NowLoop

A week before I was hired at Defector, I decided to quit vaping. This was kind of a while ago now, but I still have good days and bad. Today is a good day; I haven't even needed a patch today. Yesterday was a rough one. On rough days, I will go buy one single shitty poverty cigar—the brainchild of the Phillies' owner's dad, the Black & Mild wood tip. This is a multi-pronged strategy: I love wood tips, but I rarely smoke a whole one in a sitting, no matter how hard up I might be. Also, everyone around you will think less of you if you do this. A key feature of cravings is self-loathing, and it sort of feels deserved that people will see me: a questionably dressed yet ostensibly grown woman smoking a cigar that is usually purchased with coins. Weakness ought to feel like weakness. Last night, I had already smoked through my cigar of the day. Since my trip to New York, I'm staying with my aunt and uncle in La Crosse, Wis. for a little while before I drive the rest of the way back from to Tacoma. As the evening pushed forward, I was putting on an impressively brave face for them. Across the river in Winona, a thunderstorm had rolled in, lighting up the sky brilliantly, and the air was so thick you had a real sense for what was clapping back together when the lightning left its jagged vacuums. My aunt and uncle are big nerds (complimentary) about weather. They have a little plane and are spending their retirement bouncing around America with only Mother Nature to play defense. I'm a curious sort, so I leaned into that, hanging on every word they spoke. I begged them to explain more about how the wind played tricks on a small aircraft. I was desperate for distraction from the withdrawal. But after a while they got tired and turned in for the night. I couldn't take my car to satisfy my craving, because that would involve noisily opening the garage, which would be an embarrassing reveal of me making a whole trip to collect a second John Middleton product in just one Thursday. So I would go on foot.

Fifty years ago, the hot comedy skit was Saturday Night Live’s “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!”, a play on the coverage of the Spanish dictator’s demise. That gag came to mind when I read yet another update on the terminally ill Washington Post, a newspaper that I delivered each morning back when the Franco punchline and the newspaper were among the biggest deals in town. Washington City Paper reported earlier this week that, after this weekend, the Post will no longer have a standalone Metro section in its print edition. The paper told subscribers about the move in an email from executive editor Matt Murray. From City Paper’s story: 

For the first time in American sports history, a team has been sold on an 11-figure valuation. News broke Wednesday that the Buss family has agreed to sell a controlling share of Los Angeles Lakers to Mark Walter of TWG Global and Guggenheim Partners in a deal valuing the franchise at $10 billion. That is the largest-ever valuation at sale for a North American sports franchise, smashing the high-water mark recently set by the private equity guy who agreed to buy the Boston Celtics for $6.1 billion. Walter taking over and doing so at such a steep price is obviously interesting, though the bigger story is the Buss family finally cashing out, as they were the flag-bearers for a type of sports owner that is quickly being bought out of the business. Jerry Buss bought the Lakers, the NHL's Kings, and the Los Angeles Forum in 1979 for $67.5 million. At the time, that sale price was a record high for a team, and though sports teams are the sort of asset that always appreciate in value, few would have predicted that the valuation of the team would increase by 15,000 percent over the following 46 years. In that time period, the collective identity of NBA ownership steadily changed. The used car dealer who owned the Utah Jazz sold the team, through his widow, to a tech billionaire. The NBA forced racist slumlord Donald Sterling to sell the Los Angeles Clippers to one of the richest men in the country. The Maloof brothers, inheritors of beer distribution riches, ran out of money and sold the Sacramento Kings to another much richer tech guy. Most of the people who own teams now are billionaires, and 20 percent of the league is now owned by people who made their billions in private equity.

The best pitchers in baseball were going to pitch on the same day! In the same place! Walking distance from my home! On a day I didn’t have to work! This dream confluence would give me a chance to watch reigning Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal, always a delight, and my first in-person look at Pirates ace Paul Skenes. Skenes had pitched in Detroit last year—also in the second game of a doubleheader that began with a Skubal start—but I’d missed it because I was in New York at company meetings for my (dumb) job and only caught a few minutes when Jasper gave us breaks from looking at his impressive charts. Some fans complained that the two aces would not start in the same game on Thursday, though as someone with plans to attend both, this didn’t especially bother me. What did annoy me was it being a split doubleheader: I’d have to buy separate tickets, and leave and come back. A small price to pay, I reasoned, for what was sure to be the greatest day of my baseball-watching life. Around 12:30, the Tigers announced that the 1:10 first game would begin in a rain delay. A slightly larger but still small price to pay, I reasoned, for what was sure to be the greatest day of my baseball-watching life. I waited out the delay at home, enjoying the broadcast’s interstitial highlight reel of new Pirates manager and former Tiger Don Kelly. 

Reading or watching the news has become a real nightmare for me, as I imagine it must be for anyone reading this. Each day seems to bring some new horror or tragedy, and if the non-stop procession of bad news itself doesn't desensitize you, there's all those hucksters out there trying to sell you the idea that, actually, your empathy is wrong. It's enough to make you want to check out of everything altogether. And plenty of people have. One of the worst byproducts of Trump's second electoral victory was a refrain I heard a lot, usually from other black people: this concept of "resting." The idea starts with the fact that, going back at least to the civil rights movement, black people have spent so much time fighting for our humanity and our communal betterment, only to watch the white-supremacist power structure repeatedly thwart any possibility of radical, positive change. And so, if white people and those who hope to sidle up to white supremacy are so determined to hold onto power, even if it means destroying themselves in the process, then we should let them. Our time now is the time to disengage from the political carousal and do what was best for ourselves. Black self-care as a political ideology unto itself.

On Thursday night the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego Padres, who do not like each other, completed a four-game series in which eight batters were hit by pitches. Even excluding the incidents in the previous three-game series the two teams played earlier this month, that's a lot of hit by pitches! Enough, in fact, to rank. We are innovating in philosophical space here, raising and answering questions such as, Is it possible for a hit-by-pitch to be better quality than another hit by pitch?, and, If so, what makes a hit-by-pitch good? A hit-by-pitch is most meaningful if it is intentional, because otherwise that's just poor control, and poor control is ass to watch. Though intentionality is difficult to presume, pitches with more movement and pitchers with poor control are naturally discounted. A hit-by-pitch is also most meaningful if it carries more risk of hurting your own team—say, hitting a player who doesn't usually get on base, doing it in a close game or on an advantageous count, or doing it with hitters already on base. That is, the best hit-by-pitches are fueled by enough petty spite that they break out of the constrictive traditional frameworks of "trying to win a baseball game."

True heat—the overwhelming hot wall that hits you the minute you step out of a door, that takes your breath and makes it into more humidity, that rips the thoughts from your brain and crumples them—is oppressive. It's exhausting. It's unlivable. And it is here. Starting Friday, a giant hair dryer will be pointed at most of the United States. More than 200 million people are expected to be trapped under a terrible bubble of heat. The Weather Prediction Center is calling this a "significant and extremely dangerous heat wave." And because for most of the Midwest, Great Lakes, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic this spring has been mild and wet, the quick shift to swamp will feel even more brutal. Temperatures will be hot as hell. Humidity will be high enough to curl straight hair. Don't even get me started on the dew point (disgusting). The nights will be muggy and miserable. There will be no wind. It is going to be painful.

When it comes to my daughter, I try to live in the moment. I stumbled into this paradigm in March of 2023, when Nora was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at the age of 2. Nora is 4 now—a fiery, intelligent young lady who leads her classmates in preschool group activities and directs mommy to the car whenever they are lost in the parking lot—but she still doesn’t speak. On a short enough timeline, that’s perfectly fine; we don’t need to speak to enjoy an hour at the park or share an ice cream cone. Nora is happy. She is healthy. Everything is all right. Still, being a parent is a worrying thing, and there are fears that never really go away. What if she never speaks? What if she can’t take care of herself after my wife and I are gone? Lately, this fear has assumed a distressingly hued human form, one frequently seen getting upset in front of Congress and making rounds on the cable news circuit. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will talk to, or at, anyone; like many of the content creators Donald Trump has appointed in his second term, he seems to understand that to be his job. But when it comes to autism, it feels as if he is speaking directly to me.

It seemed like a small thing at the time. Before last Saturday's game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants at Dodger Stadium, the singer Nezza performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Spanish, even after being told not to by team representatives, in a symbolic protest against the jackbooted deportation raids being carried out around the country and in Los Angeles by faceless federal goons. It is the sort of cruelty that no human being can help but take sides on, but a baseball team is not a human being, and the Dodgers had pointedly declined to offer any comment on the crisis to that point, even as Angelenos' protests in the streets were repeatedly escalated to violence by heavy-handed policing. "We're not going to comment," Dodgers executive vice president and chief marketing officer Lon Rosen said that same day. That was in response to questions from the Los Angeles Times about whether the team had anything to say to its fans, a community that the organization proudly boasts is 40 percent Latino, and therefore a disproportionate target of ICE raids. "We’re not going to comment on anything."

The Pacers and Thunder have constructed a series that has put the lie to the notion that there are insurmountable leads in basketball. The 20-point lead, once the gold standard, is now 30, and even then there's a little white-knuckling to be done. But like any absolute counterfactual, sometimes the percentages get in the way. In fact, in every case of a team getting a 30-point lead, it was once a 20-point lead. Sometimes an ass-kicking is just an ass-kicking. Enter Game 7 of the NBA Finals, coming Sunday night to a television near you. The Pacers, who have gained their ultra-plucky reputation as the team that lets the other guy get the 20-point lead before eradicating it, finally went nearly wire-to-wire (minus the first three-and-a-half minutes) in a 108–91 beatdown of the Thunder to force El Juego Definitivo.