Kobe vs MJ

"One of the biggest differences between the two stars from my perspective was Michael's superior skills as a leader," Jackson writes. "Though at times he could be hard on his teammates, Michael was masterful at controlling the emotional climate of the team with the power of his presence.  Kobe had a long way to go before he could make that claim. He talked a good game, but he'd yet to experience the cold truth of leadership in his bones, as Michael had in his bones."

“One of the biggest differences between the two stars from my perspective was Michael's superior skills as a leader. Though at times he could be hard on his teammates, Michael was masterful at controlling the emotional climate of the team with the power of his presence. Kobe had a long way to go before he could make that claim. He talked a good game, but he'd yet to experience the cold truth of leadership in his bones, as Michael had in his bones.”

"No question, Michael was a tougher, more intimidating defender," Jackson writes. "He could break through virtually any screen and shut down almost any player with his intense, laser-focused style of defense."

Those are excerpts from Phil Jackson's new book Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success, coming out Tuesday, ​in which he compares Kobe Bryant to Michael Jordan.

​This bit was especially revealing.

Jackson also revealed that the sexual assault charges levied against Bryant in 2003 temporarily clouded his outlook of the Lakers star. The situation "cracked open an old wound" because Jackson's daughter Brooke had been sexually assaulted by an athlete in college.

"The Kobe incident triggered all my unprocessed anger and tainted my perception of him. ... It distorted my view of Kobe throughout the 2003-04 season," Jackson writes. "No matter what I did to extinguish it, the anger kept smoldering in the background."

I am definitely going to pick up that book. Too bad Phil Jackson hasn't coached more of our generation's leading players. I'd love his insight into, say, Lebron James or Tim Duncan.

​

The Americans

My favorite new TV show this season was The Americans. It took me a bit of time to fully embrace the show, though.​

Halfway through the season, I was hung up on how Philip and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth, didn't really seem credible in their loyalty to mother Russia. This was Keri Russell, for god's sake, how could she turn against the U.S.​? She doesn't even look the slightest bit Russian.

[Yes, they're supposed to be able to blend into the U.S., that is the point of being a spy, but All-American Keri Russell is not a species native to Russian soil, especially as compared to the much more Russian faces seen at the Soviet embassy in the show.]​

​But the best TV shows, the ones that rise above being high end soap operas, are ones that have a larger point to make, and the longer the season ran, the more the show's casting works in its favor. What are national loyalties, after all, than arbitrary "us versus them" distinctions implanted in us by chance and circumstance?

What better way to illustrate that by having an American sweetheart playing a Russian mole? In one life, born in the United States, Keri Russell would be Felicity Porter. In another life, born in Russia, she became Nadezhda, a KGB agent. How unaware we all are of the group affiliations we subscribe to purely because they were the ones most available to us in formative years of our lives.

That Elizabeth and Philip are playing the role of husband and wife extends this theme out beyond spy games to the very household institution of marriage.​ When Elizabeth attends the marriage of Philip to Martha Hanson, one of his informants, she asks Philip, after the wedding, if their marriage might have been different had they actually had a real wedding. In asking that, she cuts to the heart of the power of ritual.

That their fake marriage initially seems stronger than ​the actual marriage of Stan (Noah Emmerich) and Sandra Beeman, their neighbors (one of which happens to be an FBI agent hot on their trail), is a wry comment on the entire institution. Elizabeth and Philip had no choice in their marriage early on, it was their cover, and they had to make it work, despite both of them having been attracted to other people earlier in their lives.

Stan and Sandra went into ​their marriage with different expectations, romantic ones, and the show is rather harsh about the sustainability of a relationship centered around such notions. When Elizabeth and Philip start to see their relationship strained, what seems to draw them back towards each other is not any abstract ideal of romance but instead a pragmatic life and death dependence. It's easy to love someone when they're literally saving your life on a regular basis.

As with Mad Men, the audience knows how the plot at large turns out since The Americans is set during a Cold War that ended long ago. But what we're curious about is not that larger context but the smaller scale drama of Elizabeth and Philip's relationship. Of all the backdrops for a show about marriage, the Cold War must rank among the most unlikely.

Don't call me surely

When you’re reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for “surely” in the document, and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word “surely” is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument. Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about. (If the author were really sure all the readers would agree, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning.) Being at the edge, the author has had to make a judgment call about whether or not to attempt to demonstrate the point at issue, or provide evidence for it, and—because life is short—has decided in favor of bald assertion, with the presumably well-grounded anticipation of agreement. Just the sort of place to find an ill-examined “truism” that isn’t true!

An excerpt from Daniel Dennett's book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.

Jonathan Rauch's Denial

I am always bitterly amused when I hear people say that homosexuality is a choice. Even many otherwise thoughtful people maintain that the homosexual is a heterosexual who perversely ignores, or at least somehow represses, his natural cravings. I say "otherwise thoughtful" because I know of no position which collapses more quickly, under even a moment's examination, than this one.

Never mind the obvious question of why anyone would choose homosexuality, with all the inconveniences and confusions and difficulties it poses.

Let us suppose, for argument's sake, that there are people who declare: "Actually, I would prefer to be (probably) childless, to face a hundred kinds of social difficulties, to disappoint and maybe horrify my parents, to risk alienating myself from some of my friends and many of my peers, to be an object of disgust and scorn to many millions of people. Sure. Sounds fun."

​From an excerpt of Jonathan Rauch's Denial, an Amazon Kindle Single.

Timely if you've read any representative portion of the comment section on the Sports Illustrated article in which Jason Collins announced he was gay. I can't find the comment section for that piece anymore, perhaps Sports Illustrated took them down, but many argued the article proved Collins had chosen to be gay.

Comments sections, for the most part, are sobering reminders of what people will write when they can hide behind the cloak of anonymity, but Rauch, who is gay himself, provides a very powerful argument against the idea that being gay is a conscious choice.  From an incentive standpoint, it's not a choice anyone would opt for in a rational actor model.