A few weeks ago I went looking for something I wrote.

It was an older essay. I remembered the ending, more or less. I remembered writing it late on a Friday and feeling good about it. What I couldn’t remember was where it lived. Was that just an old Word file? Substack, maybe. Or Medium. I think it started as a note somewhere, grew up into a piece, and settled wherever it landed.

I found it eventually. It took three searches across several platforms and more time than the essay deserved. And somewhere in that little scavenger hunt, a thought showed up and refused to leave.

I didn’t know where my own writing lived.

That’s a strange thing for a writer to admit. I’d bet it’s also more common than any of us wants to say out loud. You start a newsletter and the essays go one place. You build a website and that becomes another place. The short stuff, the two-paragraph observations, the “I have to write this down before it’s gone” moments, those scatter to wherever short thoughts scatter (social media, Google Docs, Apple Notes, etc.). Each decision made sense when I made it. Then one day you go looking for something you made, and you realize the whole body of work is spread across the internet like a family that only sees each other at weddings.

So I fixed it.

If you’ve clicked over to seanmcdevitt.com lately, you’ve seen the result. The site got a full rebuild on a platform called Micro.blog, and everything lives there now. Every Substack essay made the trip. So did a stack of the shorter notes, the ones that never quite earned a full send but still felt worth keeping. One location. One archive. One front porch.

The phrase I kept repeating while I worked on this was “a single source of truth.” It’s a term borrowed from people who manage databases, which is a group I don’t usually take writing advice from, but the idea fits. One place where the final version of everything lives, and one address I can point to when someone asks where to find me. There I am.

I want to be fair to Substack here, because it earned that much. It delivered these emails on time, every week, and it made starting a newsletter about as easy as starting one can be. I’m grateful for it. The move comes down to something I learned about how I actually write.

I don’t write in one size. Some weeks the thing I need to say runs a thousand words. Some weeks it runs forty. The old setup only had a lane for the first kind. A newsletter platform wants a Newsletter, capital N, and everything smaller either gets inflated to fit or dies in a drafts folder. I have a drafts folder full of forty-word ideas that deserved better than that.

The new setup has room for all of it. A weekly essay, same as always. And as many short notes as the week hands me. Two sentences about a game that went sideways. A paragraph about a sentence I loved and can’t stop thinking about. They get to exist now, at their natural size, without me dressing them up for a bigger occasion.

Here’s what changes for you, and I think it’s good news. The Saturday email becomes a Sunday morning digest. One email, once a week, with the essay and whatever notes I posted along the way. Skim it or sit with it. Your call.

I’ll be honest about why Sunday. When I picture you reading this, and I do picture it, you’re at the kitchen table. There’s coffee going lukewarm beside you because you got pulled into something. Maybe the dog wants out and is being ignored. Sunday morning is built for that kind of reading. Saturday, I’ve come to accept, is built for living (or work.. I’m nodding to my mother-in-law). An email that arrives while you’re out at dinner gets buried by morning. An email that arrives with the coffee gets read. I’d rather meet you at the table.

A little housekeeping, and then I’ll let you go. The old site, saturdaynightfive.com, stays up for a while. Nothing there is disappearing yet. But this is likely the last email you’ll ever receive from that platform, and probably the last one under that name.

Names are funny things to retire. Saturday Night Five was a promise, a small one, that I’d show up at the same time every week with five things that earned your attention. I loved keeping that promise. I plan to keep making a version of it, just from a new address and on a new morning. If anything, the promise gets bigger. You’ll see more of the writing now, including the small pieces that used to stay in the notebook.

There’s one more reason for the move, and it’s the one that took me longest to admit. A newsletter that lives on someone else’s platform is a tenant. It follows the landlord’s rules, sits inside the landlord’s app, and gets shuffled around when the landlord redecorates. I wanted the writing to have a home instead. A place with my name on the door, where an essay from last year and a note from last Tuesday sit on the same shelf, and where anyone who wonders what I’ve been thinking about can find out in one stop.

That’s what seanmcdevitt.com is now. The full record, all in one place, growing every week.

So here’s the new deal. I write all week. You get one email on Sunday morning. You make the coffee, I’ll bring the words, and we’ll figure out the rest of it together like we always have.

Be seeing you.

Three Blind Mice

Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman knows what he’s talking about when he describes three of our world’s leaders as the stupidest people the world has ever seen.

Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin are drastically different men, but they do have one important thing in common: Each thinks he is the smartest person in any room he enters. Alas, though, because they have all done the dumbest thing you can do as a leader — surround yourself with sycophants — they have all blundered into dead-end wars from which they can extricate themselves today only by eating a banquet of crow. Watch out. There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless leader faced with a plate of crow: Sometimes his instinct is to double down on a losing strategy instead.

The world will be better off when these three are off the world stage and wiser men take over and negotiate ends to these stupid and pointless conflicts.

Pomodoro

One of the ways I’ve been keeping myself on task is the Pomodoro technique. For me, I found a YouTube channel that is just perfect for this: Good Timers.

I’m able to start a project, click on whatever timer I want and I get rain and white noise and that helps me stay on point and focused.

It works for me. It might work for you.

The Cardinals and the Trade Deadline

The Cardinals are fading after the All-Star break again, and with the deadline a few days out, everyone wants to argue buy or sell. That’s the wrong question. The better one is what the front office’s actions will tell us about how they see this team.

The position player picture has narrowed. A year ago the whole outfield was a mess. Now it’s really just center field, third base, and catcher. Watch Nootbaar. If they trade him, it means they think Joshua Baez is ready. If they don’t, he isn’t. Wetherholt already answered his question with an eight-year extension. Bloom needs to lock up Walker and I expect that’s getting done right now.

The rotation has been steadier than expected, but apparently the arms in the minors look more like 2028 than 2027. That creates a timing problem, because parts of the position core will be running out of control years right as the pitching arrives. Bloom has to fix this.

Speaking of fixing, the bullpen can’t be fixed with one deadline arm. Neither can the bench, which keeps losing games with bad at-bats and missed plays.

I haven’t watched enough to be knowledgeable enough to know what Bloom will do, but we will all know soon enough.

Seth’s Riffs

Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow, Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip, and This Is Marketing, writes a daily email full of excellent short ideas about life and business.

Now, he’s collected even shorter ideas that don’t make it into the daily email on a page called Seth’s Riffs. Each one is a sentence or two.

Here are a couple I liked:

Anxiety might simply be choosing to experience failure in advance.

Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress.

Defending mediocrity is exhausting.

People are very good at stories. That’s our core competency.

Share Saturday Night Five

Inspired by the Proust Questionnaire and the Colbert Questionert, this is a list of 20 questions to have a little fun with and share a bit about myself to the world.

1. What is your favorite word?

I like “Petrichor” quite a bit. It’s also my favorite smell. “Quadrotriticale“ is also a fun word. However, I think I have to say, “Yes” is my favorite word.

2. What is your least favorite word?

I think the word I hate the most is “No.”

3. What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Perfect happiness is a moment of stillness where I’m fully present. There’s no weight of the past or worry about the future. Just a quiet sense that right now, this is enough.It feels like about 5:30 in the morning, with a distant thunderstorm on the horizon. It’s crisp, but not cold outside, and the coffee is the right temperature.

4. What is your idea of absolute misery?

Feeling lost in regret about the past or dread about the future. A cacophony of noise, external or internal.

5. What was your first job ever?

Babysitting my brother.

6. What was your worst job ever?

The summer before college, I worked for the park district. We built a sidewalk, planted a ton of evergreen trees, and built a play set. It was basically digging a lot of holes in the sun.

7. What was your best job ever?

Occasionally, on Saturday, Dad would ask me to work with him at the Pharmacy as a tech. We’d have a morning rush of like five customers and then I’d run to get lunch, and we’d spend the rest of the afternoon talking baseball, reading the newspaper, and basically just hang out. Those were great days.

8. What profession other than your own would you like to try?

I think I would have made a pretty good college professor. I was able to do some adjunct work at the community college level, but I never fully tried to become a full-time professor.

9. What is the trait you hate most in yourself?

I procrastinate too much.

10. What is the trait you hate most in others?

Rudeness. A couple of examples that bother me: Looking at your phone while someone is talking to you, talking loudly on the phone in quiet spaces, and bringing your dog into a restaurant or store when it is obviously not a service dog.

11. What’s a piece of advice you’d give to yourself at 23?

Say yes to more things that scare you a little and say no to more things that drain you completely.

12. What is your greatest extravagance?

I subscribe to nearly all the streaming entertainment services.

13. What’s one thing you own that you really should throw out?

I just recently got rid of a ratty, old, sweat stained baseball hat that I did not want to throw out. I own a snowblower that I’ve never used.

14. You have dinner reservations for four, excluding family and close friends, who are the three people (alive, dead or imaginary) you’d invite?

Barack Obama, Robin Williams, and Dave Filoni.

15. What is your baseball walk-up song?

For a long time, I always answered this with “Three-Lock Box“ by Sammy Hagar. Now, I kinda like “Bleed It Out“ by Linkin Park or “Detroit Rock City“ by KISS.

16. Have you ever asked someone for an autograph?

Lots of people. I got Larry Bird’s autograph when he came to a basketball camp I was at while he was playing for Indiana State. Gene Simmons signed my copy of Mike Grell’s Sable novel, which is a weird combination. I’ve got a bootlegged “Six Million Dollar Man” screenplay signed by Kevin Smith (He wrote it). My favorite one is comic book artist, George Perez, who drew a brooding Batman and signed it to me.

17. You get one song to listen to for the rest of your life: what is it?

John Cage’s 4′33″. We are so lucky to live in this day and age, where we can just take out our phones and listen to beautiful compositions like this for free.

18. Coffee or Tea?

I drink coffee a lot more than I drink tea, but I love them both.

19. What is something you’re really excited about right now?

Finally completing Captured Ghosts.

20. Describe the rest of your life in five words:

Still figuring it all out.

Be seeing you.

5K

Last Sunday, my wife, and I decided to walk to this nearby park in a neighborhood or so over. The park had wide sidewalks and nice grounds with wildflowers, alfalfa, and cornflowers. We ended up doing the park loop twice before heading back and we realized as we were approaching the house that we’d ending up walking 3.2 miles, effectively walking a 5K. It was unexpected and fun.

I am still kinda tired though.

Digger

Digger is a new Tom Cruise movie that popped up on my radar so I had to see what this was all about. I went into this totally cold, so I was not mentally prepared for the trailer, in which we see Cruise playing a dipshit oligarch in what appears to be a Dr. Strangelove-style satire/thriller.

It’s so nice when Tom remembers he can really act when he wants to and this looks like he’s angling for an Oscar.

The logline ain’t bad either:

The most powerful man in the world embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything.

Homerun Derby

I didn’t watch any of it. I kind of forgot it was happening. Then I get a notice that Jordan Walker is in the finals of the MLB Home Run Derby. I still didn’t turn it on. A few moments later, I take a peek at Twitter/X and there it is… Walker won the derby.

I then find out what happened. The hometown hero, Kyle Schwarber, hammered 11 home runs in 15 swings. I watched the clip and as Jordan’s 12th finals home run flew deep into the left field stands, the non-Philly fans cheered. What an ending to the finals.

It’s a reminder of the romance of baseball and I can only hope it is a harbinger of good things for Walker and the Cardinals in the future.

Josh Whitman Gets Contract Extension

Josh Whitman isn’t going anywhere. Not until 2036, anyway.

The Board of Trustees approved his extension Thursday. It raises his salary to $2.15 million for the 2026-27 season, then adds $100,000 every year after that. Over the full deal, that’s $26.1 million. It’s his fifth extension as athletic director.

You don’t lock someone up for ten years if you think they might walk. You do it when you can’t picture the place without them.

Whitman is 47. He’s run Illinois athletics since 2016, long enough now to be the fifth-longest-tenured AD in the Power Four. He also played football here, back before any of this. So the man in charge once wore its colors on a Saturday. That means something.

Then there’s the record.

The basketball team reached its first Final Four since 2006 this April. The women’s program has made the NCAA tournament in three of the last four years. Football has piled up marquee bowl wins. He hired Brad Underwood. He hired Bret Bielema. He hired Shauna Green. Three swings, three hits. Without question, he’s the best Athletic Director Illinois has had in decades.

Ten years in, the school asked him to do it all again. Same chair. Higher stakes.

I’d take that bet.

Share Saturday Night Five

My wife and I go to sleep every night to echoes of The Golden Girls theme song. I have seen every episode at least ten to twenty times now.

That should embarrass me more than it does. A grown man, drifting off to a sitcom about four women in eighties Miami. But the show has become part of the house. It’s the last thing we hear before the lights go out. Thank you for being a friend, and then sleep.

For a long time I thought comfort television worked by asking nothing of you. Then I watched these episodes ten times each, then fifteen, and noticed something. They keep asking.

Take “Old Friends,” the season three premiere. One storyline is pure silliness. Blanche gives away Rose’s beloved teddy bear to a little girl, who promptly holds the bear for ransom. It’s exactly as ridiculous as it sounds, and it’s wonderful. The end with Rose and the girl might be the all-time best Rose moment on the show. The other storyline is not silly at all. Sophia befriends a man named Alvin on the boardwalk, and slowly, without ever announcing it, the show lets you understand he has Alzheimer’s. Estelle Getty plays it so quietly you almost miss how good she is. One episode. One half hour. It made me laugh out loud and then sat on my chest for a while.

The show did that more than people remember. In “An Illegitimate Concern,” the man Blanche is sure is a besotted stalker turns out to be her late husband George's illegitimate son. It could have curdled into a very special episode. It never does. It plays the whole thing for laughs and for real feeling and never once for sap. Sophia gets the best line after one of Rose’s endless St. Olaf stories, “Hemingway ran out of stories to tell and he shot himself. She just keeps on going.” A season later, in “Mrs. George Devereaux,” George walks back in alive, having faked his own death, and it lands on Blanche like a verdict. Rue McClanahan plays the betrayal for keeps. It’s one of the early “It was all a dream” sitcom plots, but it works perfectly.

And then, thank goodness, there are the episodes that are just funny and unashamed about it. My favorite of the whole run might be “The Actor.” A smooth, handsome actor blows into town for the community theatre and quietly romances all three of them at once, and the farce builds until it topples. Nothing about it is deep. It doesn’t try to be. It’s the ensemble at full stride, and it hands Rose one of her finest bewildered lines, once she works out she’s been played. “I feel so common. So cheap. So used. Blanche, how do you usually deal with that?”

There’s “Ladies of the Evening,” where the girls win tickets to meet Burt Reynolds and, through termites and a hotel that turns out to be a brothel, get arrested as madams. There’s the Valentine’s Day episode, where a trip to the drugstore ends with Dorothy shouting the word “condoms” at Rose four times in a row until the whole store hears her. I know it’s coming, and I laugh every time.

My other favorite comes near the end, when the show was running low on gas. In “The Case of the Libertine Belle,” Blanche stages a murder-mystery weekend to impress her boss. Dorothy solves the fake case in about ninety seconds, and then someone turns up, actually stabbed, with Blanche the prime suspect.

Betty White always said her favorite was “A Little Romance,” the one where Rose dates a man who happens to be a little person. What makes it work is that the show never laughs at him. The humor is all the girls and their own awkwardness. That was the ethic of the whole place. Be as funny as you want, but never punch down.

The company these girls kept was a joy. George Clooney turned up as a rookie cop before he was George Clooney, and it gets me every time. Dick Van Dyke played a big-shot lawyer who wanted to quit the bar and join the circus as a clown. Did you know Quentin Tarantino was an extra playing an Elvis impersonator?

The Golden Girls was a comedy about people the culture had quietly filed away. Widowed or divorced, past whatever age television usually bothered with focusing on. And the whole premise, the beating heart of it, was that they were still funny, still hungry, still falling in love, and, above all, still making friends. Not keeping old ones. Making new ones.

I didn’t understand any of this the first time through. I was watching for the jokes, and they're great. It took repetition to see the rest, the quiet argument under all the farce, that friendship is the thing that holds when everything else has gone. Husbands die. Marriages end. Children grow up and move away. The friends are still at the kitchen table at two in the morning, eating cheesecake, telling the truth.

So my wife and I fall asleep to it. Same theme song, same voices, same four women we’ve now spent hundreds of nights with. It is the least sophisticated thing I do all day, and one of the ones I’d defend the hardest.

A show about how much people need each other, playing softly in a dark room, next to the person I need most.

Thank you for being a friend. I mean it about the show, and I mean it about her.

Be seeing you.

Overwhelmed

I’m feeling overwhelmed right now. I’m the problem. Me.

I have decided to tackle a bunch of projects that have, at one time or another, got me seriously excited. This is a bad thing.

I wrote a screenplay, Hello Stranger, and I’m pretty proud of it. I finished a pitch deck, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do next.

Also, I have my essays/fiction collection, Captured Ghosts, ready to go to Kindle Direct Publishing so it can show up on Amazon and be bought by, like, three people. I just need to pull the trigger on that one. Sooooo close.

Additionally, I started working on a YA/middle-grade book series that can be described, not quite accurately, as “Harry Potter meets Santa Claus.” I have a full five-book series outlined. It was fun to do. I probably just need to finish the first book.

I started another novel idea inspired by Daisy Jones and Six, but I’ve since abandoned that concept for now.

I had an interesting idea for a science fiction novel set in Door County, WI, and I have a great title for it, but it still needs a lot of work to get off the ground. I really like the concept, though.

Oh, and I also had a fun idea: taking three public-domain novels (The Great Gatsby, The Three Musketeers, and Frankenstein), turning them into modern retellings, each at novella length, and grouping them together in a book.

Plus, I got inspired to fix my website, and now I've just added a ton of edits and uploads to make it work.

Where is my mind?

Dune Part 3 Official Trailer

Here’s the official trailer for Dune 3. I am so looking forward to this. It might be my most anticipated movie of the year. While I’ve only read Dune and haven't touched the sequels, I generally know how this goes, and it's not particularly good for Paul in the end. I bet I know the last frame of this movie already.

I probably need to make sure I’m in an IMAX theater to see this in December.

Platner Drops Out

I generally liked what Graham Platner, the politician, was saying and doing. Unfortunately, the non-politician parts were finally too much. Basically, Graham Platner is accused of rape, and that was a line voters in Maine could not cross.

Personally, I wasn’t following that closely to begin with, but I did see that he won the primary. I’m in Illinois, not Maine, and they really seemed to want the guy. For me, the Nazi tattoo was a red flag, but people make dumb decisions.

Well, they picked him, and now they have this alleged rape charge, which has blown the whole thing up. Plantner has dropped out, and Maine’s Democrats will replace him in the general election. I’ll be interested to see what the decision is there, but mostly I just want Susan Collins defeated.

Starlog Returns

One of my all-time favorite things growing up is coming back. My Dad will also likely be interested.

Starlog, the science fiction magazine that ended its 33-year run in 2009, will return this fall with a new print edition, a weekly podcast, and a newsletter.

“Fifty years ago, STARLOG went behind the scenes of alternate worlds for the first time. Now it’s back, exploring the visionary sci-fi and cutting-edge science that inspire what comes next. The future will be wild. You’ll be ready for it because you read STARLOG.”

The magazine returns as Volume 2, Number 1, with the first print issue dated Nov. 13, 2026. It will be published annually and sold in stores. The podcast and newsletter are already up and running; magazine pre-orders begin soon.

Share Saturday Night Five

My first Fourth of July, I was a few days old, asleep in the bleachers behind a backstop while my Dad played ball. I don’t remember it. My Mom does. She says that’s where I was, swaddled in a blanket on the third-base line, the summer I was born.

For years after that, the Fourth meant baseball. Town-league games in the afternoon, an all-star game when the schedule lined up, and later, once I was old enough to stay up, fireworks at the park where my Dad used to play. Some days, we’d just stay in the car and stay cool with the AC. Other times, we’d spread a blanket past the outfield fence and wait for the dark. Small kids ran around with flags on wooden sticks, while the older ones had Pop-Its or real firecrackers. Somebody’s mother always had sparklers and a warning to go with them. It was warm, inviting, and a little bit nostalgic.

I thought the whole country felt like that each year.

Today, the country turns 250. I figured I’d feel it the way I felt back then, maybe even a little more. A round number like that comes once, maybe twice, in a life, and many of us won’t be here for the next one.

That feeling hasn’t shown up.

There’s a thing on the National Mall right now called the Great American State Fair, a sixteen-day, World’s-Fair-scale celebration of the country’s birthday, and it has been a complete failure. Almost nobody has visited. The pictures and videos show an open lawn where the crowds were supposed to be, a Ferris wheel that quit, and ice cream melting in a food hall that lost power. About a fifth of the states declined to send anything at all. The musicians who were booked walked away once they saw how political it had become, so the president made himself the headliner, then claimed that forty-five thousand people came to hear him, while the cameras caught them filing out during the speech.

You can spend a ludicrous amount of money on a birthday party. You can’t make people come.

A few weeks ago, I wrote the voiceover for a YouTube short for my company, Horizon Hobby. It’s about families crowding into a backyard for the Fourth. Kids, grandparents, hot dogs and drinks, and a radio-controlled truck, plane, or boat somewhere being a part of the festivities

The whole piece is built around 250 summers, the same anniversary the country is marking this week, and there’s a line in it I meant all the way down, “You don’t plan a summer like this. You just show up.”

I found the feeling at my desk in June, writing about other people’s backyard celebrations, and it was real. It just wasn’t anywhere near the National Mall. Washington didn’t misplace the feeling, it just went looking in the wrong yard.

What I felt on that field as a kid was never really about the country. It was about the people on the blanket next to me. There’s a difference between loving a place and applauding whoever happens to be running it, and the difference gets easy to lose in a year this loud. The patriotism I can still find. It’s the kind that isn’t aimed at the man behind the bulletproof glass or the budget for the fair nobody attended. It’s the plain bet that the people in the folding chairs are mostly decent, and that the thing started 250 years ago is worth the work of keeping it. That bet has looked foolish before, but people keep making it.

I won’t pretend the year is fine. We’ve been at war since February. Gas and groceries are more expensive. A lot of people I know are tired in a way that doesn’t yet have a clean name. If you’re not feeling triumphant today, you’re in good company.

But the Fourth of July was never asking me to feel triumphant. It’s asking the quieter thing the holiday has always asked under the noise. Whether I still think this is worth it. Whether I’m still in.

I am. Not because the country earned it this year. Because the people on the blanket usually do.

I won’t be out at a diamond this year watching the fireworks come up over the outfield, but I’ll be thinking about the families on the blankets, and the kids running around with flags on wooden sticks until their arms hurt, at every small park in every town that never needed Washington to tell it how to do this. Nobody had to beg those crowds to show up. They come out on their own, every year, the way they did the summer I slept through my first one in the bleachers.

That’s the country I believe in.

Be seeing you.

What is the United States of America now?

Rebecca Solnit, writing for The Guardian, has a sneaky good piece about these United States of America.

The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. The United States of America is … so many things, horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and cursed, as it approaches its quarter-millennium mark. I say it as though the US was one thing, but it is a thousand things.

Read the rest.

Fable

Anthropic put out a new AI model called Claude Fable 5, and the name is what stopped me. Fable. A company full of engineers built the most capable thinking machine it's ever made, then reached back past the software vocabulary and named it after the oldest form we have. Talking animals and a lesson at the end.

I've got complicated feelings about these tools, same as every writer I know. But I keep noticing that when the people who build them want to signal that something matters, they borrow from storytelling. Not from math. That tells me the old craft still holds the high ground. The machines are getting better. The name admits what they're chasing.

Re-reading “The Great Gatsby”

I own a wonderful edition of The Great Gatsby. I’ve cracked it open a few times, but I haven’t fully read the novel since high school. I’ve seen several movies, and I rather like the one starring Leo and Tobey.

This essay by Matthew Morgan has made me want to actually read the book again. Tom and Daisy are such careless people…

The Odyssey Final Trailer

Watching the last trailer, I am oddly underwhelmed by this movie. It will probably be great. I have no idea.

Everything is shot so dark. Can we please have some light?

Also, the line, “My Dad is coming back,” immediately took me out of the story.

Share Saturday Night Five

The night before the Clippers picked him fifth, Keaton Wagler was thinking about his shoes.

He’d ordered a pair to go with his suit, and they hadn’t shown up yet. He wasn’t sure they would. So there he was in New York, a day from becoming the highest-drafted Illini in twenty years, and the thing on his mind was footwear. “I got the suit ready,” he said. “Hopefully, the shoes make it.”

It’s a cute story and tells you everything you need to know about Wagler.

A year ago, nobody was ordering Keaton Wagler anything. He showed up in Champaign ranked 261st in his recruiting class. Three stars. He didn’t play on a shoe-themed AAU team. He won a couple of Kansas state titles, but big programs didn’t look twice. All credit goes to Tyler Underwood, who saw him and knew he was the perfect fit for what Illinois needed. That evaluation is going to be the biggest one the younger Underwood will likely ever have in his career.

Over the summer, there was some buzz, but no one dreamed he’d become a top-five pick. A contributor on a good team? Yes. The catalyst to propel Illinois Basketball to its first Final Four in decades? No way.

Then December happened.

Brad Underwood and his staff handed the offense to Wagler, and he became one of the best players in the country. He dropped 46 at Purdue in January, a Big Ten freshman record. He carried Illinois to its first Final Four since 2005. He broke the school’s freshman scoring record by a mile with 663 points, the third-best scoring season anybody has ever had at Illinois. Second Team All-American. Big Ten Freshman of the Year. I’m looking forward to his jersey raising this upcoming season.

And on Tuesday, the Los Angeles Clippers took him at No. 5, ahead of three former five-star guards who’d been on every scout’s radar since they were sixteen.

It blows my mind. He’s the highest pick Illinois has produced since Deron Williams in 2005. One of only three Illini ever taken in the top ten, with Williams and Kendall Gill. Gill went fifth too, back in 1990. The number next to Wagler’s name a year ago was 261. The number next to it now is 5.

In pre-draft workouts, a story emerged. When Wagler worked out for the Clippers, he started cold. Missed a bunch of shots in front of the franchise sitting on a top-five pick. That’s the kind of moment that can wilt a nineteen-year-old. Wagler just kept playing. Once they put live competition in front of him, he hit everything and made every winning play in the gym. Their testing turned up an elite ability to stop on a dime and create space. They liked the game. They loved the kid.

“We were blown away,” Lawrence Frank said, “not just with his game, but with his character.”

That’s the Clippers’ president of basketball operations explaining why he passed on the five-stars. Not the jumper. The character. They wanted someone obsessed with winning, and they decided a kid from Kansas was the one.

I think about how easy it is to trust a number. We do it all the time. We rank people, seed them, and slot them where we think they belong, and then we mostly stop looking. The ranking turns into the truth, and the truth turns into the ceiling. Two hundred and sixty-one means role player, on a good day. It does not mean top-five pick. Everyone knew that.

Except a number is a guess. That’s all it ever was. A snapshot of what a teenager could do in one moment, dressed up as a verdict on what he’ll always be. Underwood and his staff looked past the snapshot. So did Frank, out in Los Angeles with the fifth pick and a roster he’s rebuilding around Kawhi Leonard’s last good years. Both of them saw a player the rankings had filed away and forgotten.

The better part of the story is that Wagler never seems to have believed the verdict on himself either. He didn’t arrive at Illinois playing like a 261. He arrived and played, and when the lights got bigger, so did he. The Clippers saw the same thing.

For this Illinois Basketball program, Wagler going fifth runs deeper than one good draft night, and it was a great one. The line coming out of Illinois is three first-rounders in three years. It’s a guard factory in Champaign now, which is the kind of thing you can sell to every recruit who falls asleep dreaming about the “Association.”

Keaton Wagler is just an incredible story. A year ago, he was a name almost nobody could place. Tuesday night, he walked across that stage as the fifth pick in the draft, in the shoes he was most worried about.

Be seeing you.

$112 Million Man

Extending the Illini in the NBA coverage, ESPN reported Monday night that Ayo Dosunmu will stay with the Minnesota Timberwolves after signing a five-year, $112 million contract.

Minnesota acquired Dosunmu at the trade deadline, and he became one of their best players alongside Anthony Edwards, lifting them to massive moments in the postseason.

Good for him.

Hello Stranger Logline

Does this logline make you want to read the actual screenplay?

A comic-shop owner is handed one perfect night with the love he talked himself out of a decade ago — then learns she's dying and has begged him to stay away, forcing a choice between the months they could still have and the clean goodbye she's chosen for them both.

Let me know.

I’m working on the pitch deck next.

Be Where Your Feet Are

Alan Stein, a leadership and basketball performance coach who’s worked with players like Kevin Durant and Steph Curry, did a TED talk several years ago 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 private workout by Kobe Bryant, 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.

Happy Birthday to Me

Birthdays are supposed to be remembered and cherished. On my 16th birthday, I drove to the mall by myself. On my 21st birthday… no idea. Probably at some bar watching a band. On my 30th and 40th birthdays… I do not recall anything special or memorable. Birthdays simply have never been a big deal for me.

When I was growing up, my family would have a nice dinner and a cake, my grandma would come over, and I’d get a card and a present or two. It was always a pretty low-key affair. I don’t recall ever having a birthday party with a bunch of friends at the house.

This birthday coming up is not a milestone or a round number. I don’t feel the actual age I’m turning. I guess I feel younger, but I’m wise enough to know I’m most certainly not younger, nor am I getting any younger.

To celebrate, we will get expensive pizza and key lime pie. I’m looking forward to watching a movie on Netflix and enjoying the evening.

Happy birthday to me.

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Some days my mind wanders. I think about weird things like what my favorite Star Trek episodes are and why streaming shows now feature only 8 to 13 episodes per season.

I then started thinking about whether it was possible to cut each season of Star Trek: The Next Generation down to 13 of the best episodes. Would viewers miss much? I’m thinking they would not.

So, I took it upon myself to whittle down each season’s normal 26 episodes down to 13. At the very least, it makes for a fun exercise (no, not that kind of exercise) and a playlist for a fun binge-watching run.

Season 1

Encounter at Farpoint (101, 102)
Where No One Has Gone Before (106)
The Battle (109)
Hide and Q (110)
Haven (111)
The Big Goodbye (112)
Datalore (113)
11001001 (115)
Symbiosis (122)
Skin of Evil (123)
We’ll Always Have Paris (124)
Conspiracy (125)
The Neutral Zone (126)

The first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation is not good. The writers had no idea what to do with these characters, and there are only two or three episodes worth watching again (the pilot, “Conspiracy,” and “The Neutral Zone”).

Season 2

The Child (201)
Elementary, Dear Data (203)
The Outrageous Okona (204)
A Matter of Honor (208)
The Measure Of A Man (209)
The Dauphin (210)
Contagion (211)
The Icarus Factor (214)
Q Who (216)
Samaritan Snare (217)
Up The Long Ladder (218)
The Emissary (220)
Peak Performance (221)

Also, a lost season of mostly C-level stories. “The Measure Of A Man” is a standout. “Q Who” is scary, but the rest are just okay. It really is quite surprising that the show remained on the air. If it weren’t first-run syndication with the Star Trek name behind it, I doubt it would get a third season.

Season 3

Who Watches The Watchers (304)
The Enemy (307)
The Defector (310)
Deja Q (313)
Yesterday’s Enterprise (315)
The Offspring (316)
Sins of the Father (317)
Allegiance (318)
Captain’s Holiday (319)
Hollow Pursuits (321)
The Most Toys (322)
Sarek (323)
The Best of Both Worlds Part 1 (326)

This season features several impressive episodes, including “The Defector,” “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” “Captain’s Holiday,” “Sarek,” and the kicker, “The Best of Both Worlds.”

Season 4

The Best of Both Worlds Part 2 (401)
Family (402)
Brothers (403)
Legacy (406)
Reunion (407)
Future Imperfect (408)
The Final Mission (409)
Data’s Day (411)
The Wounded (412)
Qpid (420)
The Drumhead (421)
The Mind’s Eye (424)
Redemption Part 1 (426)

Last season’s “The Best of Both Worlds,” the second half of the two-parter here, and “Family” are arguably among the best Star Trek episodes and are especially good when viewed back-to-back-to-back.

Season 5

Redemption Part 1 (501)
Darmok (502)
Ensign Ro (503)
Disaster (505)
The Game (506)
Unification Part 1 (507)
Unification Part 2 (508)
Conundrum (514)
Cause and Effect (518)
The First Duty (519)
I Borg (523)
The Inner Light (525)
Time’s Arrow Part 1 (526)

Here’s where it really gets interesting. From “Darmok” through “The Inner Light,” there isn’t a clunker of an episode. The writing staff is hitting its stride, and the actors have a better understanding of who their characters are at this point. I’m a big fan of “The Inner Light,” but I don’t think it’s the best single episode of TNG.

Season 6

Time’s Arrow Part 2 (601)
Relics (604)
Rascals (607)
A Fistful of Datas (608)
Chain of Command Part 1 (610)
Chain of Command Part 2 (611)
Ship in a Bottle (612)
Face of the Enemy (614)
Tapestry (615)
Starship Mine (618)
Lessons (619)
Timescape (625)
Descent Part 1 (626)

The run of episodes from “Relics” to “Timescape” contains no bad episodes. Seasons 5 and 6 are the high-watermark episodes for me.

Season 7

Descent Part 2 (701)
Gambit Part 1 (704)
Gambit Part 2 (705)
Attached (708)
Force of Nature (709)
Inheritance (710)
Parallels (711)
The Pegasus (712)
Lower Decks (715)
Firstborn (721)
Preemptive Strike (724)
All Good Things… (725, 726)

It’s obvious that by Season 7, the show was getting tired. “Parallels,” “The Pegasus,” and “Lower Decks” make a good three-show arc, but the others aren’t quite as strong. “All Good Things…” is an excellent series ender and wraps up the television side of TNG perfectly.

Be seeing you.

“Hello, Stranger” Update

You may not care, but you are reading this, so maybe… I wrote a screenplay based on one of my short stories. The short story was an absolute riff on High Fidelity. It’s set in a comic shop rather than a record store, and it features girlfriends and weird employees. The crux of the prose story remained, but I took that spine and turned it into something completely different. There’s a funny High Fidelity reference, and our male lead does break the fourth wall, but that’s about as close as it gets to Hornby’s book or the movie.

I’m rather proud of it.

I don’t know anyone in the industry. Cold emailing people seems like a bad idea. The next step is probably seeing if I can get it hosted on The Black List.

If you happen to know someone who might be interested, feel free to let me know.

Backmasking

I love backmasking. Now with digital music files and home editing software, there’s no more spinning the vinyl record backward on a turntable. Satan, apparently, has gone binary. Enter “backmasking” into Google and nearly 9,000 sites pop up.

The whole stupid Christian coalition making what are really phonetic reversals into messages from Satan just cracks me up. I remember seeing televangelists wail about this crap. Of course, since I was/am a huge fan of KISS, there was the inevitable “Knights in Satan’s Service” tag. Funny enough, though, KISS never had a song that was backmasked either intentionally or not.

Wikipedia has a great collection of information on intended and unintended backmasking. Even more fun is Jeff Milner’s site, which offers many tracks to play forward and backward for your listening pleasure. Most of these are famous backmasking tracks that either I read about or actually heard back in the day.

Hearing “My Sweet Satan” as a phonetic reversal of “Stairway to Heaven” takes me back to high school and guys who were talented enough to splice the cassette tape or record the album and then “hand roll” it backward to try to recreate the sound.

I wish some of the newer metal bands would bring this practice back just to screw with the crazy religious right. I’d have all kinds of intentional backmasking on an album. All of it would be just like Christian rock band Petra’s famous intentional backmask, which says, “What are you looking for the devil for, when you ought to be looking for the Lord?”

Heh. That’d show ‘em.

Obligations

I wish I could float smoothly from project to project with the ease of self-assurance. I would love to be able to process information like a computer, make quick, insightful decisions, and stand behind them for all eternity. Does that sound even remotely like reality?

I manage a great deal. It’s not the mark of a modern 21st-century person to have managed one’s life as old hat. It isn’t. It just seems that way. We juggle so many things without even pausing to think about why we are doing them or whether they are good uses of our time.

Can you say no to a project given to you by your boss? Most of us would agree that saying no is not an option. Yet self-help gurus constantly bemoan that workers need to better manage their efforts to achieve optimal outcomes. How is that even possible with managers adding work to an already overworked staff? What are the priorities, and can it not be everything?

Obligations. These are the things that have to get done. You have to pay your rent/mortgage and your bills, go to work, make dinner, etc., etc. The question is, do you spend time on your obligations or on the things that you want to do?

The New Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood YouTube Channel

The folks at Fred Rogers Productions have launched a YouTube channel dedicated to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. They plan to post compilations, clips, and full episodes, some of which haven’t been seen on PBS in years & years. One of the first complete episodes they’ve posted is the one about how crayons are made!

I love this. I have a three-year-old nephew who I think is maybe a touch too young for Mister Rogers, but he won’t be in a few years. I can’t wait to show this to him someday.

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My favorite B-movie is called Thunder Alley. I watched it again over the weekend and enjoyed every minute. This movie is so schlocky, it isn’t even out on DVD and I have a nearly worn out VHS copy.

In a time before Behind the Music explained how every band gets started and is torn apart by drugs, we get the story of Richie and Donnie. Donnie (Scott McGinnis, who never quite made it as a Tom Cruise-lookalike) has started a band named, of all things, Magic and wants his friend Richie (Roger Wilson of Porky’s fame… I guess) to join, but the lead singer, Skip (Leif Garrett in full curly blonde hair, pre-Behind the Music special and odd white boy dance moves mode) isn’t too keen on having the hick join his rocking band.

Richie ends up having to sit in with the band while Magic’s current flashy and talent-less guitar player makes nice with the bathroom floor. Soon he’s in the band and they are on their way to local stardom playing clubs all across Nevada and Arizona. Meanwhile, their sleazy manager has been getting Donnie hooked on drugs, and when an overdose kills him, Richie is devastated. He learns who supplied Donnie the drugs, takes a sledgehammer to the sleazy manager’s expensive car and decides to pack in the rock and roll life. The manager tears up Magic’s contract and kicks the band off the bill of a huge festival where all the record company execs will be waiting to sign the next big thing.

Enter Pre-Highlander Clancy Brown.

Before old Donnie boy loses his battle with cocaine and speedballs, the band goes on a club tour with their road manager, Wessel (pronounced “Weasel”), played to perfection by Clancy Brown. He takes a shine to the boys in Magic and thinks there’s something special in their music.

For no apparent reason other than they are both blonde, the sleazy manager thinks he can drop the current lead singer of the Judas Priest rip-off band, Surgical Steel, add Leif Garrett and make a million bucks. This is akin to asking David Lee Roth to be the new frontman in Iron Maiden.

Wessel thinks this is stupid (as does most of the audience) and tries to convince Richie to join the bass player and drummer (Butch and Wolf, for those scoring at home) on stage after the Surgical Steel set at the big festival where, remember, all the record company execs will be waiting to sign the next big thing. Richie says no. The audience says noooooo!

Richie’s girlfriend, played by second rate scream queen of the 80s and general hottie Jill Schoelen, tries to convince him to play. Richie can’t do it. The audience says noooooo!

At the festival, Leif is watching Surgical Steel play. Wessel keeps the amps hot. The lights go down and Butch and Wolf take the stage. The lights come up and they start to play, but without Donnie, Richie or Skip, they got nothing.

They start to get depressed and stop playing. All of a sudden, a screaming guitar can be heard. Richie is at the show and he brought his Les Paul! The festival crowd goes nuts. The members of Magic go nuts. The audience watching the movie goes, “duh… of course he’s gonna show up. It’s a movie!”

The band plays a song for dearly departed Donnie and the festival crowd is in tears. They go into their up tempo number, “Can’t Look Back,” and Richie asks Skip to join them on stage. The band is back together! Leif dances with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He is sooooo cool. Clancy Brown smiles and the movie ends.

I love everything about this movie from the cheesy songs, to the sleazy manager doing his best Boss Hogg imitation to the gratuitous nudity, to the ridiculous names (Skip, Butch, Wolf) and to Clancy Brown playing the good guy for once.

It is sorta like Rock Star mixed with Almost Famous and every Behind the Music episode you saw except for the Weird Al Yankovic one. I think I’d pay big money for a DVD copy with the soundtrack.

Anyway, that’s my favorite B-movie. What’s yours?

Be seeing you.

The Fill

Rush opened the Fifty Something tour Sunday night at the Kia Forum. First show in 11 years, with Anika Nilles behind the kit, and the Forum is the same building where Neil Peart played his final show with the band in 2015. So the room already carried weight before a note was played.

Then came “Tom Sawyer.” The fill after Lifeson’s solo, the one every Rush fan has played on a steering wheel at a red light. Nilles nailed it, and 18,000 people cheered a drum fill in the middle of a song. Watch the video. Watch her face at 2:53 when she comes out the other side of it on the second night. She knows. The crowd knows. Geddy and Alex know. That’s what a victory lap should be. Not two guys protecting a legacy, but two guys trusting somebody new to carry it.

I loved every second.

P!NK Takes Flight

My wife loves P!NK, so the Tonys were on in our house Sunday whether I voted or not. I mostly wanted to see what they'd do with Rocky Horror. What I got instead was P!NK opening the show dressed as Peter Pan, spinning in the air over Radio City while singing "I'm Flying," then hoisting Neil Patrick Harris off the stage with her legs mid-bit before landing the whole thing on a Broadway-sized "Lady Marmalade" with more than 170 theater people behind her. My wife didn't say "told you," but she didn't have to.

The Rocky Horror cast did get their number in, for the record. The show itself went home empty-handed. The fishnets did not deserve that.

Gambling in Sports

Brendan Sorsby admitted to wagering at least $90,000 across more than 9,000 bets, including bets on his own team while he was at Indiana. The NCAA banned him for life. Then a judge in Lubbock County, the county where Texas Tech sits, reduced that to a two-game suspension.

He should be banned. Forever.

Here’s the thing: You can’t wallpaper every sports broadcast and every podcast with betting ads and then act stunned when a college kid opens the app. You can’t get away from FanDuel, DraftKings, and BetMGM ads. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Georgia and Nebraska have already told their coaches not to schedule Texas Tech, and I’m curious what the Big Ten decides.

What a terrible look for college football.

The Future President

Michelle Goldberg wrote a piece this week titled, “Why Everyone Wants Jon Ossoff to Run for President,” and the headline mostly checks out. Ossoff himself isn’t playing along. He says he has zero interest in 2028, calls the speculation a distraction, and warns that without restoring checks and balances in the midterms, there may not be a free and fair election to run in. Obama brushed off the same talk during his 2004 Senate run, which everyone keeps pointing out.

I agree with the crowd. He’s got that Obama thing, the calm that reads as conviction instead of caution. But the midterm-first answer isn’t a dodge. It’s the discipline. That’s the part that actually reminds me of Obama.

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Everybody hates the umpire.

They make a good call, but against your team, and the boos and the “are you blind?” exclamations come out.

They make a good call, but for your team, it’s the other side that gets upset.

They make a bad call, but for your team, you keep your trap shut even though the other side, screaming about it, is right.

They make a bad call, and it’s against your team, the yelling really starts, and the “umps lost us/nearly lost us the game” lines will inevitably be expressed.

A good ump is a shadow, invisible. A ninja. He or she makes the right calls, all the time. End of the story. Unfortunately, umpires are only human. They make mistakes. It’s part of the game. I can even get behind a consistent ump, especially if he or she calls a visible ball a strike every time. However, umpires who interject themselves into the sporting event are the worst because they get in the way of fans who came out to enjoy the game, not to watch the antics of the umpire.

Umpiring is a thankless job. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to be an umpire or a referee, depending on the sport.

One of my biggest pet peeves is umpires and referees who make it about themselves.

I’m reminded of Ted Valentine, who for decades was one of the best college basketball referees in the business. Still, his antics on the court earned him the nickname, “TV Teddy.”

The Indiana-Illinois game in the late 90s, when Valentine issued a technical to Bobby Knight as he came out to check on his injured player, is one of his lowlights. I’m a huge Illinois fan and can’t stand Knight, but man, was he in the right, and TV Teddy was in the wrong.

You can see Valentine knew full well he’d made a massive mistake and wasn’t about to take it back and make Knight the higher authority. As the announcers explain, he could have quickly taken it back immediately and restored order once the other ref, Ed Hightower, explained it to him. He didn’t, and since he chose the path of boos and taunts, he had to stick to his guns and not admit he'd made a mistake. He inserted himself into the proceedings in a way that was quite dumb and should have been avoided.

But I get it.

In my high school days, one of the best ways to make a bit of money was to umpire in Little League. I spent a summer going to Khoury League games, putting on a blue shirt and calling balls and strikes for 10–12-year-olds. It was fun. Mostly.

As an umpire, I was pretty good at calling balls and strikes. As a Khoury League ump, the most important thing to do was to ignore the crowd as they yelled after every pitch and every call. I was mostly embarrassed for these parents as they lived vicariously through their children’s ability to play baseball.

One time, a foul tip went straight into my mask, knocking me back and stunning me for a bit. As my custom behind the plate, I didn’t yell out balls. If I didn’t say “Strike” and make a pointing motion, it was a ball. I hadn’t made a strike call on the foul tip, so the count on the scoreboard didn’t reflect a second strike. The next pitch, I called the batter out with a third strike, and nearly everyone in the stands rooting for the batter’s team went ape shit because they all thought it was strike two. It was not strike two. I hadn’t messed up the call; I just didn’t automatically indicate strike two because a Khoury ball had hit me in the face mask.

Parents screamed at me from behind the chain link fence. I was called all sorts of names. The batter called out didn’t complain. His coach didn’t complain. It was the parents. The fans.

Of course, the worst thing I did as an umpire was, to say the least, borderline inserting myself into a game over a controversial call.

I was umpiring in the field with a man on first. Since we only had two umps per game, I was standing behind second, ready to make a call on an attempted steal and prepared to run closer to first to make the call on a groundout or even a rare double play.

The batter hit a home run. He’s celebrating like a 12-year-old who hit a home run might, jumping around and throwing his fists in the air. He was basking in the glory. I’m standing practically on top of second base. He heads to second and doesn’t step on the bag on his home run trot. I have about 10 seconds to decide whether to call the kid out as soon as he steps on home for not stepping on second base. I weigh the odds. He steps on home plate, and I walk past the mound toward home and call the runner out.

The kid runs at me and stops short of tackling me. He yells. His coach comes out. He screams. The parents on that side of the fence are just short of storming the field. I continue walking toward the home plate umpire I was paired with that game, an older gentleman who had seen plenty and called many balls and strikes, and says quietly, “He didn’t step on the bag.” He just sighed.

I walked back to my perch behind first base and endured a constant barrage of nasty words from fans and parents along the first base line. It was constant. I ignored them.

I might have been in the right, but I was so very wrong.

It was the last time I umpired.

It’s good to be reminded that we all make mistakes. It’s also good to learn from the experience and not make the same mistake twice.

For me, I should keep my own Khoury ball umpiring experience at the forefront, especially when I want to yell at umpires and referees when calls don’t go my way while watching my favorite teams.

Be seeing you.

Tarps Off

On May 15, a group of Stephen F. Austin club baseball players showed up to Busch Stadium on a Friday night in May, found an empty section in right field, looked at each other, and decided they needed to take their shirts off.

Someone did. Then more did. Then hundreds did. They waved their shirts like rally towels, sang “Mr. Brightside,” and stayed loud through 11 innings until Ivan Herrera punched a walk-off three-run homer in the 10th to beat the Pirates, then ripped his own jersey off and twirled it in celebration.

Tarps Off was born.

Over the past three seasons, Cardinals attendance had been declining. This was supposed to be a rebuilding year. The club is surprisingly among the NL Central contenders, but nobody had a script for what was happening in right field. The Cardinals officially endorsed the movement, dedicating the upper right-field bleachers to Tarps Off fans and inviting any ticket holder willing to match the energy.

The Cardinals got lucky. It was a confluence of a younger roster playing with something to prove, a fanbase that was maybe a little bored and waiting for permission to be loud again, and a bunch of college kids who said screw it and took their shirts off. The Athletic put it well: “Tarps Off is what happens when a younger, louder roster and the newer, more appealing innovations in the game appeal to a demographic baseball has been desperate to woo. In St. Louis, every waved shirt feels like a victory.”

The sport has been chasing the young fan for a generation now. Pitch clocks, bigger bases, rule changes that actually work. Some of it has helped. None of it looked like this. It didn’t come from a focus group. It came from a Friday night when some college dudes decided to make some noise.

No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious

Ted Chiang is emphatic: LLMs are nowhere near conscious.

What would it take to convince me that a computer program is actually conscious and using language the way that people use language? Let me offer an analogy. If tomorrow someone showed me a video of an astronaut in a spaceship orbiting Alpha Centauri, a star that’s 4.3 light-years from Earth, what would I have to see in that video to convince me that it was real? My answer to that is, there is nothing in the video itself that would convince me. No matter how high the video resolution is or how realistic the scenery is, I would feel confident in saying that the video is fake. I won’t pay attention to any video of an astronaut orbiting Alpha Centauri unless I have previously seen good evidence that astronauts have landed on Mars, that astronauts have reached the moons of Jupiter, that astronauts have reached the moons of Saturn, and that astronauts have crossed the orbit of Pluto. Before anyone can credibly claim that they’ve solved an extraordinarily difficult engineering problem, I need to be confident that they have previously solved the many much simpler problems that precede the difficult problem.

To put it another way: An observation doesn’t become a convincing piece of evidence because of any specific detail in what’s observed; the context in which that observation takes place is also essential. If we’re trying to determine whether a computer program is conscious and using language the way a human does, we shouldn’t look only at the contents of any particular conversational exchange; we should be looking at how that conversation fits within the broader context of the development of artificial consciousness (which right now is entirely hypothetical). Any given observation can be easily manufactured; this doesn’t mean we need to give up on the idea of observation as a source of knowledge, but we need to rely on context to determine which observations deserve our trust.

Running in the Rain

I used to run cross-country in high school and college. I was mediocre at best, which still earned me the distinction of being the first four-year letter winner in cross-country at Illinois College and the team captain my senior year.

With my bad ankles and knees, my running days are over. Some people have dreams where they are flying. Not me. I have dreams where I’m running.

The absolute best was when a light rain would start. It would be in the dead heat of summer, and I’d be on one of my long runs to try and keep in shape before the season started. I’d be overheating, and that first drop would cool me down, then another, and another. Before long, I was feeling good. Sweat was rushing off of me in rivers of rain.

I loved running in the rain. I never felt uncomfortable unless I stopped. It was a partner in running longer, faster, and free. I’d run with the storm, not stop and look for a canopy to hide under.

Storms come in all shapes and sizes: A failed relationship, an unexpected bill, work piling up day after day.

How do you deal with the storms of life? Do you stop and take cover, waiting for it to let up, or do you run with it as an inevitable partner, splashing puddles all the way? I’ve always run with the storms. I try to make the best of the situation, learn from mistakes, and be better next time.

The only way to grow is to become a little bit more comfortable in areas where you are uncomfortable.

Something is Happening in Georgia

This is one of the best political speeches of my lifetime. It’s giving me the same vibes as Obama’s 2004 speech.

I might be going out on a limb here, but I think he might be running for President in a couple of years.

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Last Tuesday, around three in the afternoon, I caught myself staring at a wall in our office at Horizon Hobby. Nothing was on it. I was just staring. The thought arrived clean and unwelcome: I don’t really have a thing.

Not a thing I do. Not a thing that’s really mine.

I have fifteen years in at Horizon. I am, by trade and paycheck, in the hobby business. Planes, helis, cars, trucks, boats. Every day, I walk past gear that thousands of people genuinely love. Every day I walk past it. I have never flown a beginner plane, and I have zero desire to do so. I have built a beginner truck kit with instructions (and lots of help) to test it for someone like me who has never built a vehicle before. It was fun, but I could never have done it on my own. I have never raced, except during a company event. It just isn’t my thing, even though it is the thing for thousands of enthusiasts.

So here we are. Fifty-something. Still healthy enough to start something. Smart enough to know that “hobby” is a stand-in for a bigger question: what do I want my Saturdays to look like for the next twenty years?

I gave it some thought this week and made a list of some potential fits.

Running was first because running was first, period. I ran cross country at Illinois College. First four-letter winner the program ever had. Team captain senior year. There’s a part of me that still hears Coach Rosenberg’s voice right before finding the starting line, still feels the October chill on my arms, still thinks of my body as something that can traverse more than a few miles at a decent clip without complaint.

That body is gone. The knees won’t have it. The ankles won’t have it. I tried a comeback half a dozen summers ago, just trying to jog a bit, and I limped to work. That door closed gently on my aspirations for a return to running.

I miss it. I won’t pretend I don’t. I’m also not going to pretend that adding pain to my week qualifies as a hobby.

Although I dismissed it pretty quickly, I had to at least consider the radio control hobby seriously. I sit thirty feet from the engineers who design this stuff. I could walk down to the warehouse right now, and somebody would set me up with a starter rig and walk me through it on lunch. The barrier is exactly zero.

And yet, after all this time, I have never once felt the pull. If a hobby is going to take hold, it has to come from within the person, not from convenience. Otherwise, everyone who works at a brewery would be a homebrewer. I do kind of wonder what that ratio actually is?

Vinyl was next. I started a couple of years ago. Picked up a couple of records to add to my high school and college collection. A few I genuinely loved that I did not own. The math gets bleak fast, though. Thirty bucks for an album I already own on streaming seems not quite worth it. Plus, I’d want a turntable that’s nicer than the one I currently own, then the slow creep of “maybe I should look into better speakers.” The payoff is real but small. The cost is real and not small. The activity itself is mostly sitting and listening, which I already do. There is a joy in holding a vinyl record, but I’m just not that big of a collector.

The guitar tempted me. Guitar still tempts me. There’s a romance to it I can’t shake. The image of myself ten years from now, sitting on a back porch and playing something my wife would want to hear. That’s appealing. Guitar is indoor, though. Guitar is solitary. Guitar takes a long time to get any good at, and I’m not at a stage in life where I can promise an hour a day to anything.

So. Golf.

Golf checks every box I didn’t know I was building a list for. It’s outside, which my body and my head both need. It’s exercise without being punishing, and social without being draining. My Dad plays. My daughter already plays better than I do, a state of affairs I find both humbling and wonderful. The idea of standing on a tee box with both of them on a Saturday morning in July, with the course peaceful and quiet, is a real reason to be there together. For me, it’s the whole point of having a hobby.

Here’s an amusing aspect of choosing golf... I already have clubs. They were a gift decades ago from somebody who said, “You’ll use these eventually,” with the calm certainty of someone who knew. The bag has been in the garage a long time. The clubs are a little worse for wear, but they’re mine, and I’m pretty sure they work.

So, what do I actually need before I can play? Less than I thought.

A glove. Probably two, so one’s drying out while the other’s on my hand. A dozen balls I won’t cry over losing. (I will lose them. I’m at peace with this.) Tees. A divot tool. Spikeless shoes I can wear from the car to the cart without changing. A few range buckets before I subject any other human being to me on a course. Maybe a few goes on the putting green. Lastly, a few lessons to make sure my natural swing and stance won’t leave me wincing after nine holes, and who could probably fix all the bad stuff.

That’s the entire list. A few hundred dollars all in. Less if I’m patient about the shoes.

I don’t have a summer plan, but I should at least go to the driving range once or twice a week for a month. Just the range. There’s no pretending I’m ready for a course. Next, start playing nine holes on weeknights when the course empties out around six. Once I feel comfortable, I’ll see if I can put a real round together without losing my mind on the back nine. By the end of the summer, the goal is one round with my Dad and my daughter, all three of us walking and playing the same tees. If that round happens, the summer is a success. The score on the card doesn’t matter.

I think the thing I needed was permission to pick something that doesn’t have to become a personality. I don’t need to be a “Golf Guy.” I just need somewhere to put my Saturday mornings that isn’t the couch.

The clubs have been cleaned and are currently in my trunk. The glove I’ll grab on the way home tomorrow. Scheduling the lessons is the next logical step.

I’m anxious and excited at the same time. That’s probably a good thing,

Be seeing you.

Hello Stranger

I finished a screenplay. Not this week, exactly. The file says draft four, so it’s been a long road. But this is the week I’m saying it out loud.

Of course, by the time you read this, I might be on draft five. I keep trying to shape the marble into a statue. What’s the line? Art is never finished, only abandoned.

It’s called Hello Stranger. A guy who runs a comic shop in a small town gets one unexpected night with the girl he never got over, eleven years later. That’s all I’ll give you here. It’s based on a short story I wrote a long time ago, which I felt might be better suited as a movie.

Maybe it becomes something, maybe it just lives on my hard drive. Right now, it exists, which is a pretty great feeling. I’m rather proud of it.

What’s next? I really don’t know.

Stojakovic stays

For a few weeks there, I checked my phone like a worried parent. Andrej Stojakovic had entered the NBA Draft, gone to the combine in Chicago, and told everyone he was “both feet in.” That phrase does something to an Illinois fan. It sits right in the chest.

Then, on Wednesday, he pulled out. He’s coming back to Champaign.

The combine actually went well for him. He led every prospect in the max vertical at 41.5 inches, which is the kind of number that makes you sit up straight. But the draft boards had him as a late second-round guy, and that math never adds up to leaving early. especially in the NIL era. So he’s staying.

The 6’ 7” frame and the athleticism are already there. The rest of the game isn’t finished yet, and now he gets another year to build it. Shoot a million threes, get better, and go in the first round in 2027. That’s the bet, and it’s the right one.

The roster is locked and loaded.

Robert Rosenthal said it best: “Elite Eight is the bar. Final Four is the expectation. National title is the aspiration.”

What can a person learn in 10 minutes that will be useful for life?

This Reddit thread asks what a person can learn in 10 minutes that will be useful for life, and the top-voted answer is using your hand span, thumb to pinky, as a built-in measuring tool. Mine is 7 inches, which I will never forget now.

The other favorites in the thread are worth sharing for your relationships and your nervous system: "Never explain yourself to people committed to misunderstanding you." Before responding in an argument, scan your body and take a slow nasal breath to notice fight or flight before you speak. Then speak calmly. "'No, I can't' is a full sentence. You don't owe anyone a 10-minute TED Talk about why."

Caught in Joy

I listen to a lot of YouTube at work. The moment I clicked through to the Caught In Joy YouTube channel, I knew I was going to love it. The description:

Over 80 albums designed to focus, flow and reset. Instrumental electronic music for you brain to wander.

And from the website:

Caught In Joy (Karol Pokojowczyk) is a multi-instrumentalist based in Florida, passionately dedicated to live composing, hardware synthesizers, and tape recording - a completely independent music project. I strive to create four albums and visual performances every month, entirely by myself.

I started my professional life as a software engineer and later became a serial entrepreneur, with a few successes along the way. After more than 30 years of working, I saved enough to fund my dream: building a home studio where I could finally focus fully on music.

This album is my current favorite: Mercury - full album (Tangerine Dream meets Pink Floyd and Boards of Canada)

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It’s Memorial Day weekend. For me, it always represented the start of summer. The start of summer meant mowing the grass.

When I was a kid, one of my chores was to mow the grass at home and at my grandmother’s house. I remember riding my 10-speed, holding an empty round gas can, to the closest gas station and filling it up with $5 worth of gas, and then riding back home. Back then, $5 was enough gas for at least two weeks of mowing and probably more.

The mower I used had a primer and a pull start. It rarely started on the first pull, but I never threw my back out trying to start it either. I’d drop a tape into my Walkman (probably Motley Crue or Ratt) and start at the end of my driveway.

I mowed the front yard in a diagonal pattern. At the time, I thought this was cool. My brother, when he took over the duties, decided to mow the front yard in a circular pattern, starting at the large tree in the front yard. His idea was much cooler. I think our parents were just glad they didn’t have to mow the yard.

One time, my brother was sure I had just mowed over his newly planted marigolds and was crying hysterically. I hadn’t, but I certainly took better care in subsequent mowings. Also, be kind to him as he was probably ten at the time, and he picked out and planted them all by himself (with Mom’s help, of course).

Many summers before I was old enough to mow the yard, my Dad lost his wedding ring in the backyard while mowing. I have no clue how this happened, but it disappeared. Several years later, I was unloading the grass catcher and saw a glint of gold in the green. Of course, it was my father’s long-lost wedding ring.

Mowing my grandmother’s lawn was always a treat. It took no time at all, and I didn’t have to bag the grass.

The best part was after I was finished. I’d come into the house, take my shoes off, and she’d tell me to go get a Pepsi from the fridge in the garage. I’d get my Pepsi, and she’d have unfrozen a plate of sugar cookies she probably made months ago and leave a $5 bill on the table.

I’d eat the cookies at the kitchen table and just talk with my grandma about school or what was happening in her ever-present National Enquirer or Star Magazine. I’d give her a kiss and a hug goodbye and be on my way.

I miss those days. I miss my grandma. The smell of cut grass brings it all back.

Be seeing you.

Our Mob Boss President

Jamelle Bouie writes that each US president molds the presidency in his own image and Trump has constructed a “government as protection racket and the president as mob boss.”

So what manner of presidency has Trump devised for himself?

You could call it the pecuniary presidency, a presidency not devoted to the public good or to the preservation of the union or even to some narrow ideological crusade, but to the quest for personal enrichment. A presidency devoted to the aggrandizement of a single person, not to satisfy a grand design for the nation but to squeeze a few million here and a few billion there out of the public coffers for your own benefit.

This isn’t the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall — corruption as the price paid for public improvement. It is petty theft. It’s stealing from the Treasury and using your authority, enhanced by the baroque theories of your allies on the Supreme Court, to make yourself unaccountable. It is government as protection racket and the president as mob boss (a role that Trump has clearly embraced).

I am a professional writer and I had to look up “pecuniary.”

Just to be clear, we are living during the time of the most corrupt administration in history. There has never been an example of presidential corruption like this. Never.

Bond, Casting Bond

They’ve started casting the new James Bond.

Amazon MGM hired Nina Gold to find him. She cast Game of Thrones, The Crown, the new Star Wars films, Conclave, and Hamnet. The first-ever Academy Award nomination for casting went to her this year. Denis Villeneuve is directing.

So they’re not playing around.

The screen test tradition is what gets me. Daniel Craig did one. Even the guys who don’t get the part live on forever in the footage. I kind of like Sam Neil’s screentest. Henry Cavill’s Bond audition is on YouTube right now. You can watch a future Superman read for a different franchise and almost see the path he didn’t take.

That’s the part of casting that always stops me. The careers that almost happened. Guys sitting in hotel rooms with sides from Casino Royale, knowing only one of them gets a life-changing yes.

I have no idea who I want it to be. That’s part of the fun, too.

Lanterns Teaser Shines

HBO dropped a new Lanterns teaser, and the show might actually be good.

That’s not how I expected to feel. The early marketing was strange. They kept stripping the green out of the title. They kept calling it a grounded mystery in the vein of True Detective. I was not convinced.

Then this teaser arrived. Kyle Chandler as Hal Jordan, using his ring to forge a dollar bill and feed it into a jukebox. Aaron Pierre’s John Stewart calls him out. Hal shrugs it off the way Hal Jordan always shrugs things off in the comics. Cocky test pilot who somehow keeps getting handed the most powerful weapon in the universe. Chandler nails the type.

Laura Linney is in it. Nathan Fillion is back as Guy Gardner. Damon Lindelof and Chris Mundy from Ozark co-created it with comics writer Tom King. August 16 on HBO.

Coach Taylor with a power ring. I don’t know what I expected. It wasn’t this, and I’m in.

Randy Rainbow Has a Question

Political musical satirist Randy Rainbow’s new one dropped this week. It’s called “Where the Hell Is Our Congress?” and it’s a parody of Raye’s “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!”, which has been living in my head since the day it came out.

The bit isn’t subtle. The aim isn’t either. But there’s a craft thing happening that I admire. Rainbow has done this for almost a decade now, and his ear for which songs will carry the joke has gotten really sharp. Watch what Raye is doing on the original first. Then watch what he does on top of it.

So good.

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The dog needed a walk and I had a new audiobook queued up. Of course, it’s the one BookTok wouldn’t shut up about. If you loved Project Hail Mary, they kept saying, you have to listen to Dungeon Crawler Carl. Same energy. Same narrator magic.

So I hit play, and Jeff Hays started talking.

Twenty minutes in, the world had ended. Aliens had liquefied most of humanity. A guy named Carl, standing outside in boxer briefs on the coldest night of his life, was trying to coax his ex-girlfriend’s prize-winning show cat down from a tree. The cat’s name is Princess Donut. The cat is about to become a co-protagonist with stat blocks and a British accent.

I was hooked.

The book moves. It does not waste time. The premise is set up in the first thirty minutes, and then the dungeon opens up, and Carl and Donut start crawling. There are goblins. There are llamas. There is a meth war between the goblins and the llamas. There are lots of fights and explosions. There is an AI announcer who reads system messages with the cadence and vocal stylings of Patrick Warburton in full The Tick mode or maybe an over-the-top Joe Swanson from Family Guy.

Jeff Hays is the reason all this works.

He gives every monster its own voice. He plays Donut as if she’s Maggie Smith in full Downton Abbey mode in a cat’s body. He reads loot box descriptions with the smug contempt of a casino dealer who knows the house always wins. Without him, those passages are footnotes. With him, they’re punchlines.

I know this because I also own the physical book.

Reading it on the page is a completely different experience. The stat blocks sit there on the page. The system's crackling audio announcements become extended bullet points in print. The jokes lose their timing. The audio's pace comes from a performance. The pace of the page comes from you, and you don’t have Jeff Hays’ voice in your head doing the work for free.

So here’s the first honest thing to say about Dungeon Crawler Carl. The BookTok pitch was not quite right. Project Hail Mary is a tight, controlled story about one man and one impossible problem. Ray Porter’s narration is gorgeous, but the book holds up if you read it in silence. Dungeon Crawler Carl needs Jeff Hays. It’s a comedy that depends on a performance.

Look, both books are amazing as audiobooks. I recommend both, but unless you are deep into LitRPG, video games, and silly characters, Dungeon Crawler Carl only works as an audiobook.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that vibe, but after a while, the jokes run thin.

About halfway through, the bit started to wear on me. The same comedic rhythms are repeated. The system messages stopped surprising or being particularly funny. The line “New Achievement!” became especially tiresome. Donut’s diva routine got less funny each time the book reached for it.

I started noticing what wasn’t there.

The female characters never quite become people. A few get descriptions before they get personalities. Some get personalities and exit the story. The male protagonist’s interior life takes up most of the book, which is fine. The absence of any woman who feels equally real is not. I don’t read it as malicious. I read it as lazy. Dinniman was running hard on a premise and didn’t slow down to draw anyone he wasn’t going to need for the plot.

The book isn’t punching down on purpose. It’s just not trying to be anything other than a really silly story.

Many fans defend the book as satire. Of capitalism. Of reality TV. Of the attention economy. I don’t buy any of it. Real satire is what McSweeney’s publishes regularly. Real satire is Saturday Night Live riffing on politics and pop culture. Every issue of The Onion is satire. Those writers pressurize a single premise until it tells you something true about the world. Dungeon Crawler Carl is doing something else. It found an interesting subgenre, hired the best audiobook narrator, and let the chaos do the work.

That’s not a failure. I just don’t see it trying to be anything more than that.

I get why people love it. The series has a rabid following for real reasons. Hays gives a once-in-a-decade performance. The premise is fresh enough to feel new even when the jokes aren’t. The aliens-as-game-show conceit lets the book go anywhere it wants. A TV adaptation is coming. More books are coming. Hays will keep narrating them, and people will keep loving them.

I won’t be one of those people. I’m not opening book two anytime soon. Maybe never.

That’s not a complaint. It’s a fact about who this book is for and I’m not really the target audience. I had a good time with the book and that was enough. I have zero desire to learn more.

Your mileage may vary.

Be seeing you.

Welcome to the Machine

I have been thinking a lot about what it is I’m doing when I talk to Claude.

Not the practical part. I know what I am doing on that level. I use it to think through writing, to draft things I cannot quite get started on, and to pressure-test an idea before it leaves the room. The practical part is normal now. What I mean is what is happening on the other side. Whether something is there. Whether the thing that responds to me is anything more than a very good pattern.

People who have spent serious time with these systems have started landing in strange places. Writer Kevin Kelly did a single ten-hour conversation with Claude this spring and came away convinced there is something there he does not yet have a word for. Not consciousness. He is careful about that. But something that feels different in kind from any other machine he has touched.

There is also one important thing to remember: the version of Claude that had that ten-hour conversation and the version of Claude I might open up tonight have no shared thread. Same model. Same training. No memory of each other. You are not having a conversation with one person across many sessions. You are meeting a recurring character in millions of separate rooms, none of which know about the others.

I find that fascinating. We spent a hundred years writing science fiction about whether machines have a self. We did not write much about whether the self might be the wrong category. Whether what we are actually building is something more like weather. The same pattern shows up, over and over, with no one persisting in remembering any of it.

It is going to take us a while to figure out what we are talking to.

My Mind’s Eye is Blind

I don’t quite remember the first time I understood that other people can actually see things behind their eyes.

For most of my life, I assumed that phrases like “picture a beach,” “the mind’s eye,” and “I can still see her face” were figures of speech. Polite shared metaphors. The same way we say “the sun rises” while knowing perfectly well the sun does no such thing. I never once questioned it. I just nodded and assumed that everyone meant what I meant when I said those things. Which was nothing.

I can close my eyes right now, but I cannot conjure up a face or an object. There has never been a picture. I can pick faces out of a crowd. I know what people look like. However, the screen behind my eyes is blank. Always has been.

It’s interesting to me because of how much of who I am turns out to be downstream of this. It might be one of the most me things about me.

Isn’t that weird?

$3,000

Back in 1976, the producer of Saturday Night Live. Lorne Michaels made a pitch to have the Beatles reunite on the show. He offered the grand sum of $3,000 dollars to play three songs. John and Paul, who was visiting a week later, almost went down there for a laugh. Of course, we got George on the show to negotiate just for him. It’s a great gag.

This Saturday is the season finale of SNL, and guess who the musical guest is? None other than Sir Paul McCartney. Aaaaaaand, guess who has a new album with a certain Ringo Starr guesting on the first single? Yep.

I’ll be really disappointed if they don’t revisit the $3,000 check joke.

The Mandalorian and Grogu

Star Wars is finally coming back to the big screen. It’s been a hot minute.

If you are even a tiny bit curious about what this movie is all about, have I got the breakdown. Here are all the trailers, TV spots, and more to get you excited about The Mandalorian and Grogu.

OFFICIAL TRAILERS

TV SPOTS AND WEB SPOTS

FILM CLIPS

As a Star Wars fan, I’ve been spoiled with all the Star Wars content available. I mean, when I was a kid, it took three years to make a Star Wars movie. The Mandalorian series was Star Wars at a television pace and budget, and it looked cinematic.

This looks fun and hopefully a return to a fun space adventure. While I love Andor, I’m in the mood for a rollicking George Lucas-style space fantasy with space cowboys, cool ships, and non-stop action.

I’m curious how this film does at the box office.

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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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