Two points make a straight line, as everyone knows, so I'm going to take this and this as the start of a new trend investigating whenever someone or something really famous follows one random person on social media.
I like to think perhaps this is a pastime for the powerful and famous, just testing the extent of their power, like Superman flying over a city and using his heat vision to cook someone's hitherto raw steaks on a rooftop grill, just for kicks.
Even at his peak, Kobe Bryant made greatness look grueling. He had every gift, every natural blessing — but he made having them look hard. He could do whatever he wanted on a basketball court, but being in charge of that kind of skill was exhausting, and the strain showed. It was as if he had to keep the Amazon flowing with nothing but his own force of will. The scorn he directed at other players — at rivals, at his own teammates — always seemed to come from a place not just of superior ability but also of superior suffering. You call that a river? He defined himself through his talent, but in the sense of someone who takes pride in carrying a heavy burden without mislaying it. He had contempt for anyone whose burden was smaller, or who didn’t take it as seriously; this was why, after he’d made something of himself, he couldn’t go on tolerating Shaq. His stringency and his ferocious responsibility to himself left him sealed inside a closed circle. People wanted to be like Mike. When Kobe came around, they wanted to get the hell out of his way.
He wasn’t humorless, nor was he above showboating. But where Michael Jordan’s little backpedaling shrug was a gift to the crowd, a way of inviting fans in, Kobe’s smirk was a provocation. Jordan knew instinctively that the final inch of dominance was earned through a certain lightness, and he cultivated it as ruthlessly as his jump shot — the tongue-waggling, the pranks at the All-Star Game, the celebrations where he wept unself-consciously or seemed to float in the air. It was theater, but it completed the aura of invincibility; here was an athlete whose supremacy was so unshakable that he could afford to act unconcerned about it. Kobe could never be unconcerned, because unlike Jordan (or LeBron, or Shaq, or Kevin Durant, or Allen Iverson), he didn’t inhabit his talent so much as angrily oversee it. His smile had a way of making moments feel more tense, of ratcheting the stakes to a level at which only he could cope with them. It wasn’t in him to be generous. If you’re Superman, you can have fun flying; if you’re the CEO of Exxon, oil is never a joke.
Those are the opening two paragraphs to a magnificent piece on Kobe Bryant by Brian Phillips. This was a money quote to me: “He made misanthropy look like a key ingredient in a team sport.” Not a single teammate invited to his wedding. Not a one.
I love that we have so much more data with which to understand the value of basketball players in a sport like basketball which has so many interaction effects (Kirk Goldsberry's piece is an exemplar of the form). But Phillips' piece is a type of piece I hope we don't lose in sportswriting, a form of exploration of the fans' emotional relationship with particular players.
Steven Soderbergh posted a list of everything he read and watched in 2014. His media diet is as diverse as his artistic output, and no day epitomizes that as much as Dec. 4.
Reading his list, I wished I had kept such a log myself. Is there a website or app that makes that easy? I suppose Letterboxd could have been that for movies, but apparently I haven't been using the Diary function correctly because it shows my last activity as having occurred years ago.
It's still surprising to me that there isn't a better website for tracking books I've read. I tried Goodreads, I was really hoping it would be the one, especially since Amazon bought it and most of my reading is on the Kindle, but that site is an eyesore and a mess. That Amazon hasn't built a great social network for reading, especially with their dominant market share of ebooks and their ability to track highlights across the community, is such a wasted opportunity.
Anyone have any alternatives to suggest?
Does retweeting your own praise make you a monster? I know what Betteridge has to say about headlines, but if by monster you mean narcissist, then yes? And on the subject of narcissism, I find it rich that people take to Twitter to complain about the narcissism of selfie sticks and then you click through to their profile and they've tweeted something like 12,000 times. Okay.
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A definitive history of fleek. Just when I was starting to work it into my language, it becomes passé. Damn you iHop.
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The best rapper alive for every year since 1979 according to Complex. The first woman appears in the most recent year, 2014. Someone had to go make this list so everyone could post their outrage in the comment thread, and Complex was the one to accept this burden on behalf of humanity.
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Is this the best board game on the planet? I have not played board games in years, but I'm going to get this and see if it rekindles my interest.
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Maybe being physically cold actually does make you more susceptible to catching a cold. Grandma and mom were right, as usual.
Really great piece at Vox on how you can over-control tests to the point where the thing you're trying to detect is controlled away in a misleading way.
Statistical controls are great! Except when they're not.
The problem with controls is that it's often hard to tell the difference between a variable that's obscuring the thing you're studying and a variable that is the thing you're studying.
An example is research around the gender wage gap, which tries to control for so many things that it ends up controlling for the thing it's trying to measure. As my colleague Matt Yglesias wrote:
The commonly cited statistic that American women suffer from a 23 percent wage gap through which they make just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns is much too simplistic. On the other hand, the frequently heard conservative counterargument that we should subject this raw wage gap to a massive list of statistical controls until it nearly vanishes is an enormous oversimplification in the opposite direction. After all, for many purposes gender is itself a standard demographic control to add to studies — and when you control for gender the wage gap disappears entirely!
"The question to ask about the various statistical controls that can be applied to shrink the gender gap is what are they actually telling us," he continued. "The answer, I think, is that it's telling how the wage gap works."
It's a difficult chicken and egg problem, very relevant to studies of racism in police enforcement.
Imagine applying these controls to society itself. We still have race, but people of all races have the same amount of money, and they live in the same kinds of neighborhoods, and they do the same kinds of drugs, and they even drive the same kinds of cars. That society would be a lot less racist. But part of the reason we're so far from that society is racism. Discrimination perpetuates itself.
In some ways, what's amazing about many of these studies is that they show a racial effect even after controlling for so much of racism's work. They show that racism exists even in our control society — the one with equality of income, and education, and neighborhood, and car choices. The one where we've wiped out most every difference but pigment. The one where we've left ourselves no excuses for our prejudice. It is remarkable how much discrimination can survive.
Read through Harold Pollack's emailed thoughts at the bottom of the piece.