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Money can't buy happiness, and it seems money plus an NBA title doesn't necessarily buy charisma. The New York Knicks held their championship parade and rally in Manhattan on Thursday, and although not everyone could get in to see the actual procession, there were plenty of fans celebrating in the area. Last week's good vibes kept rolling; Jerome "Junkyard Dog" Williams was in attendance. But for a moment, the ceremony at City Hall functioned as an inescapable reminder that James Dolan owns this team, and that means he gets some mic time whenever they appear as a group to celebrate their triumph. In less than two minutes, he was able to briefly derail the festivities like a heinous fart at happy hour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE0zd5IpfAw Dolan began his remarks with a comment about the younger Knicks fans in the crowd, but because he can't deliver a line, it came off as a weird dig about their sincere love for the team. "Thank you for waiting 53 years, although I have to say: When I look out over the Knick fans here, you all don't look older than 53 years," he said. "Some of you weren't waiting 53—you weren't born yet. But we're very, very happy to have brought you a championship." Is it their fault for not being born earlier?

There's no sense in dancing around it: The sports vibes are pretty damn good at the moment. New Yorkers celebrated a long-awaited championship in the streets with a minimum of property damage and a surfeit of giddiness. The World Cup is already attempting to redeem its shameful and odious origins by delivering some of the most potent sports spectacle on Earth, and communities of all kinds are rallying around the spirited overage of it all. The positive vibrations that emanate from groups of good-natured people getting together to do fun stuff are overwhelming, so much so that Drew and I knew what we needed to do. We needed to get Ray Ratto on the podcast to straighten this shit out, and quickly. It is not a well-kept secret that Ray, for all his gruffness and singular knack for compound literary burns, is an incredibly kind and pleasant human being, and even he has not been immune to the happy surprises that this World Cup has already delivered in bulk. But we eased into things on the grumpy end of the pool, with a discussion of The Alexis Lalas Experience, which is already threatening to tip over Fox's World Cup studio show under the weight of its smirking villain's thudding trollishness. We would return to soccer later in the show, but beginning with some familiar annoyances helped to level-set nicely.

The concept of "1966" is purely theoretical for almost anyone who wasn't alive then, 60 years of human history separating us from that singular point in time. Sure, the point of history as a field is to educate us about what was happening in, say, 1966, but I barely remember what it felt like to live through most of the years I've been around for, let alone those that came so long before. However, there is one subset of people who might soon get a taste of what 1966 was like, and that is fans of England, who have been waiting since then to lift the World Cup trophy a second time. Folks, it might be coming home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5df9Pm1iFtQ

When Bryson DeChambeau tees off at the U.S. Open this afternoon, he will be doing so with the future bearing down on him. The LIV Golf Tour is about to lose its funding from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which means that DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, and the rest of the former PGA greats who defected to LIV will soon have a decision to make: Do they come crawling back to the PGA, or find new day jobs? DeChambeau’s options may be more limited than Rahm’s or Brooks Koepka’s, who has already begun his journey back at the bottom of the PGA Tour. That’s because DeChambeau is more or less the face of LIV Golf, and was happy to be something of an ambassador for the tour as it courted a right-wing fanbase and established itself as a culture-war front. A return to the PGA Tour would require DeChambeau to eat a lot of shit, and so far he doesn’t seem willing to do that. “I think there’s a way to solve any problem,” DeChambeau said last month, when asked if he would consider returning to the PGA. “It’s really about if the membership wants me back.” Given his recent play, there’s no urgent reason for the PGA Tour to want DeChambeau back. At the Masters in April, he missed the cut with a brutal triple-bogey on the final hole of the second round, unable to extricate himself from a greenside bunker. He lost 2.5 strokes to the field over those two rounds, in line with senior golfer Zach Johnson. The next month, at the PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club, Bryson slapped it around the course and whined about his irons for two days before again missing the cut. Again he lost about 2.5 strokes to the field, a little worse than senior golfer Stewart Cink. 

In the era of looksmaxxing, plastic surgery, Botox, and Ozempic, it's impossible to escape the tyranny of good looks. Are beauty standards fascist? Is losing weight about giving in or being healthy? The endless overdetermined debates about the ethics of aesthetics continues to haunt us. Even as we chase Kant's sublime through facial symmetry, we struggle to justify and categorize the various forms of body modification and whether or not they are feminist. In her debut novel New Skin, Sarah Wang wades into the culture wars with her own fictional take on facelifts, race, and desirability.  While trapped in a toxic mother-daughter dynamic, Linli Feng and her mother Fanny fall prey to a black-market plastic surgery ring. Fanny, a Chinese immigrant struggling to make rent, continues to get botched procedures in a failed bid for beauty, chasing after an imagined white-centered ideal. Linli, meanwhile, hopes to escape her mother's manipulative grasp in Los Angeles and go to graduate school in New York, but her mother continually sabotages her attempts to escape. Instead, Linli ends up taking care of Fanny after yet another dismal surgery. Soon, Fanny cooks up a plan to appear on a new reality TV show: America's Beauty Extreme. If she wins, she'll get the grotesque work on her face fixed. Meanwhile, Linli ends up working at Another Horizon, an abolitionist rehabilitation center as a way to pay her family's creditors. But she soon discovers the botched surgeries her mother receives may be a malicious attempt to weasel money out of poor immigrants looking for a cheap beauty fix. Like mother, like daughter, Linli ends up getting some whitening treatments in an attempt to nail down the shadowy gang who preyed on her mom. It's a packed novel that moves briskly in about 300 pages, full of politically minded plotlines about identity, class, and ICE raids.

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. In between spending the last month listening to every single song with "New York" in its title or chorus, I found time to keep up with the latest big album releases. We're only about halfway through, but already this has been a damn good year for music: a mix of quality releases from stars, stalwarts, and new names entering the ring. The new Olivia Rodrigo might be the best thing to come out recently, but this week I'm more moved to consider Cry Baby, the first independent release from rapper Vince Staples. https://youtu.be/qdcD99Pd0oo?si=QAbw5WSfvmAQbG8O

Beneath soaring ceilings, in a small, darkly painted gallery off the main hall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, two immense sunflower paintings hang side by side. The paintings are bigger than I expected them to be, big enough that when I watch people pose between them, their faces are the size of only one of the flowers. These paintings are sisters, not twins. Exhibited for the first time together, both show a vase of sunflowers painted by Vincent van Gogh. But they are subtly, uncomfortably different. On the left hangs one in all yellow. Fifteen sunflowers sit inside an earthenware pot, the kind you might have at home. They are painted with Van Gogh’s signature thick globs of paint. Even the flat lemon-yellow background is textured with a basketweave pattern—for every vertical stroke, there is one horizontal. The flowers themselves are a muddy yellow, their centers tinged with orange or brown. Seven of them stand erect and forceful; the other seven droop, dying. One of the drooping sunflowers, on the bottom right, splays its petals outward. The green underleaves of the flower streak skyward, outlined with a darker green, like flames, threatening the others. There is a single shot of blue, a crude line slightly higher on the left of the vase than on the right, that demarcates the yellow of the table from the yellow of the wall behind it. The right painting is of twelve sunflowers, inside the same type of pot. Its background is a shining, vibrant blue—still textured, but with less organization. The petals themselves are outlined in a slightly darker color, giving them a sharper, almost harsh appearance. The exuberance of the blue with the sharpness of the flowers makes the painting feel harried. The bottom of the pot is purple, and a bright, almost fire-hydrant red shines out from the center of one of the sunflowers. Van Gogh used the same red to outline the vase and sign his name. It's bright but not quite optimistic. There's something in there that feels a little unsettled. But maybe I just think that because I know too much.

In late 2020, months after the murder of George Floyd, our colleague Justin Ellis moved back to his hometown of Minneapolis to begin work on a book about black life in the city, where promises of racial harmony have gone unkept to generations of black residents. The city's good, neighborly intentions are alluded to in that classic phrase, Minnesota nice. "But good intentions find a way to devastate Black lives all the same," Justin writes. His brilliant new book, The Cruelty of Nice Folks: Why Minneapolis Is the Story of America, is in bookstores now. It asks readers to consider what nice really means. Floyd's death, Justin writes, is less a departure from nice than a consequence of nice, a culmination of too many conversations avoided and too many problems swept under the rug. Inevitably, this became a personal project for Justin. He spent his year in Minneapolis also taking care of his mother, Viki, as she underwent cancer treatment. (You might recall reading his beautiful tribute to her at Defector a few years ago.) As Justin sought to understand how his family's "insistence on an ordinary life could be a skeleton key to understanding Minneapolis," Viki became a vital source. Woven through this rigorous urban history about the city's constraints on black life is the moving personal story of how three generations of the Ellis family lived in and adapted to them: "When the world was not enough, or it asked for patience, they found a way to make it work." Last week, the busy father of two was generous enough to grant Defector an interview. We talked about the "actively managed" myth of Minneapolis, the challenges of writing such a personal book, the legacy of the summer of 2020, and what lies ahead for Minneapolis in the wake of the monumental anti-ICE protests that swept the city earlier this year. The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. 

Portugal began its World Cup with a goal befitting a real contender. In the sixth minute, the Portuguese pinned the Democratic Republic of Congo in their own box, fired a dangerous cross from the right side that skittered across the face of goal before being cleared, recycled the ball to the left side, and then pumped in another cross that was met by the head of late-arriving midfielder João Neves. It was 1-0, and Portugal looked ready to fly. Too bad Cristiano Ronaldo would spend the rest of the game dragging them back to the surface, where they would ultimately draw, 1-1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjumRdNESKg Ronaldo must have seen what Erling Haaland, Kylian Mbappé, and especially Lionel Messi got up to in their first games, and it must have burned him up inside. The 41-year-old's career-long rivalry with the GOAT has only become more trivial as time has gone on. Where once "Messi vs. Ronaldo, who ya got?" was one of the most hotly debated questions in sports, it becomes clearer every year that Ronaldo was never really on Messi's level. Case in point: Messi won the last World Cup and scored a hat trick in his first game at this one while re-establishing his bona fides as the best player on a contending team. Ronaldo just kind of sucks now.

So that settles it, then: Iberia's Team is Andorra. And the Andorrans didn't even know they were an option. This is what happens when Spain can't get past Cape Verde and then, maybe even more shockingly, Portugal gets stymied by the Democratic Republic of Congo. That is to say: Two of the heaviest favorites in this World Cup, each one of the most historically dominant teams in international soccer history, take nothing but shame from dropping points to a team that has never been in any World Cup and another that had never scored a goal in one. Middle fingers to the big man have never stood quite so proudly. The internet has already glommed on to the Blue Whales, but now it has to double back on the Warriors of the Equator after a 1-1 draw that was almost even more dramatic. A clothesline by Tomás Araújo on Congo star Yoane Wissa four minutes from the end drew a yellow card but also stopped a scoring opportunity for Wissa, whom Premier League dorks know from Newcastle United and who had scored Congo's goal just before halftime. He was breaking toward the underbothered Portuguese goal when Araújo took a chance on a red card to save a goal-scoring chance. He got away with it, and the game ended 1-1 rather than 2-1 Leopards as a result, thus robbing Andorra of even more bragging rights and the Portuguese from drawing up plans to recolonize Cape Verde to steal their point.