Is this it?

Or: What it means to love the Knicks

Every baseball fan of a certain type has a favorite quote about the game, from old commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, about how it marks the summer turning into the fall:

You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

Basketball is the opposite. It is there for you in the cold, with you on dreary Tuesday nights when the sun sets at 4 PM and you’re left with little to do but turn on the game. For almost my whole life, that’s felt natural; my favorite team (the Knicks) doesn’t make it to the summer, doesn’t even survive with a chance until February, and certainly doesn’t do much to buffer the passage of time.

If baseball is all smells and sense memories and languid afternoons, basketball becomes its artful, shut-in companion. It is sweat and pure athleticism and smelly gyms, and it is also astonishing displays of grace. Over the years, it became for me an exercise in observing choreographed motion that resists against defensive interruption. In other words, save for the occasional day in May when the Knicks had a few ping pong balls in the hopper, or a few weeks in February when Jeremy Lin took over the city, or a Roy Hibbert-interrupted playoff run, basketball was usually something almost academic. It was about enjoying the improbable physics of the game on cold nights.

But now, it’s June 3rd and I’m walking around New York in some kind of a daze, fist bumping strangers in a lucky Knicks hat that I’ve had to tape up because it’s falling apart from all the wear and tear. It is the same hat, mind you, that I chucked across a room in 2019 when — after a 17-65 season — the Knicks dropped to third in the lottery, missing out on the chance to take Zion Williamson or Ja Morant. Video below:

Suddenly, the hat is lucky. That’s sports! It doesn’t mean anything until it means everything. You’re rooting for laundry all the way up until you decide to imbue it with some sense of meaning yourself. A hat is a hat. It’s unlucky and then lucky.

The New York Knicks are in the NBA Finals. Their opponent, the San Antonio Spurs, employ Victor Wembanyama, a man aptly described as an alien, listed at 7’4” and likely well taller than that, with the athleticism of a small guard. The Knicks are a team very much of this earth, each player with their own easily perceptible set of flaws, and yet all rowing together to create something that has looked beautiful. Who knows if that will continue or if they will prevail.

The hat during better times, as the Knicks punched their ticket to the Finals.

But walk a few blocks around New York right now and tell me you can’t feel it. I’ve got people I barely know texting me about the team, basketball fans of rivals trying to get in on the action. When baseball extends into colder weather months, it’s frayed nerves. It’s looking through slits in your fingers at an unreliable reliever. When basketball makes it to the summer, when kids are imitating Jalen Brunson on every hardtop street corner court, it is the most alive the best city in the world ever feels.

The Brunson family has an oft-repeated phrase: “the magic is in the work.” For him, it means success comes from practice. For his city, it can mean something slightly different — the enchantment is in the journey. The joy is in the getting there. Now, we’ve just got to do it four more times.

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When I’m not biting off my fingernails or screaming with/at strangers, here’s a couple of big things I’ve been working on lately:

How Freaked Out Should Silicon Valley Be by Pope Leo?

Illustration by Lauren Bulbin for POLITICO Magazine

When the Pope released his long-awaited encyclical on artificial intelligence, one phrase in particular caught my eye: “Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.” It’s a truism easily exportable to Washington, to Silicon Valley and to the Vatican itself: no one is ever neutral. By taking a position here, Pope Leo XIV inserted himself into growing social and political debates around the issue. I took a look at how all of these places are interacting with one another, and how the missive makes things complicated for politicians back here in America.

Silicon Valley Wants to Put a Chip in Your Brain

Illustration by Claudia Hellmuth for POLITICO Magazine

Transhumanism, or the merger of humans and AI systems, or whatever you want to call it on a given day, is sweeping through Silicon Valley. I talked to a lot of people for this piece who have the genuine belief that they are working on building the next iteration of our species. I also spoke with folks who don’t want those builders to be able to easily access our most private information — our brain data. It’s a fight about policy, but also one over the future of humanity.

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Reading and Watching

For more Knicks content:

• Vinson Cunningham on his own Knicks fandom.

• Matt Flegenheimer on what happens to the city when the Knicks are good.

• Spike Lee on “fun city” and what it means to be a New Yorker.

• (The pseudonymous) ock sportello on the bridge & tunnel of it all, and how the other tri state area basketball team made him the way he is.

Otherwise:

• ‘I thought I had my future wife’: The Florida woman catfishing America’s political class by Daniel Han in POLITICO. An absolutely wild story about political honeypotting.

• Gianni’s Game by Andrew Rice in New York Magazine. Fun long read on the Gianni Infantino/Trump relationship ahead of the World Cup.

• Hard Rain by Wyatt Williams in Harper’s Magazine. On manipulating the weather — in a Godly way.

• Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass by Jasmine Sun in The New York Times. A provocative, bracing look at the people who think they’re building a world that will subject most everyone to an AI-fueled “underclass.”

• ‘Perfection’ by Vincenzo Latronico. Everyone I know loved this but I found it kind of slight and uninspired.

• ‘The New York Trilogy’ by Paul Auster. I’m a sucker for a fun detective novel.

• FRANCES HA (2012) at the Angelika. The perfect film.

• THE STRANGER (2025) also at the Angelika. Not the perfect film. Everyone looking very beautiful though.

• THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2 (2026). Magazines, and movies about them, were doing better in 2006.

• The first three episodes of ‘Homeland’ on flights to and from New Mexico. I watched this with my parents when it came out and honestly I had forgotten how much fun the first season is because of how bad it gets eventually.