The Full Court Press of the Black Athlete

By Aram Goudsouzian

As commonly portrayed, pro basketball in the 1970s suffered from Black athletes who lacked not only the dignity of 1960s pioneers such as Bill Russell or Elgin Baylor, but also the mass-marketability of 1980s icons such as Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan. The popular memory of pro hoops in this era includes accounts of contract-jumping, on-court fighting, and cocaine-sniffing. Theresa Runstedtler’s Black Ball seeks to dislodge this conventional narrative.

Sports | Reviews

Psilocybin Mushrooms

How to Meet the Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes

By Jeannette Cooperman

Reverence, serenity, and compassion, courtesy of a mushroom? Well, what would be wrong with that? Humans are a broken species. Negative emotions wired into us for survival have run amok in times we call civilized, and now we hunt, or at least hurt, one another. It would be lovely to think we could all meditate our way to wholeness. But why not speed the process?

Science & Nature | Essays

The Economic Paradox That (We Hope!) Might Save Us All from AI Devastation

By Ben Fulton

Perhaps we can take comfort in the fact that his paradox has at least survived long enough to be quoted and debated in our current age of AI anxiety. Perhaps we should hope against hope that Jevons paradox will prove itself useful all over again.

Society & Culture | Dispatches

Tiptoeing Around Our Stories

By John Griswold

In the best of times it is impossible to know other people fully. Even if we wish to act in good faith, it is hard to express to others who we think we are—and we may not know who we are.

Society & Culture | Dispatches

The Art and Science of Hold Music’s Best Soundtracks

By Ben Fulton

When we are up against the inevitable limits of human invention and our capacity for patience, it is the music that matters most.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

The Slow, But Powerful, Erosion of Flattery

By Ben Fulton

Flattery flattens a person, robbing us of complexity and crippling our will and ability to exchange and understand truths—even the hard ones—we might gain from others.

Society & Culture | Dispatches

Update from the Shawnee National Forest

By John Griswold

It is a redundancy to say heroism must be shown in inopportune times. The current administration recently put 59 million acres of national forestland at greater risk in an opening salvo of a commodity-mindset war against the environment.

Science & Nature | Dispatches

Billy Joel

The Billy Joel Documentary Is like a Good Novel

By John Griswold

One of the reasons I like the term “novelistic” for these sorts of documentaries is that it stresses how they deal in the mysteries of creation, its meaning, and its emotion. Joel has a song from 1977 called “Vienna,” with the refrain, “When will you realize / Vienna waits for you.”

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

The Nuclear War Films We Refuse to See, but Must See

By Ben Fulton

The War Game and Threads have no time for dramatic trifles of characters dealing with nuclear war from afar, or even the relative safety of a military bunker. Instead, both films plunge us deep into their dreaded, adrenaline-soaked horrors.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

The Asian Erasure Trap, or How Being the “Model Minority” Makes Everyone Feel Safer

By Wen Gao

The air shifted. Some smiled with relief, others looked away. In that moment, I realized what the “model minority” concept protects is not me, but the comfort of those around me. Politeness asks us to trade particularity for harmony, difference for calm.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

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