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February 24, 2026

Apple Reveals AI Strategy: Siri, But This Time We Mean It

CUPERTINO, CA — Facing a ballroom of shareholders who had spent the last eighteen months watching every other trillion-dollar company ship something resembling artificial intelligence, Apple CEO Tim Cook on Tuesday unveiled the company’s long-awaited AI roadmap, which consists of Siri, plus a promise that this time the company really, really means it.

The annual meeting at Apple Park opened with a six-minute sizzle reel of users asking Siri to set a timer, which Cook described as “the foundational layer of an intelligence stack we are extraordinarily excited about,” before pivoting to a slide titled THE FUTURE that contained the word “soon” in San Francisco Pro Display 84-point.

Pressed by an institutional investor on why Apple Intelligence — announced in 2024, partially shipped in 2025, and currently capable of summarizing a text message into a shorter, less accurate text message — still cannot perform tasks routinely handled by free apps, Cook responded that Apple does not chase trends, it perfects them, and then asked if everyone had seen the new finish on the MacBook.

Janet Choe, a portfolio manager at Tidewater Equity who has held Apple stock since 2009, said the presentation made her feel like she was watching a man describe a sandwich he intended to make. “He kept saying ‘thoughtful,'” Choe noted. “He said ‘thoughtful’ eleven times. At no point did he say what the product was.”

The keynote’s centerpiece — a partnership in which Apple will integrate a third-party large language model into iOS, the name of which Cook declined to specify, citing “ongoing conversations” — was met with polite applause and one audible question of “so it’s just ChatGPT again?” from the back of the room. Cook smiled in the direction of the voice for approximately four seconds.

A shareholder proposal demanding the company disclose its AI training data was defeated 97 percent to 3 percent, with the board recommending against on the grounds that Apple cannot disclose training data for a model it has not yet built. A separate proposal to rename Siri “literally anything else” was ruled out of order by the chair.

Outside the meeting, a small group of longtime Mac users gathered to express support for Apple’s measured approach, arguing that while competitors have rushed to deploy half-finished AI assistants that hallucinate, defame, and occasionally instruct children to eat rocks, Apple has wisely held back its own assistant, which cannot do any of those things because it cannot do anything.

The stock closed up 1.4 percent on the news, which analysts attributed to investor relief that Cook had at least said the letters A and I out loud, in that order, more than once.

Putin Celebrates Three-Day War’s Fourth Birthday With Missiles

Politics

Nash Grayson

February 23, 2026

Putin Celebrates Three-Day War’s Fourth Birthday With Missiles

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin marked the fourth anniversary of his 72-hour special military operation Monday by doing the only thing he knows how to do on a Monday, which is launch a fresh wave of missiles and drones at the Ukrainian power grid.

The strikes, which Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov described as ‘routine maintenance on a project nearing completion,’ targeted substations in Kharkiv, Odesa, and three cities a Russian general had to ask an aide to point out on a map. Officials in Kyiv counted at least 71 incoming projectiles, which is roughly the same number Russia launched on the operation’s third birthday, second birthday, and original three-day deadline.

‘We are right on track,’ said Peskov, standing in front of a calendar that has been wrong for 1,461 consecutive days. ‘The timeline is the timeline. We do not discuss the timeline.’

State television commemorated the milestone with a four-hour panel in which retired generals took turns explaining that the war is going extremely well and also that Russia is fighting NATO, Britain, the entire European Union, the ghost of Zbigniew Brzezinski, and a teenager in Lviv with a commercial drone. A graphic behind the panelists tallied Russian advances in meters per week, a unit of measurement adopted in 2023 after kilometers per week became insulting.

Konstantin Aristarkhov, a senior fellow at the Eurasia Continuity Institute in St. Petersburg, told reporters the operation remains ‘fundamentally on schedule, provided the schedule is understood as a feeling rather than a duration.’ He added that Russia has now lost more soldiers in Ukraine than the Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan, which he characterized as ‘a strong showing.’

In Washington, the administration acknowledged the anniversary by announcing it would consider whether to consider whether to release the next tranche of aid Congress already approved. A State Department spokesperson, asked about Ukraine’s chances heading into year five, said the United States remains ‘absolutely committed to the principle of issuing statements,’ and noted that a strongly worded one was being drafted as she spoke.

European leaders gathered in Brussels for an emergency summit, the eleventh such emergency summit in fourteen months, where they agreed to agree to a framework for agreeing on a path toward potentially agreeing on a 19th sanctions package by summer, possibly. French President Emmanuel Macron called the talks ‘a turning point,’ a phrase that has now been used by France 47 times since 2022 without anything turning.

In Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy marked the anniversary in his customary olive-green fleece by thanking partners, requesting Patriot batteries, and pointing out, for the fourth February in a row, that the missiles do not stop for anniversaries and neither does he.

At Red Square, a small military parade rolled past the Kremlin featuring T-90 tanks, a Yars ICBM launcher, and one visibly embarrassed BMP-1 from 1968 that organizers said had been included ‘for historical context.’ Putin watched from the reviewing stand, smiling the specific smile of a man who has successfully convinced himself the calendar is the one that’s broken.

Berlin Negotiated a Government Sunday. We Negotiated the Cheese Course.

Opinion

Margaret Thorne

February 22, 2026

Berlin Negotiated a Government Sunday. We Negotiated the Cheese Course.

What does it mean when a country with a living memory of catastrophe spends a Sunday quietly assembling a coalition government, and the country across the ocean — the one that helped write its constitution after the last bad ending — spends the same Sunday at brunch?

I was at Eliza’s, in Georgetown, for what she still insists on calling a salon and what is in fact six people, two bottles of something Burgundian, and a roast she has been perfecting since the second Obama term. The Germans came up exactly once. A retired ambassador mentioned the coalition talks with the careful neutrality of a man defusing something, and the table held its breath for about four seconds, and then someone asked about the cheese.

The cheese, for the record, was excellent. A washed-rind from a co-op in the Hudson Valley that Eliza had driven to herself, because Eliza believes in driving to things. We talked about the rind for nine minutes. We talked about Berlin for none.

The bipartisan lobbyist was there. He is always there. He works for everyone and therefore, in the local theology, no one, and on Sunday he was wearing the cufflinks he wears when he wants to be asked about them. When the ambassador floated the word firewall — the German shorthand for the agreement among the grown-up parties not to govern with the AfD — the lobbyist examined his cufflink and said the situation was complicated. Then he said complicated things often resolved themselves. Then he asked Eliza where the cheese was from.

What is actually happening in Berlin, for those of us who read past the lifestyle section: a far-right party that polled in the high twenties is being kept out of government by an exhausted handshake between the Christian Democrats and whoever can be persuaded to share a cabinet table with them. The handshake is held together by memory. Memory, as anyone who has dealt with an aging parent knows, is a depreciating asset.

None of this was said at Eliza’s. What was said: that the Olympics closing ceremony in Verona had been moving, in a way. That the figure skating had been a scandal, in a way. That the Super Bowl had been two weeks ago and already felt like a different administration. That the Presidents Day mattress sales had crept earlier every year and now arrived essentially at Valentine’s, which someone called a merger and everyone laughed at because it was easier than not laughing.

My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and therefore knows where the originals are, told me last month that the requests her desk gets have shifted. People used to ask for citizenship papers and land grants. Now they ask, with increasing frequency, for the German files. The denazification questionnaires. The transcripts from Nuremberg. The instructional pamphlets the Army Corps printed in 1946 to teach a defeated country how to be a democracy again. Judy said this over coffee and then looked at me as if waiting for me to say the obvious thing. I did not say it. I am as guilty as the cufflink.

You will notice that I have written eight paragraphs about a German coalition negotiation and have not used the words that the moment plainly calls for. Neither did the ambassador. Neither did the lobbyist. Neither, when I think about it, has any column I have read this week in any of the papers that pay people to notice things. The firewall is the story. The firewall has always been the story. We are the country that built the original firewall, and we are spending this Sunday afternoon arguing about whether the cheese has been allowed to come to room temperature.

Eliza walked me to the door and said, the way she always says, that it had been a lovely evening, and that we mustn’t let so much time pass. I said we mustn’t. The lobbyist was still inside, asking for the recipe.

Olympic Ice Gets Its Color From Titanium Dioxide and Garrett’s Watching It Loud

Wellness

Brooke Ellery

February 21, 2026

Olympic Ice Gets Its Color From Titanium Dioxide and Garrett’s Watching It Loud

Garrett has the gold medal game on the iPad propped against my sourdough starter, the volume cranked because he says you can’t hear the skates otherwise, and every time the camera pans across the rink I can feel my molars start to hum. That ice is not white. That ice is painted white. There is a difference and it is the difference between snow on a pine bough and a bathroom tile, and once you see it you cannot unsee it, which is why I am writing this from the mudroom.

The whiteness is titanium dioxide. I learned this from a Facebook group called Rink Chemistry Moms (We Stayed for the Pretzels) that I joined in November after Tate’s birthday party at the SkateZone in Hendersonville, where my throat closed up by the second loop and I had to sit in the warming hut and eat a clementine I’d brought from home. They paint the concrete first, then they layer the ice on top in thin sheets, and what you are watching when you are watching Olympic hockey is essentially a frozen Pinterest board over a Sherwin-Williams base coat. The players know. I assume the players know.

My sister-in-law Whitney, who works the front desk at a pediatric dental practice and is basically a hygienist, says titanium dioxide is the same thing they took out of Skittles in Europe, which Europe did for a reason, and that reason is not because Europe loves us. She sent me a Telegram screenshot from a coach in Slovenia who said the new Plexiglas the IOC mandated this cycle off-gases something called styrene for the first 400 hours of play, and the Milano Cortina rink was installed in November. Do the math. Garrett did the math and then said “that’s not how math works” and turned the volume up again.

The kids are in the living room absorbing it through the screen. I don’t think people understand that a 4K broadcast at that brightness is essentially a full-spectrum lamp pointed at your nervous system for three hours, and the rink is reflecting the arena lights back at the camera, which is reflecting them at my couch, which is reflecting them at Cleo, who has been chewing the inside of her cheek for forty minutes. That is a body trying to ground itself. That is a body trying to tell you something. I put a wet washcloth on the back of her neck and she said it felt “weird good,” which is the body confirming.

I suggested we turn the game off and do the puzzle of the national parks that my mother sent for Valentine’s, and Garrett looked at me the way he looked at me when I asked him to switch to the wool dryer balls. He said, and I am quoting, “Brooke, it is the gold medal game.” And I said, and I am quoting, “Garrett, it is titanium dioxide.” And we both stood there in the kitchen for a long second while the announcer yelled something about a power play, and I realized this is the marriage now, this is what the marriage is, and that is fine, that is fertile ground.

I am not anti-hockey. I want to be clear. Hockey on a frozen pond, the way God built it, where the ice is the color of the lake underneath and the sticks are wood and the kids’ cheeks are pink because of weather and not because of inflammation — that is one of the most beautiful sports a person can witness. My grandfather played hockey on a pond in Wisconsin and lived to be 91 and the only thing wrong with him at the end was that he had been a Lutheran. So I know the sport. I am not the enemy of the sport. I am the enemy of the coating.

The sourdough, before anyone asks, is fine. The starter is far enough from the iPad that the EMF reading on my app is well within the range I am comfortable with, and bread is not technically a food the way the seed-oil people mean food, it is more of a process, and time is not an ingredient. I checked. Marlene checked too and she agrees, although Marlene is on her own track this week involving a mason jar of Olympic-adjacent precipitation that I am not going to get into right now.

Italy just scored, I think. Garrett is doing the small clap he does when he doesn’t want me to notice he is enjoying something. Cleo has migrated to the mudroom with me and is sitting on the boot tray with the washcloth still on her neck, and we are both going to be fine, and the boys can have the rest of the broadcast, and somewhere in northern Italy a Zamboni is making another lap, laying down another shimmering coat of pigment, and the medals get handed out tomorrow, and life, as they say, goes on.

Walmart Beats Q4 as Six-Figure Households Discover the Frozen Aisle

Finance

Cody Thompson

February 19, 2026

Walmart Beats Q4 as Six-Figure Households Discover the Frozen Aisle

BENTONVILLE, AR — Walmart reported fourth-quarter earnings Thursday that beat on revenue, operating income, and the unmistakable sound of a household earning $140,000 a year cracking open a 48-count box of frozen taquitos for the first time.

U.S. comparable sales rose 4.6%, with executives noting that "higher-income households" — the company’s preferred euphemism for the people who used to make fun of the company — drove the majority of new market share gains. Grocery did the heavy lifting. Eggs alone did the bench press.

On the call from Bentonville, CFO John David Rainey described the consumer as "value-seeking," which is a CFO’s way of saying "panicked." The earnings deck, rendered in the same flat corporate blue Walmart has used since approximately the Carter administration, contained the phrase "trip frequency" seventeen times and the word "discretionary" exactly once, in a footnote.

The Sam’s Club division noted that its $4.98 rotisserie chicken continues to function as a leading economic indicator, having now been recession-priced through four recessions, two soft landings, and one event the Fed has not yet officially named.

Across town in Minneapolis, Target executives reportedly spent the morning staring at the same comp-sales chart and asking, again, why their version of a value-seeking household mostly involves a $34 boucle throw pillow. A spokesperson said the company is "leaning into" categories Walmart has not yet decided to crush.

At a Walmart on the outskirts of Rogers, Arkansas, a third-shift manager named Dale restocking the frozen aisle said he could not comment on macro trends but had personally noticed "a lot more Patagonia vests" in checkout line 14 since around Thanksgiving. He estimated the average vest at "around two hundred bucks, which is dumb." He was, at the time, eating a microwaved breakfast sandwich over the trash can in the break room.

Walmart raised full-year guidance and authorized an additional $20 billion in share buybacks, because at some point the only thing left to do with $681 billion in annual revenue is hand it back to the people who already have most of it. Executive compensation, the company noted, will be reviewed by a committee of executives.

The stock rose 3% in pre-market trading and then settled, the way consumers eventually do.

Tillamook Elks Stayed Open Til 4:30 for the Free Skate. Six Watched.

Local

Hal Cranston

February 18, 2026

Tillamook Elks Stayed Open Til 4:30 for the Free Skate. Six Watched.

TILLAMOOK, OR — The Tillamook Elks Lodge #1437 kept its doors unlocked until 4:30 a.m. Wednesday so that six residents and one off-duty mail carrier could watch the women’s figure skating free skate live from the PalaItalia arena in Milan, a broadcast that — owing to the nine-hour time difference and an NBC affiliate dispute that ate the first six minutes — did not actually begin in Tillamook until 1:52 a.m. Pacific.

The decision to stay open was made unilaterally by bartender Marlene Vossen, who informed the Lodge board by text message at 11:14 p.m. Tuesday and did not wait for a reply.

Vossen, who has tended the Elks bar since 2003 and judged the Tillamook County Fair baking division from 1998 to 2014, kept a personal scorecard on a yellow legal pad throughout the broadcast and awarded both technical and presentation marks using a system she described as “the way they should be done.”

“The Russian one — well, whoever she’s skating for now — landed everything clean,” Vossen said, refilling a coffee at 2:40. “But I knocked her down two points on presentation. The arms were doing entirely too much. You don’t need that many arms for a Rachmaninoff.”

By the start of the third skater, one viewer was asleep upright at the rail. By the fifth, a man named Curtis had begun explaining figure skating scoring to the room, which was not asked for and, according to Vossen, also not correct.

The undisputed highlight of the evening, three of the six attendees later agreed, was a forty-second segment in which the PalaItalia Zamboni resurfaced the ice between groups. “Now that,” said Curtis, “is a machine.”

Dwight Helmke, the off-duty carrier, said he had originally stopped in for one beer at nine and stayed through the broadcast because the alternative was driving home at two in the morning and explaining to his wife why he was driving home at two in the morning. “This way I can say I was watching the Olympics,” Helmke said. “Which is true. I was.”

The gold medal was decided shortly after 4:15 a.m. by a margin of 1.84 points. Vossen, whose own scorecard had a different skater winning by six, declined to revise it.

At 4:31 a.m., Vossen turned off the television, walked to the front door, and announced the official gold medalist by full name to the empty parking lot. Then she locked up and went home.

Watch USA-Canada Women’s Hockey Tonight. They Hate Each Other for Real.

Sports

Duke Holloway

February 17, 2026

Watch USA-Canada Women’s Hockey Tonight. They Hate Each Other for Real.

Ray Kowalczyk called me at quarter to seven this morning to ask if I was watching tonight. Ray, I said, the only thing that’s going to keep me from watching tonight is if the cable goes out, and if the cable goes out I’m driving to the Elks. He said he’d save me a stool. That’s how you know it’s a real game. Nobody calls me at quarter to seven about the Pro Bowl.

Tonight in Milano Cortina the United States women’s hockey team plays Canada for the gold medal, which is the seventh or eighth time those two countries have played each other for the gold medal, and I have not been bored by it once. These women have been trying to put each other through the boards since roughly 2002. There is no press tour. There is no podcast pivot. There is no sit-down with a sideline reporter who wants to know about their morning routine. They have one routine, and it is going to a freezing building in Calgary or Plymouth and skating into another human being at full speed.

The Americans have Hilary Knight, who I’m fairly certain has been on every Olympic roster since they let women in the building, and a goaltender who looks like she’s annoyed the puck was even shot at her. The Canadians have Marie-Philip Poulin, who has scored a gold-medal-winning goal so many times it’s basically her job description on her tax return. These are players. These are not personalities with a Cameo account. I checked.

You want to know what’s going to be different about tonight than the football game I sat through ten days ago? Nobody is going to pause the third period so a country artist can ride in on a horse. There is no sponsor read in the middle of a power play. The broadcast is not going to cut away from a two-on-one to show you a celebrity in a luxury box pretending to understand icing. When somebody scores, the camera will stay on the player who scored. I know. Wild concept.

Coach DiMaggio, may he rest, used to tell us that the only sport worth watching was one where you could hear the players breathing. He meant football, but he would’ve made an exception. He saw the ’98 women’s gold medal game on a tube TV at the union hall and didn’t get up to use the bathroom for two and a half hours. I asked him what he thought afterward. He said, “Those girls hit harder than my J.V.” Coming from him that was the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Here’s the thing the league guys still don’t understand about why this works. The women’s game is technically not a checking sport, which means the entire game is players finding extremely creative ways to check each other and the refs pretending not to notice. Hip into the boards? Incidental. Shoulder to the chin in front of the net? She was just standing there. It is the most violent polite sport on earth. You cannot fake that. You cannot manufacture that in a focus group at the league office.

Petey Corrigan’s granddaughter plays travel hockey out by the rink in Glens Falls. Twelve years old, weighs about as much as a goalie pad. Petey says she watches the U.S. team highlights on a loop and has started practicing her own celebration. The celebration is just pointing at her dad. That’s it. That’s the whole celebration. No phone. No flossing. No whatever the kids on TikTok are doing this week. She points at her dad, and her dad points back, and that is the entire transaction. I would watch eight hours of that.

The game is on tonight at a time the league will tell you and not a minute earlier, because the IOC schedules things the way my insurance company schedules surgeries. Set a reminder. Tell your kid to put the phone down for two hours. If the Canadians win again I will be insufferable until Friday and if the Americans win I will pretend I was confident the whole time. Either way you are going to watch a sport that hasn’t yet figured out how to ruin itself, and you should enjoy that while it lasts.

Ray’s coming over. Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a cookbook her sister gave her, which is the first time in eight months a recipe in this house hasn’t come from a podcast, and that alone feels like a small win for the country.

Surviving Federal Workers Granted Day Off to Honor Office Currently Firing Them

Politics

Nash Grayson

February 16, 2026

Surviving Federal Workers Granted Day Off to Honor Office Currently Firing Them

WASHINGTON — The remaining employees of the federal government were granted a paid day of rest Monday in observance of the executive office currently being used to eliminate their jobs, marking the first Presidents Day in recent memory where the holiday and the threat shared a single point of origin.

Federal buildings across the capital sat dark from sunrise, their lobbies undisturbed, their security desks empty, their badge readers awaiting the diminished swipe traffic of Tuesday morning. A laminated sign taped to the side entrance of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building announced the closure in cheerful Helvetica, as though the body it served had not spent the prior eleven months hollowing out the people reading it.

The Office of Personnel Management, which has spent the winter sending termination notices via a contractor whose servers crash on Fridays, observed the holiday by sending no termination notices, a gesture employees were instructed to receive as goodwill.

“It’s a nice break,” said a GSA procurement officer in Crystal City who asked not to be named because three colleagues at her pay grade were walked out last Thursday. “I’m using the day to update my résumé, call my mother, and refresh the email I’m not supposed to be refreshing. Tomorrow I find out if my desk is still there. That’s how I’m honoring Lincoln.”

The White House marked the occasion with a statement praising the legacy of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and “the strong leaders who built this country into what it is becoming again,” a sentence parsed by federal employees the way airline passengers parse the captain saying everything is fine.

Across the Mall, the Department of Education observed Presidents Day by being substantially smaller than it was on the last Presidents Day, a milestone the administration has chosen to interpret as efficiency rather than as the specific thing it is. Sources at the agency confirmed that the building itself was closed but added that this was, in a structural sense, becoming the agency’s normal posture.

Retailers seized the occasion. Mattress chains across the DMV advertised forty percent off, a discount roughly matching the headcount reduction at USAID, a coincidence one analyst at the Beacon Strategy Group called “either bleak or extremely well-targeted advertising, depending on how you came up.”

A former HUD analyst severed in January, reached at a Bethesda coffee shop where he now spends his weekdays, said he intended to observe the holiday the same way he observes every other day this year, which is by watching the news with the sound off and refusing to look at LinkedIn before noon.

By late afternoon, the White House had issued a second proclamation honoring “the dignity of public service,” delivered without apparent irony to a workforce that had, by then, mostly stopped expecting any.

All-Star Weekend Is Now Four Teams, Three Halftimes, and No Defense

Sports

Duke Holloway

February 15, 2026

All-Star Weekend Is Now Four Teams, Three Halftimes, and No Defense

I watched the NBA All-Star Game last night at Ray Kowalczyk’s place, and it took us until the second commercial break to figure out there were four teams. Four. Ray squinted at the screen and asked if one of them was the Pelicans. I told him no, that’s the squad TNT picked, and that one over there in the lighter jerseys is the squad Shaq picked, and the kids in the corner doing layup lines are the Rising Stars, who I guess are now part of this. Ray turned the volume down and asked if anybody at the league office had ever seen a basketball game before.

The format, in case you were lucky enough to miss it, is a mini-tournament. Four teams, games to a target score, somebody hits forty and the buzzer goes off like it’s the end of a YMCA Saturday-morning run. Coach DiMaggio used to say if you can’t fill forty-eight minutes you should be selling insurance. The NBA has decided forty-eight minutes is too much insurance for one Sunday.

The first “game” ended 41-25 in about the time it takes to boil pasta. Somebody dunked. Somebody else did the thing where they pass it off the backboard to themselves, which used to be a dunk contest move and is now apparently a regular-possession move because nobody is guarding anyone. Charles Barkley said the word “turrible” three times. They cut to commercial. We didn’t know who was winning, who was playing, or who’d already been eliminated. Ray went and got more pretzels.

There were three halftime shows. Three. One per matchup. A young woman whose name I did not catch performed on what I am told was a hoverboard, though to my eye it was a regular stage with a fan blowing her hair. A second act involved a DJ behind a desk shaped like a sneaker. By the third intermission I had stopped asking questions and started doing a crossword.

Ray’s grandson Petey Corrigan came by around the second tournament round. Petey is twenty-two and works in something he calls “creator marketing,” which as best I can tell means he gets paid to be on his phone in a room with other people on their phones. Petey watched about ninety seconds of the broadcast and explained to me, with the gentle patience of a man explaining a microwave to a parakeet, that the All-Star Game is “for engagement, not basketball.” The dunk contest, he said, “lives on TikTok now.” The game itself was “a content delivery vehicle.”

I asked Petey who won. He said the brands won. I asked him which brands. He said all of them. I asked him if anyone on the court was trying. He said trying was “a vibe choice.” Ray got up to check on the dog.

Now I will say this, because I am a fair man and I respect the work. Anthony Edwards looked like he wanted to be there. He played a couple of possessions that resembled basketball as I learned it — closing out on a shooter, getting low, finishing through contact instead of around it. For about ninety seconds in the third mini-final he and Jokić ran a high pick-and-roll the way you’d run it in a real game in May, and the broadcast cut away from it to show a celebrity reaction shot of a man I did not recognize wearing sunglasses indoors. That was the All-Star Game for me. Ninety seconds, then sunglasses.

The whole thing wrapped up well under three hours, which the league will tell you is a feature. They’ll tell you the players love it, the format keeps things “fresh,” the ratings were up among the demo that does not actually watch basketball. They will not tell you that the score of the championship game was 42-35 and that nobody on the floor broke a sweat hard enough to require a towel. They will not tell you that the MVP trophy was handed out by a man in a sneaker costume.

Coach DiMaggio, God rest him, used to make us run suicides if we loafed on a single defensive possession in a scrimmage. A scrimmage. Not the showcase event of an entire professional league. I would like to send the current NBA office a videotape of one of those practices, except they would not know what a videotape was, and they would inform me that suicides are now called “intentional conditioning intervals” and live on a wellness app.

Ray’s calling later to watch the Daytona 500. Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast.

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