider-Man. It’s an interesting starting point and seems about right.

And then the trailer gives you approximately fifty other things to think about.

The Punisher’s back, in his battle van. The Scorpion shows up. I’m pretty sure that was the Tarantula for half a second. There are Hand ninjas, which means maybe we see Daredevil? Peter has a class with the Hulk. Is he mutating? Hey, look, Tramell Tillman from Severance is in there, too.

I have no idea how this all comes together, but it looks great.

He Doesn’t Know What He’s Doing

Steven Beschloss –

The man sitting behind the Resolute Desk is out of his mind. This person possesses the title of Commander-in-Chief. This person is “deciding” how to conduct a war against Iran that he started. He does not know what he’s doing.

This is not just my opinion. I urge you to watch this short montage (one minute and 47 seconds) of Donald Trump’s mind-bending and deeply alarming contradictions showcased within a matter of minutes. It was assembled by CNN and shown by anchor Katie Hunt in an effort to make sense of his position on allies taking part in re-opening the Strait of Hormuz. His frustration over their sensible reluctance is obvious.

But what this clip really provides is fresh evidence of Trump’s scale of derangement, his inability to think or act strategically, and his utter lack of fitness to be sitting in our Oval Office. That’s been true for a long time, but it has become increasingly clear.

He does know one thing… a war with Iran keeps the Epstein files out of the news.

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It is a difficult thing being a fan. To be so invested in a team that every mistake is total heartbreak and every win is expected, never celebrated.

I’m watching the Illinois-Maryland game at home with my wife a few days ago. The team did something dumb. I slap my knee a bunch of times and say, “We can’t lose to this terrible Maryland team!” It probably looked like a tantrum. My wife hates it when I do this kind of thing. In the moment, I don’t know if I’m in the wrong by getting excited or if she’s overreacting. In any case, she was like, “I can’t watch games with you.”

The honest answer is probably that I’m not wrong for getting excited about the team. I think that’s part of loving sports. However, the way it comes out consistently makes the person next to me miserable.

That’s no good.

I’m not wrong for being a passionate fan, but she’s also not overreacting. She just reached her limit with something that’s been unpleasant for her over time because this isn’t just a one-time thing with me.

Illinois won, and, of course, my tiny tantrum had zero effect on the game. Also, it’s good to remember that there’s no “we” here when I say “We can’t lose.” I’d also like to apologize to any Maryland fans. You have a good coach and a good program. Next year should be much better.

In any case, I need to stop being so passionate that it comes out so negatively. The bottom line is that there’s probably a healthier version of fandom available to me. That’s easy to say and harder to do.

Why?

Because the real reason is that it’s not really about sports at all. It’s about emotional maturity. And that is something a lot of us are still very much in the middle of figuring out. Including me.

So, what actually is emotional maturity? It's usually thrown around as an accusation. No one says something like, “Boy, he’s not emotionally mature.” They say, “He’s such a baby,” or “He can’t control himself,” and “He doesn’t think before he speaks.”

Emotional maturity is the ability to recognize what you’re feeling, understand where it’s coming from, and choose how to respond rather than simply react. Notice that word: choose. It’s the critical one. The feeling itself isn’t the issue. Having feelings is not the problem either. Emotional maturity addresses the gap between feeling and what you do next.

A mature emotional response doesn’t mean you don’t feel things deeply. It doesn’t mean you become some kind of serene, unflappable presence who watches sports with the detachment of a monk. It means you feel the frustration and still decide how big a room to give it.

Basically, it’s the difference between being emotionally reactive and emotionally responsive. Reactive is my knee-slap tantrum. Responsive is the exhale, the pause, the “come on” muttered quietly to yourself before you move on. Same feeling underneath. Very different output.

The mechanics of emotional maturity are more practical than they sound.

It starts with awareness and noticing what’s happening inside you in real time. For me, I find that to be genuinely difficult, especially when the stimulus is fast, like a bad turnover with two minutes left in a close game. The emotional brain moves quicker than the thinking brain.

The internal mechanism that bridges that gap must be an internal pause button. There’s a fraction of a second between stimulus and response. That’s when the pause button is pushed. It can be a breath. A beat. Even holding a token like a calming stone can be the trigger. That tiny interruption changes everything. It doesn’t eliminate the frustration. It just gives you back authorship over what happens next.

Emotionally mature people don’t blame their feelings on someone else. They have control.

In a relationship, emotional maturity is incredibly important.

Every relationship has what you might call an emotional weather pattern. It’s the general climate that forms between two people over time. Individual moments contribute to that pattern, small deposits and withdrawals made constantly, most of them barely noticed. The knee-slap is a withdrawal. Not a catastrophic one on its own, but it can compound. My wife didn’t suddenly reach her limit during the Illinois game. She reached it because my reaction was the latest in a long series of games where the couch became a stressful place to be. The “accumulated bad weather” is how emotional immaturity damages relationships.

Emotional maturity, practiced consistently, does the opposite. It tells my partner that she’s safe next to me. I have my own feelings, but I am not going to make them your problem. That is a gift in a long-term relationship. It creates the kind of ease and trust that is genuinely hard to manufacture any other way.

The good news is that emotional maturity is not fixed. It’s a skill. It gets built.

The most effective starting point is simply naming what you’re feeling, in the moment, out loud or internally. Not “this is bad” or “this is frustrating” but the actual emotion: I am anxious. I am scared this team is going to break my heart again. Whatever it is. Naming it engages the thinking side, which literally calms the emotional side.

Beyond that, reflection matters. After the moment has passed, ask yourself the question: Where did that come from? The goal is to understand the pattern well enough to interrupt it next time.

I think emotional maturity might be one of the most consequential things a person can work on. I’m well aware of how an emotional outburst affects others around me. I’m good in most areas and poor in others. I’m not perfect and no one really is.

There are people I admire who share a certain quality. They have opinions. They have preferences. They have frustrations, fears, and concerns. But when those feelings arrive, they seem to have a settled, adult relationship with them. They feel things without being at the mercy of them. That’s what I want. That’s the thing worth chasing.

Illinois won the game. I sat on the couch with my knee radiating frustration, and my wife was out of the room, deciding she’d had enough.

She wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t wrong either, not for being a fan. But being a fan does not excuse having emotional outbursts.

I’m going to work on the pause. I’m going to try using a worry stone or another token to help regulate my emotions. I’m going to remember that the person next to me on the couch did not sign up to absorb the emotional outbursts of her crazy husband.

And the next time Illinois does something dumb, which will be soon, because... sports. I’m going to try the long exhale, rolling the totem in my hand, and the quiet “come on.”

This isn’t easy, but it matters. More than the score does.

Be seeing you.

The Kid Nobody Wanted

When Keaton Wagler committed to Illinois, he was the 150th-ranked prospect in the country. Two high-major offers. That was it. Most programs didn’t give him a second look. Tyler Underwood saw something the rest of college basketball missed and then showed his Dad.

Keaton Wagler just won Big Ten Freshman of the Year.

The 6-foot-6 guard from Shawnee, Kansas, averaged 17.9 points, 4.9 rebounds, and 4.3 assists while shooting 41 percent from three. Remember when he scored 46 at Purdue? He broke the Illinois freshman scoring record with 555 points on the season. He was named First-Team All-Big Ten by both coaches and media. He is one of only two freshmen in the entire country averaging at least 18 points, five rebounds, and four assists. The other guy is Duke’s Cameron Boozer, one of the most recruited players in recent memory.

Wagler is only the fifth Illini since 1986 to win the conference’s freshman honor. He joins Corey Bradford, Brian Cook, D.J. Richardson, and Kofi Cockburn.

That is a very short, very good list.

I look forward to seeing his jersey in the rafters next year.

They’re Doing Something with Firefly

I don’t want to get my hopes up. I am absolutely getting my hopes up.

Nathan Fillion has been posting a series of amusing videos recruiting his old Firefly castmates, Gina Torres, Morena Baccarin, Summer Glau, Jewel Staite, Sean Maher, Adam Baldwin, for… something. One by one. There’s a countdown. The announcement is due tomorrow.

He’s specifically ruled out convention appearances, podcasts, and crossovers.

Firefly ran for one season in 2002. Eleven of its fourteen produced episodes aired before Fox cancelled it. It developed a cult following that has refused to let go for over twenty years. There was a movie in 2005. There have been comics. The cast has spent two decades doing convention panels together.

Whatever this is, it looks like the whole crew is in.

I will be genuinely shocked if it’s a rebooted series or another movie, mostly because many of these actors are committed to other shows.

What do I think? It’s going to be something animated.

We Lost Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons died on February 21st. He was 77.

He wrote lots of books, but the one he’ll be best remembered for is Hyperion.

If you haven’t read Hyperion, I want to be careful not to overexplain it, because the structure is part of the experience. The short version is that the novel is built like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It features a group of pilgrims traveling toward something terrible, each telling their story along the way. It won the Hugo Award in 1989. It’s simply one of the best science fiction books of the 20th century. The Fall of Hyperion completes their story.

The author might have gone off the deep end in the last few years of his life. Simmons got driven crazy by watching too much Fox News after September 11th. Seriously. However, if you can separate the art from the artist, I highly recommend reading Hyperion (and maybe Carrion Comfort and The Terror, too).

Perspective is Everything

Dan Oshinsky –

A week ago, something pretty remarkable happened in the golf world that, if you’re not a die-hard golf fan, you almost certainly missed.

Shane Lowry, a former major winner, led the Cognizant Classic by three strokes with three holes to play on Sunday. And then, on back-to-back holes, he hit shots into the water. He went from being a near-certain tournament winner to finishing second.

A few days later, I was listening to “The Tony Kornheiser Podcast,” when Steve Sands, a golf commentator, told this story about chatting with Lowry after the tournament:

He told me a cute story on Tuesday. He said, “We’re headed home, we’re getting to the house, and everybody realizes how upset Dad is and how upset I am. Nobody’s saying anything, and my 9-year-old daughter looks at me and says, ‘Daddy, what’s wrong with second?’”

When you spend enough time inside your own work, everything can seem overwhelming and every detail precious. That’s usually the moment you need an outside voice who can step back and ask the simplest question in the room: Why does this actually matter?

Because when you’re too close to the thing, perspective disappears. An outside set of eyes can reset the whole picture. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Which brings me back to Shane Lowry. Yes, it was a brutal way to lose a tournament. No golfer dreams about finishing second. But second place still paid $726,400.

Not much wrong with second place.

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As March once again comes roaring in and college basketball is ramping up to its most prestigious event, I’m excited to see the University of Illinois in the thick of things. This year’s team is headed for a 2 seed and could make an incredible run. I know I’m excited.

College basketball is a series of cycles. Sometimes you’re riding high for a few years, and sometimes you’re on the downward slope, hoping to head back up the mountain of greatness. Illinois Athletic Director Josh Whitman talked about climbing that mountain in 2016:

When faced with climbing the biggest mountains, I know only one approach to take: look not up, because the size of the task might be daunting, but instead look down and focus on placing one foot in front of the next, trusting that you will reach your destination by concentrating on each small step to get there. In that way — with steady, tough progress — we will reach the mountaintop.

As I think about that mountain, I’m reminded of the previous peak of Illinois basketball success: The 2005 Regional Final. You might think the National Championship game was the top, but you’d be wrong. The moment Illinois basketball fans remember is the Arizona game, not the loss to the cheating North Carolina Tar Heels.

All year, Illinois was the best team in college basketball. Led by a trio of talented guards in Dee Brown, Luther Head, and future NBA All-Star Deron Williams, and mobile and athletic power forwards Roger Powell, Jr. and James Augustine, the Illinois basketball team was not just the talk of the town or state but the nation.

See all these college kids popping their jersey? That was started by Dee Brown, who told everyone, "This is my school, my team, my pride." Fans responded in kind.

Assembly Hall (now the State Farm Center) was a packed house of orange-clad faithful screaming and yelling, making it one of the most formidable home-court advantages in college basketball. Every fan was an extension of the Orange Krush student section.

When number one Wake Forest came to town, Illinois destroyed them 91–73 at Assembly Hall. Wake Forest never led at any point in the game. After that dominating performance, Illinois was ranked number one and held that spot for the rest of the season.

Sports fans began to take notice. Everywhere the players went in Champaign-Urbana, they’d be mobbed by fans. Roger Powell showed up in The News-Gazette lobby inquiring about getting a few copies of the newspaper, his picture was front and center on, and a crowd instantly appeared around him, pressing pens and paper for him to sign. Posters that appeared in programs sold at each home game became hot collector’s items. They started acquiring celebrity fans like Bill Murray.

During the NCAA selection show, it came as little surprise that Illinois was the overall number one team in the field. Dee Brown was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News. They started drawing large numbers of fans to their pre-game shootarounds. As the tournament started, they cruised through their first few match-ups. Everyone was eyeing the Arizona versus Illinois Elite Eight game as the one to watch.

It did not disappoint.

Without a doubt, the Arizona-Illinois game was by far the best final four minutes of comeback basketball ever played. More than 20 years later, it still stuns me how the Fighting Illini Men’s Basketball team beat the Arizona Wildcats.

At halftime, Arizona led by only two points, but the second half exploded into a 15-point lead. Nothing like this had happened all season. Calling the game on TV, Jay Bilas said, “Illinois has relied way too much on the three in this game.” Little did he know what was about to happen.

Over the last three minutes of play, Illinois made three of four threes, added points on turnovers, and took the game into overtime. It was staggering to see. Down by 13 with 3:28 left, down by 11 with 3:00 left, down by nine with 2:43 left, down by five with :57 left. Dee Brown stole the ball and made a breakaway layup, and Illinois was only down by three with :45 left. Everyone wearing orange was screaming. The Arizona players were shellshocked. Another steal on the in-bounds, and Deron Williams hit a three with 34 seconds left to tie it at 80. The place went bonkers.

Bill Murray, decked out in Illini orange, was going crazy.

I was at my parents’ house watching the game, and I was pacing the entire time behind the couch, tearing my hair out and pleading with the basketball gods. My Dad was calmly sitting on the couch, not reacting like his crazy, lunatic of a son. Years of coaching and being around coaches helped him keep his emotions in check. After the Luther Head steal, he said almost matter-of-factly, “Luther Head still wants to play.” After the three to tie it, he said calmly, “Deron Williams has ice-water running through his veins.”

The Deron Williams game-tying three is what most Illinois fans call “The Shot.” Although, to be fair, there are quite a few vying for that moniker, such as Cory Bradford’s shot to beat Indiana as well as Tyler Griffey’s layup to beat Indiana. Illinois likes beating Indiana.

The game went into overtime, and Illinois came out hot, sinking threes and getting another breakaway layup. Still, Arizona was not going to roll over and give up. What most fans forget about this game is that Deron Williams held the best shooter in college basketball, Salim Stoudamire, to a 2-for-13 night in the biggest game of his NBA-bound career. Even though Arizona shaved a six-point Illini lead to just one point in overtime, Williams made it impossible for Stoudamire to get a shot off to win the game. Illinois advanced to its first Final Four in sixteen years in front of an ecstatic crowd at Allstate Arena and Illini Nation everywhere.

I was in a state of shock.

Sure, they’d get beaten in the National Championship game by a cheating North Carolina, but reaching that game did not make this team revered in college basketball. It was the 2005 Regional Final.

It’s time for Illinois Basketball to climb the mountain. Just one foot in front of the other.

I want to see another run like the 2004–2005 team. It can happen.

I believe.

Be seeing you.

The AJ Redd Game

I went to the final regular-season game at State Farm Center on Tuesday. It was Senior Night when Illinois hosted Oregon and it was great to see Ben Humrichous and Kylan Boswell be honored before the game. However, another player was also receiving senior accolades: AJ Redd.

There are players who arrive at a program with fanfare and expectations. AJ Redd was not one of those players. The Chicago native came to Illinois as a student manager, someone who carries bags, does laundry, and sets up drills and exists, largely, in the background. What he has become over the past four years is something far more interesting than any highly recruited prospect.

Redd eventually earned his way onto the court as a walk-on, grinding through practices, earning the respect of his coaches and teammates one day at a time. Redd stayed for all four years. He became, fittingly, the only true four-year player honored on Senior Night.

The game played out exactly as it should have. Orange Krush began chanting his name early in the second half. When Coach Underwood sent Redd onto the floor with about three and a half minutes remaining, the roar from the crowd set the tone for what followed.

What followed was, first, a nearly 28-foot pull-up three that clanged off nothing. Underwood called a timeout. The coach was not amused. “He’s done one dumb thing in four years,” Underwood said afterward in the locker room, which was both a rebuke and, quietly, a tribute.

The redemption came quickly. A between-the-legs, backward bounce pass from Mihalio Petrovich found Redd in transition on the left wing, and he buried the three-pointer. State Farm Center came unglued. Then, just to complete the story properly, Redd drove hard to the basket against an Oregon defender and finished the layup, giving him five points, a new career high, in his final minutes as an Illini on his home court.

Andrej Stojakovic, who has only known Redd for nine months and was the real star of the game with 21 points and 12 rebounds, said simply: “No one can replace what he brings to this team.”

The manager-turned-walk-on had more points on Senior Night than the leader of this team, Kylan Boswell. That’s something.

What a great moment for the young man.

In Brightest Day, in Blackest Night

The first teaser for HBO’s Lanterns has arrived, and if you were expecting a neon-green spectacle of alien worlds and cosmic ring-slinging, think again. The trailer leans heavily into a moody detective vibe, zero ring constructs, and a dusty atmosphere. The whole thing is set to Bruce Springsteen’s “State Trooper,” a nod to the police-like nature of the Green Lantern Corps.

Kyle Chandler as veteran Hal Jordan and Aaron Pierre as rookie John Stewart make for a compelling odd-couple pairing. For less than a second, you see a Green Lantern uniform, and I like that the design takes clear inspiration from the graphic novel Green Lantern: Earth One, opting for a muted, grounded jacket rather than a flashy super-suit.

The trailer’s best moment, though? Chandler’s Hal Jordan casually dropping a joke about one of the Corps members being a squirrel. It’s a perfectly timed “say what?” for non-comic fans and a nod to comic fans who know Green Lantern Ch’p, the squirrel-like alien Green Lantern from the comics.

True Detective with magic rings? I’m in.

A Quick Thought on AI-Written Material

Lately, I’ve seen commentary on Large Language Models (i.e., AI) that goes like this: I prefer finding written material with spelling mistakes because then I know it’s not written by AI, and the writer knows everything in the material. The opposite being: If you’re using AI to write something, it’s easy to not know what’s inside your writing, and you may be writing something you didn’t intend to say or didn’t intend to include.

I’m neither positive nor negative on AI. For me, AI is a fascinating tool for certain parts of my work, but I’ve immediately noticed brain rot creeping in around topics that are easily handed off to an AI bot. Long-term, I imagine I'll need to develop a workflow to combat brain rot.

In summary, though, I appreciate the point of view regarding AI, but I don’t like spelling mistakes.

No

Max Leibman: No means no.

No, I do not want to install your app.

No, I do not want that app to run on startup.

No, I do not want that app shortcut on my desktop.

No, I do not want to subscribe to your newsletter.

No, I do not want your site to send me notifications.

No, I do not want to tell you about my recent experience.

No, I do not want to sign up for an account.

No, I do not want to sign up using a different service and let the two of you know about each other.

No, I do not want to sign in for a more personalized experience.

No, I do not want to allow you to read my contacts.

No, I do not want you to scan my content.

No, I do not want you to track me.

No, I do not want to click “Later” or “Not now” when what I mean is NO.

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I’ve concluded that I cannot watch, read, play, or listen to all the entertainment that I would like. There is simply far too much quality entertainment. This is a good thing, but also disheartening.

Here’s a dumb example. I carved out chunks of time to watch Zack Snyder’s Justice League when it came out. It’s a long, long movie. I had other things to do in my life that did not include watching gods among mortals fight the inspiration for Thanos. It was just okay. I probably should have done something else with my time.

Still, there’s so much good stuff out right now. I mean, I could never have dreamed the amount of genre entertainment that would dominate the pop culture landscape when I was in Underoos, watching Saturday morning cartoons.

As a kid, I endured a sad Hulk television show, a poor Spider-Man television show, and tried-really-hard-but-just-not-quite-there space shows like Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. I suffered through terrible cartoons of all stripes, from Super Friends to He-Man and the Masters of the Universe to Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends. At the time, these shows were peak genre television. Revisiting them today is a lesson in just how much my kid brain wanted to like these shows.

Now, it is impossible to partake of everything interesting. I can’t watch every summer blockbuster movie or critically acclaimed TV series. I can’t listen to every groundbreaking album or the latest podcast. I can’t read every new author or catch up on years of comic books. The only thing anyone can do is pick and choose what seems the most interesting. You have to make choices. For instance, I simply gave up on video games decades ago.

When I was collecting and reading comics, I wanted to have complete runs. I liked knowing I had an entire story. Still, I knew that was an impossibility for many characters. I’m never going to own every appearance of Superman or even every issue of Action or Detective Comics. I learned early on that while I might have wanted every Star Wars action figure and toy, that was a pipe dream. It turned me into less of a completist and more of a curator.

What I do now is evaluate and review, then decide whether a piece of entertainment is for me. Sometimes I wait to see if a TV show is worth diving into, especially if I’m on the fence. I stopped reading comics regularly when I could no longer keep up with storylines or characters that interested me. I haven’t bought an actual music CD in ages. However, I did get back into vinyl a couple of years ago, even though it really is an expensive hobby, and I’ve only bought a handful of albums.

While I don’t usually suffer from a fear of missing out, I still have a ton of shows to watch and books on my shelf to read. My pop culture read/watch/listen list is endless, and that’s with actively saying no to so many cool pop culture projects. There are so many TV shows I’ve watched a few of the first seasons of and enjoyed, but have not had time to get caught up, such as The Pitt, Doctor Who, Severance, Silo, Cobra Kai, Black Mirror, The Sandman, Stranger Things, Poker Face, His Dark Materials, and probably a bunch more. I know I have hundreds of comics and books I want to read, but I’m afraid there isn’t enough time.

I’m not one who “hate watches” something. I’ll criticize it, but if I’m not getting any enjoyment out of it, I’m out. I can tell you exactly what sucks about the latest incarnations of Star Wars and Star Trek, but I still enjoy what I’m watching.

On the other hand, I can go online and read blogs and watch videos from “fans” who watch their favorite franchise shows, then spend hours explaining in excruciating detail why it is the worst garbage they’ve ever seen. I don’t understand people who hate everything a TV show is doing, from characters to storylines to visual effects, and continue to watch every episode. If it sucks that badly, why watch?

I guess some of those grizzled veterans of the 70s and 80s who watched the terrible genre movies and television, hoping something magical would happen, now feel that when the actual magical things are happening, they must shit on them. I’d rather find the cream of the crop. I don’t have to experience the bad with the good. I’m not a completist or a glutton for punishment. I’m a curator, and I’ll find the good stuff, thank you very much.

Also, my good stuff might not be your good stuff and that’s okay. Author Austin Kleon discussed how to respond when confronted with the hate-watching complainers.

I’m a big fan of the phrase “it wasn’t for me” when asked about books (and music and TV and movies and so forth) that I didn’t get into.

I like the phrase because it’s essentially positive: it assumes that there are books for me, but this one just wasn’t one of them. It also allows me to tell you how I felt about a book without precluding the possibility that you might like it, or making you feel stupid or put down if you did like it.

“It just wasn’t for me.” No big deal.

The wonderful thing is that “me” is always changing. Every day you’re a different you. So when you say, “It wasn’t for me,” maybe it’s not for the “me” right now — maybe it’s for the “me” in the future.

Connecting with a book is so much about being the right reader in the right place at the right time. You have to feel free to skip things, move on, and maybe even come back later.

And you have to feel free to say, “It wasn’t for me.”

So, while we may be living in the golden age of genre entertainment, when nerd stuff is mainstream, those complainers who liked the band/the comic/the book series before everyone else are best avoided.

Find the good stuff and enjoy it. By the way, you also get to decide what constitutes the “good stuff.” Curate your own brand of entertainment and ignore the rest.

You’ll be happier about it.

Be seeing you.

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame 2026

The 2026 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominees arrived this week. As always with this institution, the 17 names on the ballot are not all rock and roll. I roll my eyes in their general direction.

There are several rock acts among the nominees, including Oasis, Iron Maiden, the Black Crowes, Joy Division/New Order, INXS, Billy Idol, Jeff Buckley, and Melissa Etheridge. I’ll even grant you P!NK is a rock artist even though she’s mostly pop. The remaining nominees are anything but rock and roll: Phil Collins, Mariah Carey, Lauryn Hill, Luther Vandross, New Edition, Sade, Wu-Tang Clan, and Shakira. Not taking anything away from these artists, but none of them are rock-and-roll acts by any measur

Mariah Carey is now up for induction for the third consecutive year. Her holiday dominance and pop chart reign are undeniable, but she isn’t a rock and roll artist. Luther Vandross was a transcendent soul singer. Wu-Tang Clan revolutionized hip-hop. Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation is one of the greatest albums of the 1990s. Shakira is a bona fide global icon. None of that is in question. What is in question every time a new list of nominees appears is why there are so many acts that are not rock and roll included?

Sure, rock and roll has always been rooted in blues, R&B, and gospel. However, that seems like a loophole for the Hall to induct virtually any popular music act from the past half-century. If everything is rock and roll, then nothing is.

In my humble opinion, none of the non-rock-and-roll-oriented acts should be inducted, and of the remaining acts, only Oasis, Iron Maiden, the Black Crowes, Joy Division/New Order, and INXS really showcase rock's popularity, longevity, and influence.

Paying Attention

It’s hard to walk the line of being informed, being outraged at the news, and not caring. I don’t get on Facebook much anymore because it’s designed to suck my attention, and I don’t want to be sucked in anymore. It’s easy to stay on the 24-hour news cycle and get outraged. Just as easy, you can watch a wasteland of “reality” TV. Better yet, get into arguments on the internet or spend all your time telling others what’s wrong with them.

I have more important things to worry about. I prefer my focus to be laser beam tight. I pay attention to what’s important.

Are you?

Be in the Moment

It is far too easy to bite back boredom with a smartphone. Of course, is that the way you want to live your life? Constantly immersed in your social feed, email, text messaging, etc.?

Life should be lived. One way to do that is by being in the moment.

Put the phone away. Keep it in your pocket. Be aware of your surroundings. Forget about the “fear of missing out” and just be in the moment. Let each moment wash over you.

You can’t control everything and, of course, you have to pay attention to the important things. Still, allow yourself to find some inner peace in the quiet or in the boredom.

Keep your direction, but stay focused on the moment. Cherish these moments. Pay for experiences if you are so inclined. Concerts are a good example of a unique moment in time. Put your phone down and let the performance unfold before you.

What a way to live your life.

Be Where Your Feet Are

I love this.

Alan Stein, a leadership and basketball performance coach who’s worked with players like Kevin Durant and Steph Curry, did a TED talk on something I need to be better at―time and attention.

In the video, he explains how learning to be where your feet are can help you become more present, productive, and successful.

“Your habits are in fact a choice. You choose your habits and your habits are what dictate your happiness and your success.”

His beginning, about what he learned from watching a Kobe Bryant private workout, is great.

I recognize when someone is present and focused. I admire it in other people. In practice, for myself, I’m terrible at it. Take 10 minutes to watch. I need to watch it about ten more times a day.

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This might get a little nerdy. Bear with me.

Real Simple Syndication, or RSS for short, is one of the greatest inventions on the modern web. It allows one to follow a wide variety of websites that utilize RSS feeds with a dedicated application or website. Practically every website and blog has a free-to-use RSS feed, and there are a ton of paid and free feed readers to choose from.

Basically, it consolidates web content into an inbox where one can click to read new blog posts, social media posts, news posts, etc. It saves you from actually visiting all the sites you might visit on a given day into one place where everything is ready for you to read.

I opened my RSS reader of choice, Inoreader, last Wednesday morning and stared at the number.

An even 900 unread items.

That’s not a reading list. It’s a backlog. It’s a number that sits in the corner of your screen and quietly tells you that you’re already behind, that you’re missing out, that there’s always more, and that you can never, ever catch up. It was depressing.

I’ve had an RSS reader in some form or another since the Google Reader days. For a long time, I thought of it as a healthy alternative to social media. With RSS feeds, I was curating. I was choosing my sources. I was in control, unlike those poor souls getting spoon-fed crap by that nasty algorithm. I admit, I felt slightly superior about this.

However, somewhere along the way, I hit 90 feeds. Then 110. Each one had felt like a small act of curiosity. A tech blog here. A film critic there. Three different newsletter writers who covered sports. A handful of sites I liked once, in say 2019, and never really loved again. Each individual subscription was justifiable... at least at the time. As I went on, my unread items would simply accumulate, more and more each hour, whether I read any of them or not.

I’m currently sitting at 258 feeds. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all too much.

Social media, especially over the last several years, has replaced keeping up with our friends and family with an endless stream of algorithmic content. Guess what? I did it to myself. No algorithm needed. I had personally constructed my own firehose and opened it every morning, wondering why I felt wet.

As I was contemplating the ridiculous number of things to read in my feed, I realized there is no meaningful difference between a feed that overwhelms you by design, like Facebook, Instagram, and the like, and one that overwhelms you by accident because you never actually did any real curation or culling.

My RSS feeds became a blur. I found I was skimming and deleting and barely making a dent in the unread count. I was consuming and not getting anything out of it.

I needed to simplify.

In the case of my overwhelming RSS feeds, I needed subtraction. I needed to let some things go.

So, I commenced the great RSS culling.

I spent a few hours going through every feed. This was not a reorganization. I simply opened each feed up in Inoreader and asked one question for each, “Do I actually look forward to reading this? Yes or no.”

I went from 258 feeds to 135.

It felt a tiny bit scary. There was a small sense of “Fear of Missing Out,” but I plowed through. A quick first pass and I nipped 123 feeds. After a few weeks, I’m going to do this again and see if I can’t reduce the number to under 100.

The next step is curating the 500+ items I’d saved to read later. I really wanted to just delete them all and start over, but I didn’t. I’m going to tackle that at a future date.

After reducing my feed count, I archived or deleted what I had sitting in my Newsfeed. Now I had an empty inbox. My goal was not to look at my RSS feeds in the evening and see what my item number would look like in the morning.

In the morning, I saw 81 items in my Newsfeed.

I skimmed the headlines, deleted a bunch of items I didn’t care about, and in no time, the feed was down to 57.

The reduction in digital clutter and the feeling of accomplishment after going through my feed were surprising and welcome.

If you use RSS, awesome. If you are a power user like me and follow 250+ feeds, it might be time to curate and cull your feed. I’m not saying you need to cut nearly half of your feeds as I did. However, I think it’s worth asking if the feeds you are following are serving you.

I’m down to 135 feeds. I’ll reduce it even more after a few days. I’ve taken control back, and it feels better than I imagined.

Be seeing you.

The Mandalorian and Grogu Trailer

I watched the trailer twice. Then I watched it again.

Look, I know what they’re doing. They know exactly what Baby Yoda, aka Grogu, does to people. Jon Favreau has known since that first reveal in Season One of the Disney+ show. Obviously, they’re going to use it responsibly and completely without restraint. Not.

The trailer hits all the beats: cinematic, large in scope, super fun, and Star Wars-y. I am cautiously optimistic.

Din Djarin and his kid. I’m in. This is the way.

Valentine’s Day Dio

On Valentine’s Day, I was tasked with acquiring a heart-shaped pizza from Papa John’s for my step-daughter and her friend. I walked into the place to order, and they had Dio’s “Holy Diver” playing at concert-level volume. It was a scene.

I placed my order and sat down to wait while they made the pizza. The guy swinging the dough around started singing, and suffice it to say, he was not on the same level as Ronnie James Dio. It was almost amusing, but he was clearly enjoying himself immensely.

I texted some friends, knowing they’d also enjoy the situation I was in. They loved the whole karaoke-and-pizza vibe.

It was obviously a greatest hits or playlist because the next song was “Rainbow in the Dark” and he continued to add his vocal stylings to the recording.

When my pizza was ready, I told the guy at the counter that I was really enjoying the Dio and he gave me a completely blank stare. Like, he either didn’t hear me or his opinion of the music choice/singing was less than enthusiastic.

I wanted to say to him, “Do your demons, do they ever let you go? When you’ve tried, do they hide, deep inside. Is it someone that you know?”

Somehow, I don’t think he would have appreciated it.

Vanilla in my Coffee

Before Christmas, my wife, my step-daughter, and I went up to Algonquin, Illinois, to do some unique shopping. We stopped at Syrup for a late breakfast and enjoyed the food immensely. On a whim, I had the waitress add a couple of pumps of vanilla syrup to my coffee. Somewhat unsurprisingly, that little trick turned a good cup of coffee into an amazing cup.

Since then, I’ve been adding two or three pumps of sugar-free vanilla syrup to my coffee mug, and I’m never, ever going to apologize for it.

I know there’s a contingent of people who treat coffee purity as a moral position and I’ve decided they can have all that. For me, the bitterness and the sweetness do something together that neither does alone. It’s just chemistry.

Also, it makes 6 am more manageable, which is worth something.

Ted Chiang

Several years ago, I read the two collections by Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation: Stories. He’s easily one of the best authors in contemporary science fiction.

Chiang has recently been a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, writing critically about technology and artificial intelligence. Key essays include “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web“ (2023), “Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?“ (2023), and “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art“ (2024).

What’s surprising to me is that Chiang has published only eighteen short stories in the last thirty years, one and a half dozen masterpieces of the genre whose insightful, precise, and often poetic language confronts fundamental ideas about intelligence, consciousness, and the nature of God.

Here are my favorites (found via web.archive.org):

Tower of Babylon — A Bronze Age laborer joins the construction of an impossibly high structure on a mission to breach the vaults of Heaven. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

Story of Your Life — A talented linguist reflects on the life of her daughter as she struggles to grasp the meaning of an alien language. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novella and was adapted into the film Arrival.

The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate — An ancient alchemist introduces a traveling merchant to a mysterious time-traveling gateway. It won the Hugo and Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

Exhalation — A non-human scholar relates the dissection of his own brain and the implications his discoveries hold for his curious clockwork universe. It won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects — The relationship between people and their creations is explored in the near-future world of sentient AI. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novella.

Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom [scroll down]- A new technology that lets people see and communicate with alternate timelines throws society into an existential crisis.

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I was in line at Costco on Wednesday night, and I watched a man stand in front of the flower cooler for what must have been five minutes. He picked up a bouquet of red roses. Put it back. Picked up pink tulips. Put them back. Tried the mixed arrangement. Back again. Finally, he grabbed the roses, a safe and expected choice, and walked to the back of the line looking like someone who’d just finished a test he wasn’t sure he’d passed.

I thought about that man all the way home.

What I respected about that guy is that he was trying. Actually, trying to choose something that would land right, that would say what he wanted it to say. He was weighing his choices. He was trying to make his significant other happy. He was thinking of her (or him, I have no idea).

Today is Valentine’s Day. The holiday sits there in mid-February like a referendum on whether you’ve been paying attention, whether you know how to translate love into a gesture, and whether you can get it right when the calendar tells you it matters.

For me, I’ve realized Valentine’s Day gives you permission. It’s permission to buy the flowers. To write the card. To say the thing, we should probably say more often, but don’t because life is overwhelming and we’re tired and the bed is cozy and warm.

Without really going out on a limb, I’d say the man at Costco picked a dozen roses because roses mean something on Valentine’s Day. They mean something because we’ve all collectively agreed they do in the same way a diamond ring means something, or a handwritten note means something, or showing up to an event as a parent or a partner means something. The meaning isn’t in the object or the event. It’s in the attention.

I’ve been thinking about attention a lot lately. What I give my attention to, what is worthy of my attention, and how we show people they matter in a world that constantly asks us to pay attention to a million other things. Valentine’s Day, for all its commercial trappings, is a day when we’re culturally permitted to give someone our full attention.

Are you paying attention?

I don’t know if the man in Costco got it right. I don’t know if the roses landed the way he hoped or if they sat on a kitchen counter waiting to be thrown away. I hope they meant something. I hope whoever received them understood they represented genuine deliberation. He was paying attention.

Putting aside the heart-shaped boxes and the overwritten cards, Valentine’s Day says, it’s okay to try. It’s okay to be obvious. It’s okay to buy the flowers everyone knows are flowers, to make the gesture everyone knows is a gesture, and to hope it communicates something that sometimes is hard to say out loud.

Yeah, yeah… Valentine’s Day is all about monetizing love. It’s Hallmark and your local florist’s favorite holiday. I get it. However, I’ll take a world where people stand in front of flower coolers trying to get it right over one where nobody bothers at all.

Be seeing you.

Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl

The Super Bowl halftime show featured Bad Bunny with special guests Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin. It was great. I loved the dancing, the (real) wedding, and the message. I didn’t know the songs or what he was singing, but the storytelling was clear. He’s not my music, but I’m an old fart. I think the last Super Bowl halftime performance I even think about, years later, was Prince in the rain. Right now, Bad Bunny is one of the biggest musical stars on the planet.

There’s always been alternative halftime shows. This year, the one getting all the attention featured Kid Rock, an artist who has not had a meaningful hit since 2008’s “All Summer Long,” which, incidentally, is just a riff on better songs (Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” and Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London”). I don’t mean to call Kid Rock irrelevant, but he is. The Puppy Bowl probably got better or about the same numbers as the show featuring Kid Rock and a bunch of musicians you’ve never heard of before.

Bad Bunny performed to 120 million people in a language that half the country doesn’t speak fluently, and it worked because the performance was excellent and the moment was genuine. That’s it. The NFL didn’t book him to make a political statement. They booked him because he is an international superstar, and the NFL is trying to expand to other non-American markets. Kid Rock and the people putting on this show are yelling at a cultural shift they don’t like and can’t stop. Too bad. So sad.

Related: I love the fact that New England’s O-line was accidentally tipping off play calls the entire game.

The Neil Gaiman Situation

I read a long investigative piece into the allegations against Neil Gaiman, and I read the coverage of his publisher moving forward with his new book anyway. I don’t know what happened in those rooms, and I’m not here to adjudicate guilt or innocence. However, I will say the piece raised serious questions about reporting standards, corroboration, and the speed at which accusations become convictions in public discourse. Just to be clear, no criminal charges have been filed, and all the civil lawsuits have been dismissed.

Is Neil Gaiman a scumbag? I have no idea. Probably? I don’t really know. And neither do you.

“The Only Failure in Life is Not Trying”

Lindsey Vonn crashed during a training run at the 2026 Winter Olympics. She was coming back after retirement, skiing against people half her age, and she crashed hard enough that her Olympic dreams were dashed. Her response was to keep dreaming.

“…we take risks in life. We dream. We love. We jump. And sometimes we fall. Sometimes our hearts are broken. Sometimes we don’t achieve the dreams we know we could have. But that is also the beauty of life; we can try.

“I tried. I dreamt. I jumped.

“I hope if you take away anything from my journey it’s that you all have the courage to dare greatly. Life is too short not to take chances on yourself. Because the only failure in life is not trying.”

Just… wow.

Big Ten Conference Officiating

Brad Underwood is tired of the shitty officiating in the Big Ten Conference. Start at 13:35 if you don’t want to watch the whole thing.

The fix for this is so easy.

The Big Ten hires the highest-rated referees in all of college basketball and gives them a real salary, real accountability, and real opportunity. You set up a real league office, just like the NBA, with a staff of around 50 referees (maybe more, I didn’t do the math to see if that’s off) for the regular season and the B10 Tournament. The office then manages their training, evaluation, and performance reviews. The league covers travel and hotels and pays a real living wage for a high-stress job. NBA refs on the low end make $150K. I’d probably start at $50-60K, with the opportunity to earn more based on performance.

This should be Tony Petitti's top priority. It isn’t, but it should be.

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When I started this Substack newsletter, I was trying to establish my name with the associated platform. That’s why I pushed seanmcdevitt.substack.com and seanmcdevitt.medium.com. It was an easy way to connect my writing with my name.

I had already set up seanmcdevitt.com as my identity site, so I wanted the other platforms to build off that.

After 30 weeks of posting, I wanted something different.

As you can see, I have rebranded my Substack from The Sean McDevitt Newsletter to Saturday Night Five. It’s a bit more than just a new name. With Saturday Night Five, my goal is to make a fresh statement about what my newsletter has become and what I want it to be.

The core remains the same: one essay that serves as the anchor. This is where I dig into whatever’s captured my attention that week, whether it’s cultural commentary, personal reflection, or something else entirely. The essay format allows for depth, nuance, and the kind of thinking-out-loud that makes a newsletter feel less like a marketing platform and more like a conversation.

However, with Saturday Night Five, I’m presenting four additional items that have been rattling around in my brain. This isn’t a link roundup of “things you should read” from across the internet. So, no more The Weekly Click. It’s not curated content designed to position me as a tastemaker or cultural gatekeeper. Instead, it’s something more intimate and, frankly, I think more interesting.

It’s a peek into my mental landscape as someone who’s paying attention to the world.

Those four additional items could be anything. A half-formed thought about something that caught my attention. A frustration with a news item. A quick note about a book, movie, or experience. A quote that I wanted to share. This is where the newsletter gets personal, where the relationship between us shifts from formal presentation to something closer to friends catching up over drinks.

The old format leaned on external links. Here’s what I read, and I think you should read it too. There’s nothing wrong with that approach, but it’s also crowded territory. Everyone with a newsletter is sharing links. The new format makes a different promise: this is what I’m actually thinking about. There might be links, but not necessarily.

I hope the name itself does some heavy lifting. “Saturday Night” suggests leisure, reflection, the end of the week when you finally have time to think about something other than what’s urgent. Saturday night (or Sunday morning) is when you can sit with ideas that don’t have immediate applications, when you can be curious without needing to be productive.

Five is specific enough to create a structure but flexible enough to allow variety. One essay plus four things. It’s memorable. It’s repeatable. More importantly, it creates an expectation I can meet week after week without becoming formulaic.

My goal isn’t just another Substack newsletter clogging your inbox. This is a weekly ritual: a specific time and place where a particular kind of thinking and sharing occurs.

We might be internet strangers, but we can be friendly strangers, right?

Now for the part where you come in. I’m seeking your feedback on three areas: the name, the format, and suggestions for improvement.

On the name: Does it communicate what the newsletter is about, or does it need explanation? Would it be better served as SaturdayNightFive.com or kept under my name? I’m leaning toward going with the new URL.

On the format: One essay plus four additional thoughts. Would you prefer more structure around what those four items are (such as always one article I read, one observation, one question, one recommendation)? Or is the freedom and unpredictability part of the appeal?

On making it better: What would make Saturday Night Five a better product? Would shorter essays work better, or is depth the point? Would themed weeks or months help build momentum, or would that constrain the format too much? I’ve never considered monetizing it, but I might. This one hit your inbox in the morning, but with the name change, does it make sense to be an evening newsletter?

What makes a newsletter interesting to me is the voice, the consistency, and the sense that there’s an actual human on the other end who’s thinking about things and wants to share those thoughts. Saturday Night Five is designed to deliver exactly that. Hope you like it.

Be seeing you.

Remarkably Bright Creatures audiobook

My wife has chided me for continually listening to podcasts focused on Illinois sports or politics. Guilty as charged.

To her point, I finally started Remarkably Bright Creatures on audiobook. My wife often finds new books via Instagram Reels. This particular title was among the recommendations and was specifically praised for its audiobook version. She loved the book and could not wait for me to listen to it so we could talk about it.

I currently have about five hours remaining. So far, it is delightful. I’m enjoying the narration quite a bit. Michael Urie is a standout here.

I have no idea where the story is headed, but I look forward to learning more.

Tank and Rebuild

With Spring Training on the horizon, Chaim Bloom and the St. Louis Cardinals finally moved Brendan Donovan to the Seattle Mariners in a three-way trade that yielded some prospects and cleared the way for Nolan Gorman and Jordan Walker to prove their worth in 2026, and also cleared a spot for J.J. Wetherholt to make the show as well.

The Cardinals traded Donovan and received a bundle of five assets for their rebuild: three prospects drafted in the first and second rounds, plus two draft picks that give St. Louis six of the first 86 selections in the 2026 MLB Draft. The prospects are Jurrangelo Cijntje, a hard-throwing pitcher who needs work in the minors and to stop with the whole switch-pitcher thing, and outfielders Tai Peete and Colton Ledbetter, who, as I understand it, are still learning how to hit professional pitching.

I guess that’s a good return for two years of Donovan, who was an All-Star, but not really a star. I’m also guessing this completes the offseason moves with Donovan, Sonny Gray, Nolan Arenado, and Willson Contreras all traded.

Bloom has lessened the payroll and broken up the infield logjam.

The only Cardinals players making $5 million or more in 2026 are pitcher Dustin May ($12 million) and outfielder Lars Nootbaar ($5.35 million). May is on a one-year deal with a mutual option, while Nootbaar has two years of team control. Both are trade candidates if they’re playing well in July and the Cardinals are out of the playoff picture (and they will be, and they will be traded, zero doubt).

The tank-and-rebuild process continues as the Cardinals look toward 2028, because it isn’t happening this year or even the following year. Plus, the strike is coming...

That Kind of Writing

Out of the blue, I was thinking of a comic book writer I loved as a kid. Not sure why. Jim Shooter passed away last summer. Cancer.

He was the first writer I ever recognized by name. As a kid flipping through my Dad’s old Silver Age comics, his stories stuck with me. Even then, something about his voice on the page just landed.

He was just 13 when he sent in stories for the Legion of Super-Heroes at DC Comics. At 14, he wrote the story in which Ferro Lad died, the first “real” death of a Legionnaire (although Lightning Lad had been believed dead for a while before), and introduced the Fatal Five.

Looking back, I think reading his stories helped me understand the role of the writer. Comics are known predominantly as a medium for artists, but if the story is crap, it ultimately doesn’t really matter how good the art is. A writer has to collaborate with the penciller to make magic.

Maybe someday I can get back to that kind of writing. But first… I need a story to tell.

Does the truth still matter?

John Green is a long-time video blogger with his brother Hank. He has an enormous following. John is a New York Times bestselling author and has numerous interests. If you want to go deeper, his Wikipedia page is a pretty good place to start. He isn’t a crackpot nor a partisan hack.

In this video, he spends a lot of time trying to figure out how to participate effectively in an information distribution system that prioritizes attention over accuracy. It is a short and sane perspective on what is happening, and I hope those who may think differently from me will watch.

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Right around when Illinois basketball practice started, and I was trying to figure out who was who on the team, I had lunch with my wife near campus. As we were leaving, Keaton Wagler and a friend were walking in. I knew who he was. He knew that I knew who he was. We exchanged “bro nods” and went our separate ways.

My wife asked me who that was, and I told her it was Wagler, a freshman student-athlete on the Illinois basketball team. I told her we did the head nod thing, so we were basically best friends now.

She rolled her eyes, and I let out a small chuckle.

As I began learning about the team’s new faces, Wagler didn’t initially catch my attention. I knew he hailed from Kansas and hadn’t been a high-profile recruit. I also mispronounced his name as WAG-ler, not WAHG-ler, but that changed quickly once the season began.

I thought he was pretty good and would get more playing time as the season wore on. Back in November, I called him the “X-Factor.”

Wagler began the season in the starting rotation due to injury, but played defense and hit shots when given opportunities. He struggled at first, recording his first bad game in a loss to Alabama with 8 points on 9 shots. The UConn game marked another turning point. He took only three shots and was a non-factor. Following this, Illinois head coach Brad Underwood shifted Wagler to point guard and retooled the offense, leading to a major turnaround for the Illini.

That early adjustment period soon gave way to excitement as the season progressed. So far, the highlight has been the most dominant road performances in college basketball history as Wagler and the Illini beat fourth-ranked Purdue last Saturday.

It was an extraordinary feat. Wagler’s performance wasn’t just impressive for a freshman or for an underrecruited player getting his moment: it was significant by every measure. When he erupted for 46 points, he sent shockwaves through the college basketball landscape, proving that Illinois might have something truly special brewing in Champaign. After the Purdue win, everybody knew how to pronounce his name.

With the Purdue game now behind him, Wagler’s story of being largely unrecruited and holding only a couple of scholarship offers will undoubtedly be echoed by every color commentator each time Illinois takes the court.

During early practices, the staff and team members could not stop talking about him. The hype train was over-the-top. Kylan Boswell met with the media and basically said he was the best player on the court. Most people, those who have not seen a minute of practice, thought it might have been a bit too much. As it turned out, Wagler was undersold.

The Fighting Illini entered Mackey Arena already missing Kyle Boswell, who was sidelined with a broken hand. Facing the fourth-ranked team in the nation on their home court, with a hostile crowd and a Purdue team desperate to avoid a second consecutive loss, Illinois needed someone to step up, and Wagler seized that opportunity when it counted most.

Actually, he took over completely.

He scored the first 14 points for Illinois, setting the tone with impressive stepback jumpers and tough crossovers that left Purdue defenders off-balance. The Boilermakers tried switching, putting big men on Wagler after screens to protect the arc. Purdue head coach Matt Painter essentially dared the freshman to score 30 or 40 points.

Challenge accepted.

By halftime, Wagler had 24 points, already surpassing his career high. His stoic demeanor, perhaps most impressive of all, never wavered. I can’t recall a single possession where Wagler failed to make the correct play. He ruthlessly exploited defensive switches and driving lanes. When no opening appeared, he calmly moved the ball, setting up teammates. Throughout, his calm, cool composure was unshakable.

This just doesn’t happen with 18-year-old freshmen playing in the Big Ten Conference.

His high basketball IQ proved crucial in the game’s final minutes. With Illinois entering the last four minutes trailing by four points, Purdue made an adjustment, sending two defenders at Wagler. He responded by calmly hitting the open man, which resulted in open threes for his teammates. Tomislav Ivišić, Jake Davis, and David Mirkovic each drained crucial triples off Wagler’s setups, swinging the game decisively in Illinois’s favor.

Illinois hit four threes in a row and shellshocked the home team.

When Purdue’s Braden Smith hit a three to cut the lead to two, everyone in Mackey Arena knew who would get the ball. Wagler didn’t disappoint. He dribbled down the clock, hit a tough midrange pull-up, and gave Illinois a four-point cushion. Two free throws later, and the celebration began.

The final line: 46 points on 13-of-17 shooting, including a school-record nine threes on eleven attempts. He was also 11-of-13 from the free-throw line. Teammate Jake Davis summed it up best, albeit colorfully: “When he got to like 24 in the first half, I was like, shit, this motherfucker… he’s making everything. We’ve got to keep getting him the ball. And we did.”

For Illinois, the victory was a statement. The Fighting Illini improved to 17-3 overall and 8-1 in Big Ten play, tied for second place behind undefeated Nebraska (that return match is tomorrow, February 1). The win marked Illinois’s best conference start since 2004-05 (the team that should have won the national championship) and extended its winning streak to nine games, the longest under Brad Underwood’s tenure. For the record, on Thursday, they beat Washington to secure win number ten. The Purdue victory also represented Brad Underwood’s 100th Big Ten win.

Will Keaton Wagler have another moment like the Purdue game this season? That’s not the question to be asking. The right question is, “How high is the ceiling for this team?”

As of today, many March Madness prognosticators have Illinois as a two seed, and I’m over here dreaming of a Final Four and a possible National Championship. There’s little doubt this team has the depth and versatility to make noise in March.

And I’ll be right there cheering my “best friend” on the court.

Be seeing you.

How Brad & Tyler Underwood built the nation’s No. 1 offense at Illinois: ‘We did have to redefine some things

Here’s a bit more about Illinois Basketball. They have the number one offense in the country, don’t you know.

Brandon Sanderson just sold his Cosmere universe to Apple TV

This is the next fantasy series that I predict will take off. Apple TV has acquired the rights to fantasy author Brandon Sanderson’s “Cosmere” universe. There are many books, and adaptations will likely be a mix of movies and series. I have never read a Sanderson book. Maybe I should?

15 Scenarios That Could Stun the World in 2026

Here are 15 possible Black Swan events for 2026. I think I speak for everyone who has managed to get through January: Thanks, but no thanks.

A Few Things I’m Pretty Sure About

Two things caught my attention: 1. “…all behavior makes sense with enough information. You can always see people’s actions, but rarely (if ever) what’s happening in their head.” 2. “When you look back, you forget about all the things you worried about that never came true. So life appears better in the past because in hindsight there wasn’t as much to worry about as you were actually worrying about at the time.”

Rian Johnson Screenplays

Writer-director Rian Johnson has posted many of his scripts on his website. It is a treasure trove for an aspiring writer. You’ll want to download the Benoit Blanc material, but I recommend starting with the Brick screenplay/novella combo PDF. It’s beautiful.

12 Distractions to Leave Behind in 2026

These are all excellent, but the ones that I’m feeling the most lately are 5) Consuming more opinions than you can think through and 7) Background noise that never turns off

Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis

The first real protest song of this day and age. He wrote on Bluesky: “I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis.”

Melania Documentary Flops as Crew Reveals Behind-the-Scenes Chaos

What a joke. It’s projected to make just $1m in its first week, reports The New Republic, having cost $75m to make and market. According to reports, Melania pockets at least $28m to appear in the “documentary.” By the way, Brett Ratner is a horrible human being. No one cares about this film, even the people who get paid to care. Even her son ditched the premier. I don’t really care—do u?

Mark Carney Took the Stand the Rest of the World Must Now Take

His speech at Davos was incredible and profoundly sad. “This break with the United States is historic; Canada does not appear to have any hope that the two neighbors’ irreconcilable differences can be overcome. It is a tacit acknowledgment that a right-wing, authoritarian movement in the United States is ascendant, and unlikely to be removed anytime in the foreseeable future. Even if a different administration comes to power in three years, the United States has proven to be an unreliable partner and cannot be trusted not to fall into idiotic despotism every four years.” When the United States gains new leadership with Democrats in charge, everyone in this ridiculous and dangerous administration needs to be brought to justice. Otherwise, the country will be a pariah of the world and no one really wants that.

One Minute Challenge

Let’s end on a fun note. Can you stop the timer on exactly one minute?

Indiana won a national championship on Monday night. Let that sink in for a second.

The Indiana Hoosiers beat the Miami Hurricanes 27-21 in a game that was much closer and more entertaining than I had thought possible. I said, to anyone who would listen, that Indiana would be up three touchdowns at the end of the first quarter. I was wrong. For three and a half quarters, both teams played a nearly even matchup.

Then the play that will be on posters forever happened. Curt Cignetti called a relatively surprising QB run on fourth-and-4 from the Miami 12-yard line. Fernando Mendoza put his head down and changed Indiana football history forever.

You can watch that play a hundred times, and it won’t get old. Mendoza faking the pass, cutting right, accelerating past one defender, then two, then lowering his shoulder, spinning, and refusing to go down as he leaped and stretched the ball across the goal line.

That was the play.

The fourth-down call that sealed the game didn’t involve the Football Gods or a lucky bounce. It was a calculated coach’s decision. Cignetti could’ve kicked a field goal. That’s what Miami Head Coach Mario Cristobal did earlier in the game when he settled for a 50-yard field goal attempt that doinked off the upright instead of going for it on fourth-and 2.

Cignetti called a timeout, made the call, and trusted Mendoza, the Heisman Trophy winner, to take it to the house.

Indiana. National Champions.

Curt Cignetti built something nobody thought possible in Bloomington. A 16-0 season. A perfect record that puts them alongside the 1894 Yale Bulldogs, which is a comparison and a sentence nobody expected to write about Indiana football.

Cignetti’s plan wasn’t complicated. He found older, experienced players who wanted one more shot at glory. He gave them the resources and structure to succeed. He demanded and then trusted them to execute. The transfer portal and NIL money made it possible.

It helped to have Mark Cuban writing checks and John Mellencamp donating to their indoor practice facility, but it was Cignetti who best understood this era of college football.

The average age on a Division I college football team typically hovers around 20 to 22. The average age of Indiana’s squad is 23. By way of comparison, the average age on the Green Bay Packers is 26, and the league average is 27.

Three-star 23-year-olds are going to be better than five-star 18-year-olds. Just ask Oregon and Miami.

The Big Ten Conference now has three straight national championships with three different teams: Ohio State, Michigan, and now Indiana. The conference everyone loved to mock for being slow and boring just proved it’s the best in college football. The depth of talent, the quality of coaching, and the resources available to programs across the conference have created an environment where even long-time bottom-feeders can compete for bowl wins, playoff berths, and national titles.

Indiana handed every Division 1 college football program a blueprint. You don’t need to be a blue blood. You don’t need decades of tradition. You need a coach who understands the new rules of college football and isn’t afraid to use them.

Brett Bielema and Illinois should be taking notes.

Both schools play in the same conference. They have access to the same transfer portal, NIL opportunities, and recruiting grounds. There’s no obvious reason why Illinois can’t build what Cignetti built in Indiana.

Bret Bielema is the best coach Illinois Football has had in forever. His teams achieved consecutive seasons with 9+ wins for the first time in program history (2024: 10-3, 2025: 9-4). Won back-to-back bowl games for the first time since 2010-11. Developed numerous players for the NFL, including standout defensive backs Devon Witherspoon, Sydney Brown, and Quan Martin. Lastly, he set records for wins in a two-year period (19) and most wins in a head coach’s first five seasons at Illinois.

As a fan of Illinois Athletics, I’m ecstatic. These last few years have been a true renaissance for Illinois Football. However, just 168 miles away, Indiana Football put the rest of college football on notice. In just two years.

Does Bielema get it? I think so. The future is bright at Illinois.

As for Curt Cignetti’s future, what does he do now? He’s reached the peak. There’s nowhere to go but down. Every season from here will be measured against perfection, which is an impossible standard. He’ll either leave for a bigger job or stay and watch the expectations crush him. That’s the price of success in college football. You get one perfect moment, and then you spend the rest of your career trying to recreate it.

For Indiana fans, none of that matters right now. They’ve got a national championship. A perfect season. A moment that will define their program for generations. Everything after is gravy.

The new era of college football is here. Transfer portal mercenaries, NIL money, and programs and coaches who understand how to weaponize all of it. Indiana proved the system works if you’re willing to embrace it fully. Other schools will try to copy them. Most will fail. A few might succeed.

Illinois has the chance to be one of the few to take full advantage. In many ways, they already have.

The blueprint is right there.

Be seeing you.

Did Curt Cignetti and Indiana change CFB forever? Here’s what could actually happen next

I wrote my piece above around the same time as Will Leitch’s here. He goes a bit further and talks about what other programs might do in light of Indiana’s historic win.

Jim Edmonds should be in the Hall of Fame as a St Louis Cardinal

This is a pretty smart breakdown. I especially liked, “I cannot see any reason why Jim Edmonds shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame if Scott Rolen is in.”

The Best Thing About ‘Stranger Things’ Was the Dungeons & Dragons of It All

“The implied message seems to be that D&D is a game for children. That there is a very real boundary between childhood and adulthood, one that the magic of make-belief can’t cross. That, in the end, we are all Moonlight Grahams forced to step off the field. Mine may be D&D, yours may be baseball, but eventually we all have to accept that we can no longer play the children's game.” I played D&D when I was a kid, and I wish I still had all the paraphernalia I used back then. For no real reason, I moved on. Stranger Things, especially during the first few seasons, perfectly captured my time growing up. I should really watch it all from start to finish.

Competency porn: is there any greater escapism than watching a capable person on TV?

“Because, in 2026, when it feels like the entire world is being run by people who wouldn’t be able to successfully locate their own bottoms with their hands tied behind their backs, nothing is hotter than basic competency.” I love this concept so much and, yes, The Pitt is a prime example.

Stephen Miller may never understand the core message of ‘Star Trek’

John DeVore explains Star Trek to the guy who roots for the stormtroopers in Star Wars, gets upset when the Nazis get zapped by the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and thinks President Snow has some good ideas in The Hunger Games.

The Secret to One of Hollywood’s Most Enduring Friendships

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are in a new Netflix movie called The Rip, and they are everywhere doing press to hype it. This piece focuses on their friendship and careers. It’s still a pretty cool story.

14 Ways The Trump Administration is Trying to Kill Us

I’m kind of surprised it’s only 14.

Bus Thread

This isn’t an article, but a thread on Bluesky from an account called Musicology Duck. This person relates the most unhinged bus story I’ve ever read. It starts with, “I just woke up from a nap and somehow while I was asleep, everyone on the bus has figured out we are not going to the right place.” It just gets crazier from there.

Oscar Predictions 2026

Simon Dillon is an excellent movie critic, and I think his approach to his predictions is smart, methodical, and likely correct. There are plenty of movies I haven't seen among this year’s nominees, so I can’t really speak to the art collected. However, I have seen F1, and I thought it was ridiculously entertaining.

How to Shovel Snow Without Hurting Your Back

I’m going to need this smart breakdown. I thought this line was insightful: “It’s far, far easier on your body to shovel three inches of snow four times over the course of the day, than to tackle 12 inches of snow all at once.”

My wife was upset with me and rightfully so.

I was distracted. I was neglecting important things at home. I was getting accused of not knowing what was happening all around me because I was too busy watching a video or scrolling through social media on my phone.

I wasn’t present, and I certainly wasn’t thinking about what needed to get done, what was important, and what was the next right thing.

The accusation finally hit when she said I wasn’t thinking. She believed I was outsourcing my thinking on things that I had no control over and not doing it at all regarding things that needed my attention.

Ultimately, it wasn’t an accusation so much as confirmation.

I was in a much more in-depth relationship with my phone than with the people in my household.

That needed to change.

My iPhone has a whole section for screen time. I had not looked at it in a long time and I was a little afraid. My average screen time was 6 hours 14 minutes, and I picked up my phone 60 times per day. I was not surprised.

I tell myself my phone is a tool. That I’m using it, not the other way around. But tools don’t buzz in your pocket while you’re trying to write. They don’t light up during dinner. They don’t whisper “just check me once” when you’re lying in bed at 11 PM, finally ready to sleep.

My phone isn’t a tool. It’s a toxic relationship.

I’ve spent the last few years telling myself I’m good at managing distractions. That I can write an email and scroll RSS feeds. That checking Instagram Reels between work jobs helps me “take breaks.” That scanning headlines while my coffee brews is just being efficient.

I was lying to myself. I wasn’t being efficient. I was fractured.

Every empty moment in my life had become a chance to fill my brain with something. Home from work and just want to relax? News headlines. Standing in line at the grocery store? Email. Driving my car? A podcast. I’ve eliminated every second of boredom from my days. And you know what else I eliminated? The space where I used to figure things out.

When was the last time I’d just... thought? Not consumed information. Not reacted to messages. Just sat somewhere and let my mind work through something that mattered?

I couldn’t remember.

I traded thinking for consuming. And I didn’t even notice I’d made the trade. I realized I check my phone more often than I talk to my wife. That, my friends, is not a healthy relationship.

So, I’ve made a few special modifications.

I turned off every notification on my phone except texts and calls. All of them. No email badges. No social media alerts. No news pings. No app updates. Nothing. If something truly matters, I’ll find out. Usually from my wife, in an actual conversation.

I deleted Google and Apple News apps. I stopped pretending I needed to know everything that was happening everywhere, all the time.

I deleted Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and the Threads apps. I had already deleted Twitter last year. Now, I only interact with these services when sitting at my computer. They aren’t constantly in my hand begging me to “check them.”

A few things made the cut. I did keep my podcast app, Overcast, but I’m re-evaluating what I’m listening to and refocusing the content. I also kept Inoreader to read the many RSS feeds I’ve collected over the years. I’m up to nearly 275, so it’s way past time for a wave of personal curation on what is truly worthwhile to read and keep.

While I have a great many digital books, I wasn’t using my phone to read them. I’ve changed that and have started reading for pleasure via my phone instead of mindlessly scrolling.

Another interesting addition to my toolbox has been an actual physical notebook. Each day, I write down lists of things I need to remember, to-dos, and really anything else that comes to mind. I set up each day in quadrants: Me, Copy, Home, and Work. I’ve only had it out for a few days, but I think it’s working as intended.

My phone is still being used constantly, but now I use it when I decide to, not when it tells me to. The goal is to be more present, get more writing done, have better conversations, sleep better, and feel less anxious. Not because I’m more disciplined or more enlightened, but because I created space for my brain to do what brains are supposed to do. Think.

I’m not here to tell you that I’m now a better person because I deleted some social media apps and went slightly analog, and you could be just like me. You do you, boo. All I know is it’s helping me focus and, more importantly, think better.

Of course, I’m still checking my phone more than I should. However, I’m better at sitting with the discomfort of boredom instead of scrolling it away. Now, I’m thinking about something that matters instead of consuming something that doesn’t.

Start wherever you are. Delete your least-used social media app. Walk the dog without anything in your ears. See what shows up when you make room for it.

It’s amazing what a little thinking time can do.

Be seeing you.

Illinois, Daktronics Install Largest Video Display in College Football

“The new south end zone display will measure approximately 69 feet high by 250 feet wide and will feature a 10-millimeter pixel spacing for high-resolution imagery and improved contrast. The size of the display will allow for larger-than-life content, including live video, instant replays, graphics, animations, game statistics and sponsorship messages.” I can’t wait to see this thing in action.

How To Work Out What You Want In Life

Karen Barnes might not have it all worked out, but this is some good advice. I should take it.

The secret to being happy in 2026? It’s far, far simpler than you think …

“I have a proposal to make: 2026 should be the year that you spend more time doing what you want. The new year should be the moment we commit to dedicating more of our finite hours on the planet to things we genuinely, deeply enjoy doing – to the activities that seize our interest, and that make us feel vibrantly alive. This should be the year you stop trying so hard to turn yourself into a better person, and focus instead on actually leading a more absorbing life.” This is amazing. So many good ideas here.

Scott Adams’ Life and Death Is a Cautionary Tale for the MAGA Age

Here’s some advice: Live your life in such a way that when you die, your obituaries don’t open with how you were such a massive racist asshole.

MTV Rewind

MTV Rewind collects over 33,000 music videos, shows, and exclusive concert footage spanning the station's four decades. Want Pop Up Video? No problem. An MTV Unplugged concert you haven't seen in ages? Sorted. Need to show a millennial how truly terrible early '80s music videos were? This is your resource. The site is searchable, well-organized, and captures the fun, rebellious aesthetic that MTV packaged and sold us when we were growing up. I could spend hours upon hours with this… By the way, MTV still exists, even though some people think otherwise.

‘The Toys That Made Us’ Triggered My Nostalgia Reflex

Eric Pierce and I could be friends. We both have very similar tastes and approaches. This most recent bit of writing reminded me of myself quite a bit. To make him insanely jealous, I should point out that all my Star Wars toys are in my parents’ basement.

The Madness of Living in 2026

Will Leitch has had a hard week. Haven’t we all? “I have regularly told myself, truly believed even, that this ghastly period will eventually end, that we will get through it, that we will someday tell stories of how we lived through it. I didn’t know how it would end. I just believed it would. May we be so lucky. May we make it long enough to find out.”

JD Vance is a piece of s—t

Drew Magary is on fire. “What does he actually stand for, besides anything that Trump or his sugar daddies in the tech sector tell him to say? And how exactly did Americans benefit from the unprovoked killing of a woman literally named Good? Do you feel any safer thanks to Ross’ open cowardice? Do you feel grateful that he left Good’s children devastated, forever? Are your groceries suddenly cheaper now thanks to Ross’ heroic act of randomly shooting a woman? Did you study all of the camera angles like an NFL ref and decide that actually, Good completed the process of attempted murder? No, no, no, no, no, and no. Vance can lie, slander and spin this killing all he likes, but, thanks to the raw footage, none of it will mask the giant, neon sign blinking over his head that says THIS MAN IS AN AMORAL SACK OF S—T. A fascist. A liar. A champion of genocide.”

Fascists Are Pathetic

As a companion piece to Magary’s writing, David Roth is also en fuego. It is a beautifully written essay that stands alone as a biting observation of societal failure. This is a good example of Roth’s inimitable style: “In Trump's second term, the federal government has intentionally rid itself of the capacity to do anything but make things worse; it has quite literally traded Ph.D scientists and dedicated civil servants for the chance to hastily stand up this expansion team from the waiver-wire flotsam of the violence worker community." I long for the days when government policy wasn't literally 4chan shitpost logic.

‘F*** you’: Trump FLIPS OFF heckler at Ford plant after ‘pedophile’ comment

During his visit to a Ford F-150 plant in Dearborn, Michigan, convicted felon Donald Trump made an obscene gesture and yelled an expletive in response to a factory worker who shouted that he was a "pedophile protector." The incident, captured on cell phone footage and shared widely online, was confirmed by the White House. Trump's undignified response would never be tolerated if it were any other president. Ultimately, Trump was getting a taste of what most Americans think of him, both as a leader and as a person. Keep in mind, the finger is not a denial.

We’ve finished the first full week of 2026, and I’m already so, so tired of everything.

In an attempt to brighten my spirits (and maybe yours), I have accumulated a few things that brought me joy in the past year. Sure, there was plenty that brought me fear, anger, and existential dread, but I’m in need of some light in all this godforsaken darkness,

These are just a sampling of the joyous things of 2025, and I’m sure there are plenty of others, even more specific to you and yours. Maybe this list will resonate with you. Maybe you’ll find a couple of nuggets you missed or never knew about. At the very least, I hope it brings you a tiny bit of joy. We all could use some.

Jacob Collier. For some reason only the algorithmic gods understand, I clicked on Jacob Collier Improvises the National Symphony Orchestra (Live from The Kennedy Center) and was transfixed for 18 minutes. I’ve never heard of Jacob Collier. I still don’t know much about this man. All I know is that he’s a musical genius who made me forget the horribleness of this world for a few minutes. That’s an invaluable gift.

I quickly went down the rabbit hole of Jacob Collier, finding some live performances on YouTube and his output on Spotify. I haven’t listened to everything yet, but his style basically blends jazz, pop, and R&B with experimental music and synthwave. His improvisational live performances of familiar songs are uncanny. He’s a concert-quality pianist, tenor voice, and conductor. He’s simply the most unbelievable talent I’ve ever watched. I think he might be made of music.

If you’ve never heard of him, may I recommend starting with his version of How Deep Is Your Love Live from Fort Lauderdale. His arrangement is creative, unlike anything I’ve ever heard, and his interaction with the audience is both manic and amazing.

The Pitt. My wife and I do not usually have the same taste in television shows. However, I begged her to watch this with me, and she obliged. We were transfixed. We waited until the entire season was complete, so we binged it straight through. I knew Noah Wyle was going to win an Emmy. He’s amazing in it.

I can’t wait for Season Two.

The Rick Roll. In the newest Benoit Blanc movie, Wake Up Dead Man, most of the movie is set in a large church with a lovely church organ. There are several funny moments, but the amazing organ joke made me laugh out loud.

However, the fact that one of the sets in the movie was also used in the Rick Astley video for “Never Gonna Give You Up” was an inside joke that, when I learned about it, made me smile uncontrollably.

Superman and Krypto. I loved the James Gunn Superman movie. However, when I first saw the teaser clip, and it was heavy on Krypto, I was uneasy. I should not have worried. In many ways, Krypto stole the movie. However, what I really loved was the movie's core message: an immigrant trying his best, often failing and flailing, but continuing to do the next right thing. It was not a subtle note to today's leaders. Don’t worry, though, they didn’t get it. They never get it.

The Voice Message. Matt Wolf’s two-part documentary, Pee-wee as Himself, features marvelous archival footage that tracks Paul Reubens’ rise as Pee-wee Herman and his fall after his arrest and vilification. I learned so much about Reubens that I simply did not know.

It’s also about the making of the documentary itself. Throughout, Wolf navigates Reubens’ doubt about whether to cooperate and tell his story. The voicemail Reubens left Wolf shortly before he died says everything about his desire to control his legacy, right up to the end. It was heartbreaking, but he was finally able to set the story the way he wanted.

The Cigarette Exchange. Sinners is my favorite film of 2025. Yes, I know I haven’t seen hardly anything. Still, it ought to win best picture and probably won’t. I knew Michael B. Jordan was a great actor and that he was playing twins in the movie, but early in the film, when his two characters pass a cigarette between them, I completely forgot it was one actor doing that. It was so mind-blowing, I had to watch it again. Astounding bit of filmmaking.

Gavin Newsom’s trolling. I know it’s not actually him writing the posts, but his social media team has been on point. Newsom exposed Trump’s deranged, all-caps rants and AI meme-trolling by doing his own version, and it’s really funny and biting.

Ultimately, it doesn’t mean much. However, it certainly catapulted him into the spotlight, and he’s now the odds-on favorite to be the Democrats’ choice in 2028. Of course, that’s a long way from now. Anything can happen (and probably will).

Andor Season 2. It’s not going to win the Emmy, but it should. Easily the best thing I watched last year. Of course, I didn’t watch everything. I’m sure someone will have a few recommendations for things I should watch. I welcome them one and all.

The Reading. I read ten books this year: In Any Lifetime, When the Moon Hits Your Eye, Leave the World Behind, The Gone World, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, The Algebra of Happiness, The Whyte Python World Tour, Winterset Hollow, Digital Minimalism, and Dark Matter. My wife read 120, so I need to catch up. I’m not sure which was my favorite, maybe The Whyte Python World Tour. I highly recommend all these books. In fact, I highly recommend reading some fiction this year in general to step away from reality for a little while and enjoy a whole different universe.

I’m setting a goal to double my reading in 2026. Wish me luck.

The Basement Alchemy – Live from the Basement. The concert was one of the coolest watches I had in 2025. I love how he not only played every instrument, but also crafted the video to look like a full band, even though it’s just one guy playing them all. Somehow Shai Pelled’s videos caught my eye, and then I was sucked into this super small, independent artist and his work. He has a couple of albums of material and a bunch of videos. Catch him on Spotify and YouTube

Be seeing you.

First the Shooting. Then the Lies.

It was murder. Dave Pell of Nextdraft made this Atlantic piece a gift article and it should be read by everyone. Others should listen to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey's message: “Get the f-ck out of Minneapolis. It was murder. The New York Times has a frame-by-frame analysis, from three angles, of the murder. She was a poet. Renee Nicole Good won the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2020 for her poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pgs.” It was murder.

Renee Macklin Good’s wife says she nurtured kindness

Of course she did.

I got stranded in Germany for days. It gave me faith in humanity.

Drew Magary had a pretty terrible experience. I’m glad he’s better for it.

19 Lost Episodes of ‘Star Trek’

They were going to reboot Star Trek without Spock in the late 70s, but the project morphed into the first movie (Basically, Star Wars happened). There are 19 episode scripts and treatments from the project and a few were adapted for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Margaret Atwood on Doomscrolling: ‘I Want to Keep Up With the Latest Doom’

That does not sound like fun.

10 Predictions for Life in 2026

They all suck. Especially, “everything is marketing” and the bet on smoking pipes. Really? REALLY??

Why Does Empathy Have to be Earned?

It’s a very good question.

December 31 means a great deal to me.

It’s the last day of the year, of course. However, it’s also my mother’s birthday and the day I lost my right eye in a freak accident.

My accident isn’t something I think about daily. I was only eight years old. When I do think about it, I only think of fleeting things like getting the wind knocked out of me, being carried to my back door, the stitches, and staying in a hospital for a bit.

I don’t think about blindness, mostly because I can see just fine out of my left.

It was a football accident, so my chance of ever playing football in high school was pretty much over. Because I lost depth perception, playing baseball was out of the question, especially when they started throwing curveballs. I found other interests and other sports.

Blindness in my right eye probably restricted my life in a few minor ways, but it wasn’t that big of a deal in reality. I certainly never allowed it to define my life. On the other hand, my mother certainly shaped me for the better.

She was of the stay-at-home variety, and I saw my Mom every day after school. She grew up as a latch-key kid, but I did not. She never wanted that for her children and didn’t go into the workforce until both of her kids were essentially out of the house.

When she married my father, she could hardly boil water. We would nearly always come down to eat at the dinner table as a family. Dinner time was family time. Over the decades, cooking became a passion, and she still loves experimenting with new recipes.

I learned most from my mother that family is the most important thing. Your family is the one to rely on when you need help. When confronted with obstacles or realized successes, my family was there.

As I reflect on the lessons taught by accidents and mothers, my goal for 2026 is to keep these ideas alive in me, not as some resolution, but as a steadfast core belief in myself.

Hello, 2026, and goodbye to 2025. Goodbye to a year of doubt and fear. Goodbye to the need to be like others or worry about how others view me. Just be me. I may be overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what I want to accomplish, but I can’t be paralyzed by it. I can’t be fearful.

It’s hello to a restored sense of family. I will embrace what I have right in front of me and worry less about what I think I want. This is the year I find my voice and quit letting the successes of others drive me or make me try to mimic their unique achievements. I’m the star of my own life, and I need to start acting like it.

The best motivator for me is me. Do better than before. Get better. Find the next level and keep at it, in my writing, with my family and friends, and in how I approach this precious thing called life.

The adventure is just beginning.

Be seeing you.

Illinois is on the right track after another historic season

I had never been to a bowl game before, and this was a great first game to witness. It was awesome. The helmets were amazing. Here are the highlights. I was lucky enough to attend some fan events and experience what it means to be part of a big-time program. Illinois football is now a real program. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Seven Tips for the New Year

Michael Wade’s list of seven tips should be placed somewhere one can see it every day.

How to Organise Your Life in 2026

This is an incredible list of good pieces of advice. I need to spend some time with it and really see how the ideas here can benefit me most. It’s just a guess, but I bet it would benefit you too.

The Democratic Party Is Making a Big Mistake

This is so frustrating. “Pretending, for multiple years, that the elderly Biden was fit to run for another term remains one of the great acts of political delusion and deceit in the modern era. Some Democrats knew better and looked away.” I will forever be thankful for Joe Biden’s win. Unfortunately, he should have resigned after two years and passed the torch to Harris.

Ex-KISS member Vinnie Vincent lashes out at fans ‘whining’ about $225 price of his new single

Vinnie is delusional. I can’t imagine there’s anyone who would pay that price for a single. I can’t even imagine there would be much demand at $1 price point.

Making Ben Affleck Talk About Every Film He's Ever Done

This is one of the better interviews with Affleck. He really comes across as intelligent, talented, and articulate, and is clearly winning his battle with addiction.

Somebody Needs to Tell Trump Everybody Is Laughing at Him

He’ll never get this. Never.

The Cult of Costco

Easily one of my favorite openings to an article: “Because every day is Black Friday at Costco, I choose to go on Saturday. I like to get there early. I always park in the same spot (right next to the cart return), and wait with the other die-hards. It has the thrill of a stakeout, absent any crime or danger. When the doors open, we move toward the entrance in an orderly march. There’s a small gasp upon entry—the kind of quiet awe that one feels before the most epic human achievements, as when stepping across the threshold of St. Peter’s or the Chartres Cathedral. But in this place, there is no baroque majesty, no stained glass, just abundance bathed in light. In the sweep of human history generally marked by scarcity and want, here is bounty on an unimaginable scale; here is a year’s supply of mozzarella sticks; here is a hot dog and a drink for $1.50; here is a monument of our civilization, in more than 600 locations across the United States.”

Trump-Hosted Kennedy Center Honors Ratings Drop to All-Time Low

Shocking no one, I muted the TV every time Trump was on screen. It made my viewing much more enjoyable. As for the KISS section, I thought Garth Brooks was great in the introduction, but he really should have just sung “Hard Luck Woman.” I thought the country kid who sang “Beth” was atrociously awful, and I thought it would have been nice for Rick Nielsen to actually learn the solo in “Rock and Roll All Nite.” I will never watch it again.

52 things I learned in 2025

One of my favorite end-of-year lists is Tom Whitwell’s annual record of 52 things he’s learned in the past year. A couple of favorites: 13. Most characters in the film Idiocracy wear Crocs because the film’s wardrobe director thought they were too horrible-looking to ever become popular. [Alex Kasprak] and 40. Writing is a way to escape your mind’s default setting. [Kupajo]

I wake to a loud house.

My three-year-old nephew is with us for the holidays, and he’s excited. His parents are also here, trying to keep him from bouncing off the walls. There are stockings to go through before opening any presents, and he’s understandably impatient.

It’s Christmas morning.

I grab a cup of coffee and get ready for what the morning brings. It’s an unseasonably warm late December and, finally, the holiday spirit has taken hold. Better now than never.

I hope you’re having a great day so far, or had one if you’re reading this after the fact. I know I’m posting this after Christmas, but time is a flat circle.

There aren’t usually wide-eyed children exploding with anticipation in this house anymore, which is a touch sad. There are still stockings hung by the fireplace, a twinkling tree (actually several), and the feeling of “the calm before the storm.” However, there is a wonderful feeling of family.

There aren’t a lot of Christmas traditions in this family. We don’t open everything all at once and luxuriate in the carnage of torn wrapping, ribbons, and tape. We go through our stockings first to see what Santa brought, then open presents. It’s a joyous occasion, and we do what we want.

My nephew tears through his presents, immediately wanting to open the boxes and play. Unfortunately for him, his parents are heading to church and then to the grandparents’ house. He doesn’t get any say in the matter. The only bonus is that I’m sure more presents await him there.

Once they take their leave and head out for the rest of their Christmas day, we all take a moment to let the aftermath of the Christmas chaos settle before gathering wrapping paper, bows, boxes, and ribbon for either the trash or next year’s presents.

In the kitchen, cinnamon rolls are coming out for breakfast. It’s not really a Christmas morning tradition, but I like that it’s just for us. It feels right.

After the presents are piled up and clothes tried on… after the kids have headed out to go to their other family Christmases… after watching a movie or two and maybe taking a nap… I will give thanks for the warmth and light, for family together again, and for being reminded of how blessed my family truly is on this day and all the others as well.

Be kind, be happy, and be at peace this Christmas.

Be seeing you.

Why do we hear the same Christmas songs year after year?

I know it’s a few days after Christmas, so you might be all Christmas-ed out, but I thought this was an interesting article. In light of my recent piece on some of my favorites, I am a bit tired of the same old same olds. Speaking of songs of the season, here’s Austin Kleon’s most recent mixtape.

The True Meaning of Christmas

This is a lovely set of stories by Jeff Goins. If you are trying to extend the Christmas spirit a few more days, this will do the trick.

The Odyssey | Official Trailer

At long last, Universal has released the first official trailer for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon as the wandering Ithacan king Odysseus. Frankly, it looks appropriately epic.

Pirates descend on Spotify’s entire library

Speaking of music, “A pirate activist group called Anna’s Archive allegedly pulled 300 terabytes of data from Spotify, creating what might be the largest open-music database ever…” Woah.

Architects Explore New York City’s Secrets

Architectural Digest put together an excellent two-hour walking tour of Manhattan's iconic sights and neighborhoods, led by New York City architects Michael Wyetzner and Nick Potts. Wyetzner spoke about the history of Central Park, the bygone era of NYC Mansions, while Potts covered the Upper West Side, the Upper East Side, Grand Central Station, The High Line, Greenwich Village, and Wall Street.

The 2025 Hate List

Defector has made a list and it’s great.

The Wegovy Weight-Loss Pill Is Officially Here

GLP-1s are among the most effective health medications ever developed. The health benefits are tremendous. Making it cheaper and easier to take will be a massive game-changer. Here are five things to know about the new obesity pill.

The 10 Most Compelling Sports Stories of 2025

Will Leitch gathered all the best stories, but I think he nailed it with his top two choices.

The Epstein Files Only Get Worse

None of this is all that confusing. Epstein was a pedophile. His best friend for many years, Donald Trump, knew about his proclivities and took advantage of them as well.

You All Have Made the Difference

Josh Whitman is, arguably, the best Athletic Director in the Big Ten Conference and possibly in the nation. Comfort and joy.