There’s been so much complaining about the second apron over the past several weeks that as a chronically disagreeable person who’s skeptical of consensus, and particularly internet consensus, I do find myself tempted to zag. Unfortunately, I can’t get there. I’ve been mad at the second apron since the day the CBA was agreed upon in 2023. I remember this vividly. My son had been born the day before and I was in an exhausted fog, parsing the details from the hospital, baffled that people weren’t more upset about what the league had just done. So yes, I hated it then as much as everyone else does now, and three years later I remain resolutely annoyed.

Today’s headline poses a question you’ve probably never thought to ask, so I’ll start with my answer: yes, Netflix is washed now. The content on the platform has never been great, but it’s never been worse. I open the app these days and I’m amazed. What used to be a source of fun, buzzy, compulsively watchable, and occasionally excellent TV and movies is now an endless river of reheated IP, true crime documentaries, and filler dressed as prestige. Millions of people watch this stuff, and everyone instantly forgets it.

Everyone should care less about politics than they currently do, so this is not a detail I share proudly, but I spent a good portion of my July 4th weekend working my way through a two-hour conversation between Ezra Klein and Chris Rufo. The pair offered diagnoses of the problems on the left and right, agreed on a variety of fronts, and articulated cogent, competing visions of the institutional and ideological tensions that define our times.

There was also a bit on conspiracy theories that has stuck with me, so if you’ll forgive a midsummer zag, today’s post will focus on the state of the information landscape online.

On the way into a much-needed vacation next week, I’m going to do something I’ve never done with this space and promise to do only sparingly, and responsibly, in the future: I will write about my favorite basketball team.

The Washington Wizards are a niche topic even among NBA fans, let alone anyone who’s come to enjoy reading this site for commentary on culture or geopolitics, but they made national news on both Monday and Tuesday this week. What follows, then, is a written record of my honest thoughts as I continue to process and cope with two franchise-altering moves that I kind of hated. If not necessarily a window into sports fandom generally, then it’s at least a glimpse into a specific type of psychosis that has become familiar and comfortable for me.

It’s been nearly a week since Game 5, and I’m still flabbergasted by how much fun the NBA Finals were, how cinematic it all became, and how many 50/50 calls went against the Knicks—none of which mattered in the end!

In addition to capitalism and the modern rule of law, the U.K. gave the world Pax Britannica, a period of nearly 100 years in which the Royal Navy controlled international waterways, secured global trade, and avoided any great power wars. During that period, Britain used the steam engine to revolutionize its own industry, export its abundance abroad, and become the richest economy in world history.

Prior to the peak of the British Empire, the Turks and the Ottoman Empire dominated Eastern Europe and the Middle East for centuries, while the navies of the Spanish and Portuguese empires opened and controlled major Atlantic, African, Asian, and American trade routes. Later, and in parallel to the British, Germany combined technology from the industrial revolution with one of the most skilled workforces in the world to become an industrial powerhouse in its own right. And throughout those five hundred years or so, there was always the French. They revolutionized the world’s art, food, fashion, and urban planning, while contributing a good bit of modern legal grounding, themselves, with the Napoleonic Code.

It’s not every week that mainstream news merges two of my podcast worlds into one story, so if you’ll indulge a brief detour from the NBA Finals, let’s talk about Steph Curry’s new endorsement deal with Li-Ning.

I never watched The Hills, and if you’d asked me a month ago to explain who Spencer Pratt is or why he’s well known, I’m fairly certain I would have come up empty. Mention his MTV show and that may have rung a bell, but you also could have convinced me that “Spencer Pratt” is a billionaire booster who helped fund AJ Dybantsa’s freshman season at BYU.

In any event, millions of Americans now know Pratt as an insurgent, Republican-coded candidate for mayor in Los Angeles, where Democrats have held office for the past 25 years. The next big step in Pratt’s political adventure comes Tuesday, in the L.A. nomination primary, where he has to finish in the top two to advance to a runoff, most likely with incumbent mayor Karen Bass.

The time and energy required to maintain hardcore sports fandom is barely rational and rarely worth the investment. On the other hand, if I were to explain to an uninitiated stranger why it’s nevertheless a good deal, I would start with the Minnesota Timberwolves. 

They are a maddening basketball team, full of clunky offense and bad decisions that will make you miserable, but also replete with the sort of indelible characters that make the sport feel twice as alive and every playoff win turn borderline euphoric. One week ago, only days after calling out every Denver Nuggets player by name, Jaden McDaniels exploited Nikola Jokic’s matador rim protection to put up 32 points and 10 rebounds on 13-25 shooting, all while ruining Jamal Murray’s life on defense. It was my favorite game anyone’s played all season.