a generational Wembanyama hater walks among us
Plus a good summer media sports blind item…
I’m back in da U.S. and mega jet-lagged. But my Japan doc is updated here, and the Saigon starter pack will hit soon. God, I can’t believe I’m typing on a computer instead of eating fresh bánh xèo in a shaded alleyway……yet we press on… :(
The official Deez Links contribution to the NBA championship discourse is a reupping of the iconic Hate Read that Harry Krinsky wrote for us last year about his deep disdain of the Victor Wembanyama Technocracy. Here’s a taste:
On the court, Victor Wembanyama has no bag. He has no grace of movement. The most impressive athletic feat he accomplished was flexing his pituitary gland at 14. His movements are so clunky and unrelatable that it sometimes feels like my YouTube TV is buffering when I watch him. His whole thing — and this is the god-honest truth — is that he’s so big and long that he deters would-be scorers from even attempting shots near him. He is like if preventative crime-stopping Palantir drones looked like Gumby. He is pure, optimized evil.
Off the court, it gets worse. Wembanyama talks openly about putting his phone on airplane mode after 9 p.m. He started learning English as a child so he could communicate better with American athletes. He “practices” “mindfulness.” The most daring thing he’s done in his life is pull up to Union Square in New York to play four games of chess.
There has been a push, in the last 15 years or so, to try to “get to know” the athletes we love so much. That project has been an undeniable failure. We do not know these people. We will never know these people. They are millionaires with generational wealth, riding on their ability to remain unknowable and brand-safe. Of course, we will not “get to know them.” Victor Wembanyama is this era’s final form — an athlete who isn’t just guarded and unknowable, but who appears to literally enjoy not having an interior world.
Feel free to agree to disagree! I for one find that long-limbed lithe guy personally rather charming per aspects of his incontrovertible Frenchness, but unfortunately I would still slam those Gramercy Park gates closed on him in a heartbeat for the good of my fair city…
It’s been a couple of years since we’ve gotten a Ted Chiang dispatch handed down from on high, but what’s extra interesting is that this latest one on the myth of “conscious” A.I. and Claude’s constitution — a little rambly but overall as bangin as ever in its intolerance of foolishness — is published at The Atlantic and not his usual home pulpit at The New Yorker. Good companion reading with Dan Chiasson’s Think for Yourself essay at NYRB; a big week overall for lucid thought from writers with last names beginning with Chia…
Will John Paul Brammer reveal, in practical terms, how he learned to read way more prodigiously (up to a book/week now, apparently)? No. But I think that’s for the best when we all konw what’s actually needed is a total attitude adjustment — since this is a “curiosity crisis” we’re dealing with instead of an “attention crisis,” as JP puts it. It’s not about cramming a few extra pages into your commute or going audiobook forever. You! Must! Change! Everything!
Curiosity stays childlike, always; childlike, even as everything else matures and grays and turns cynical. Curiosity is easy to distract and, because it’s indiscriminate, easy to exploit. It pursues zealously, tuckers out quickly. Its desires are pure; good and evil don’t figure in. It’s up to the parent to guide the child here. My return to reading was a collaboration between play and discipline, child and parent. Curiosity supplies the energy. Curiosity is attention’s white-hot spearpoint. I am its guide. I take aim.
I feel like I would respect this WSJ piece on whether people are really making $500k a month on ShopMy more if it didn’t also randomly have its own shoppable links embedded in there?
And finally, a little Deez Links blind item for you: Which New York media softball team is notoriously way too intense about gameplay — to the point where they reportedly incited some downright unsportsmanlike “shoving” at a recent game this season? Hint: they have the permit for the nicest field in town…