My friend Brendan has run a hand-scored March Madness fantasy league for more than a decade, and Chet Holmgren's game today is the single best individual performance I can remember during that stretch. Mostly I remember Scottie Reynolds having a game so bad that I finished last. It's the absolute apex of college basketball pervert behavior and I love it dearly. It's mentioned in this piece I wrote at Vice years ago, but I so respect my dude for choosing to do Microsoft Excel stuff in his leisure time, for the love. vice.com/en/article/bmq…

Obviously there are worse ways for the government to spend money but this just makes me sad at this point. That cure will be implemented with what health care system? Will it be something everyone gets, or one of the ones that only some people get?

https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1489049118148337667

I know we're well into the meta/dystopian stage of the pandemic at this point but the gap between the miracles that we are capable of willing/working/spending into being and how much of that the apparently permanent health care marketplace allows people to have is enraging.

I think Medium would have worked if any of the people putting money behind it had the necessary patience or the interest in making it work. But, and this is a recurring theme in pivot-prone sites, the most important people were cretins and everyone was subject to their whims. The editorial people there were always absolutely state of the art and every experience I had there was good. They paid on time. The people who would either make it work or not were crystal-vision tech dunces who don't read.

I know Fox has never found a lie too obvious and stupid for their puddingheaded viewers to question, but "Green Texas Didn't Believe In Oil And Gas, Deserves To Freeze" is a fucking incredible heat check.

https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1361828654792212481

Anyway here is a very easy to understand article about what actually happened to Texas's power grid, and the various unsurprising why it happened. houstonchronicle.com/business/energ…

Quillette is so good. I didn't think it'd survive the broader political movement with which it's aligned blossoming into fash-aspiring Facebook-brained incoherence, but these prissy weirdos doing posts about how weird and gross they find other people have really hung in there! This is obviously inspired by the Quillettesman with a Yale grad degree huffily blaming Arm & Hammer for selling him dog shampoo with a big picture of a happy dog on it, but I am inspired by all of these well-credentialed Big Thinkers who presumably must wear velcro sneakers.

With regard to "We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend, and in the plane it was almost completely loaded with thugs, wearing these dark uniforms," I will remind you that the President is a replacement-level Facebook Gossip Elder. newrepublic.com/article/159021… Trump compulsively adds hedges and decimal points to shit he makes up to make it seem more convincing, which is something that little kids also like to do but also gives us the opportunity to imagine a plane that's 90% masked antifa commandos and also a few business travelers.

Trump's signature combination of viciousness, idiocy, and pure soft laziness means that the only thing he really can think of to do with power is send someone to go brutalize other people for him and then be like "we kicked their ass, huh." There's a big constituency for that. But I think most people can see that as the shameful thing it is. I hope and I sense that most people can see that hurting people on behalf of delicate rich sadists is a shitty, shameful thing to do.

The famous phrase universally associated with tremendous success and peerless executive judgment. These astroturfed protests are pathetic and ugly, but they fit an emerging pattern for both Trump and big business types, which was established through our forever wars—just accept mass death as normal because changing course is too difficult/annoying. newrepublic.com/article/157322…

Pardon the earnestness but good writing is so fun to find, just in the sense of some strange/surprising phrase that absolutely rings out and makes sense. I read a sentence earlier today in which Italo Calvino described a shitty beach on a sunless day as "water the color of fish." I don't even know how I'd explain what that means, but that's why he's a better writer than me. A thousand idiotic forces try to break language every day and there are still somehow new, strange, illuminating ways to put words together.

I won't keep spamming my TNR bit but I feel compelled to note that every stagger Trump takes towards pure racial fascism is led by Fox News. The more white nationalist they get the more white nationalist he gets, because it's all he watches and he obsesses over their approval. He doesn't have ideas, really. He doesn't read and doesn't listen, and all he knows about what's happening in the world is what he sees on Fox News and Fox Business, which he watches because they cover him a lot. If they're going in on Ilhan Omar, he will, too, just the same.