The night that sports began shutting down was the night that the United States began shutting down. On March 11, 2020, an announcer at the Oklahoma City Thunder’s home arena told fans just before tip-off that the evening’s game had been postponed. Within an hour, the visiting Utah Jazz revealed that a player—soon identified as the center Rudy Gobert—had tested positive for COVID-19, and the NBA also declared that it was indefinitely suspending the season. Suddenly, Americans were forced to accept that the coronavirus pandemic was going to completely disrupt everyday life.
Although the NBA eventually resumed its season by creating a playoff bubble, and other professional and college leagues figured out a way to return in some form, the sports world is still struggling for normalcy nearly a year after widespread shutdowns began and fans turned their attention to matters of life and death.
As the pandemic dragged on, the leagues, universities, pro franchises, and other entities that profit from a multibillion-dollar sports economy made a push for games to return. But these efforts also reflected a working assumption that the mere presence of sports would provide comfort, and perhaps a welcome distraction, for people who wanted to escape the horrors of the pandemic, at least momentarily.
In 2016, I interviewed an entrepreneur named Sean who had co-founded a small technology startup based in London. As with many organizations at that time, Sean and his team relied on e-mail as their primary collaboration tool. “We used to have our Gmail constantly opened,” he said. Then they heard about a slick new instant-messenger service named Slack that promised to streamline office communication: “There was this hype, so we decided to try it.” Once the team switched to the tool, the rate of back-and-forth messaging intensified, eventually reaching a stressful peak when a demanding client insisted on the ability to directly communicate with Sean’s employees using Slack. The team soon burned out, and two engineers quit. In desperation, Sean moved the company off Slack. When I spoke with him, some time had passed since this incident, but the memory of the service’s omnipresent notification ping remained strong. “I hear that sound, it gives me the shivers,” he said.
I thought about Sean when I heard about Salesforce’s proposed acquisition of Slack for close to twenty-eight billion dollars. From a financial perspective, the deal probably makes sense. Sean’s company was one of many to embrace this platform when it arrived on the knowledge-work scene. Today, Slack has millions of users and reported more than six hundred million dollars in revenue for the last fiscal year. The shift toward remote work during the pandemic only reinforces the company’s value to the marketplace. But a lot of us share Sean’s fatigue with Slack. Writing in The New Republic, Timothy Noah laments that the platform transformed the American workplace into a “dystopian micro-Twitterverse,” while the technology journalist Casey Newton tweeted, “Salesforce is paying $28 billion for an app that people shut down when they need to get things done.” Slack is both absolutely necessary and absolutely aggravating; we rely on it, but we also can’t stand it. To dismiss this confused reaction as the usual grumbling about new forms of communication, however, would be a mistake. A closer look at Slack reveals an underlying dynamic with potential economic ramifications that make twenty-eight billion dollars seem paltry.
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Slack is both absolutely necessary and absolutely aggravating: we rely on it, but we also can’t stand it. Photograph from Panther Media GmbH / Alamy
On Thursday, July 11, 2019, without a dollar in his pocket, Anthony Estes flew from Charlotte to Las Vegas for a basketball tryout. He didn’t have a place to stay in Vegas, but then he hadn’t had one in Charlotte either, so “what difference does it make,” he thought to himself, “the street is the street.”
Estes was 26 years old and since his freshman year in high school, he hadn’t played longer than a single season for any one team or coach. Shuttling between Long Island, Washington DC, and North Carolina, he grew from a gangly kid into a 6’6, 220lb force of nature. Scouts marveled at his potential—“The sky is the limit,” one recruiting service touted—but Estes lacked the consistent adult presence in his life to help him reach it. He ended up playing one year of Division 1 at North Carolina A&T, then bounced around the junior college ranks before landing behind bars a few times.
Now he was homeless.
The tryout in Vegas was the three-day “TBL Pro International Exposure Event,” hosted by a nascent pro circuit called The Basketball League. The stated mission of TBL is to help unheralded players gain a foothold in the slippery underworld of pro basketball: Find an agent, impress a scout, and grind their way up the food chain, to a team overseas or maybe, if all goes right, a shot at the G League, the NBA’s official development arm.
Maipo is a stratovolcano in the Andes, lying on the border between Argentina and Chile. It is located 90 km (56 mi) south of Tupungato and about 100 km (62 mi) southeast of Santiago. It has a symmetrical, conical volcanic shape, and is among the southernmost 5,000-meter peaks in the Andes.
Maipo is located within the Diamante caldera, a feature measuring 15 km by 20 km that is about half a million years old. It rises about 1,900 m (6,230 ft) above the floor of the caldera. Immediately to the east of the peak, on the eastern side of the caldera floor, is Laguna del Diamante, a lake that formed when lava flows blocked drainage channels from the caldera in 1826. The Diamante Caldera erupted 450 cubic kilometers (108 cu mi) of tephra, 450 ka.
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An image from Maipo volcano from the Mendoza region of Argentina
Even though the presidential election is over, we’re still doomscrolling through gloomy news about the coronavirus surge. The rest of your daily routine is probably something like mine while stuck at home in the pandemic: Divided among streaming movies on Netflix, watching home improvement videos on YouTube, and playing video games. All of these activities involve staring at a screen.
There has to be more to life than this. With the holiday season upon us, now is a good time to take a breather and consider a digital detox.
No, that doesn’t mean quitting the internet cold turkey. No one would expect that from us right now. Think of it as going on a diet and replacing bad habits with healthier ones to give our weary eyes some much-needed downtime from tech.
“There’s lots of great things to do online, but moderation is often the best rule for life, and it’s no different when it comes to screens,” said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and the author of “iGen,” a book about younger generations growing up in the smartphone era.
Something strange was in the air at the Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. It wasn’t just that deadlines loomed—that was typical. A shareholders meeting was just around the corner, which never brightened the mood, but that wasn’t it, either. Tinker Hatfield Jr., a 35-year-old sneaker designer, couldn’t quite put his finger on it. His boss, Nike’s creative director, and lead shoe designer, Peter Moore, typically blasted music in his office while he sketched new ideas for shoes. But this summer morning in 1987, the music wasn’t playing.
A few weeks prior, Rob Strasser, Nike’s vice president, suddenly handed in his resignation. Nobody had seen it coming. Strasser was an industry veteran who’d spent nearly two decades as Phil Knight’s marketing guru. He’d become a local legend, “the man who saved Nike.” In three years, he’d turned the company’s fortunes around by signing Michael Jordan to the most high-profile and successful athlete endorsement deal in history. Soon, Jordan’s contract would be coming up for renegotiation. Wherever Strasser was about to go, he seemed poised to take Jordan with him.
Jack Dorsey doesn’t eat anything in the morning. Instead, he meditates for two hours, takes an ice bath, and drinks a lot of water. He doesn’t eat anything for lunch, either. After subsisting on water all day, Dorsey consumes a dinner of proteins, greens, and mixed berries between 6:30-8:30pm, as the Twitter CEO explained on the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast in April 2019.
If Dorsey were a woman, we might call this disordered eating. But because he’s a man—and a powerful one in the tech industry—we call it “optimizing.”
For decades, women, especially those in the public eye, bore the brunt of unrealistic beauty standards, which caused many to develop or exacerbated unhealthy relationships with food. Actress and Goop founder Gwenyth Paltrow reportedly ate 300 calories a day during a January 2018 detox regimen; reality TV star Nicole Richie admitted that she “liv[es] on a diet of sunflower seeds, celery juice, and chewing gum.” Just this week, Today Show hosts Jenna Bush Hager and Hoda Kotb weighed themselves on live television after spending a week only eating between 10am and 6pm, with the intention of losing weight and improving “brain health, and energy and skin.”
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Jack Dorsey has been a vocal proponent of intermittent fasting. Photo by David Becker/Getty Images
In the end, the Houston Rockets didn’t get the blue-chip young player they boasted they would receive in return for James Harden — the second-greatest player in franchise history, behind only Hakeem Olajuwon, and one of the league’s all-time best scorers.
Victor Oladipo, acquired in exchange for Caris LeVert as part of this monstrosity, does not quite qualify. Oladipo is almost 29, two years, and one major leg injury removed from his only All-NBA season. He has looked more like his old self this season; he is getting to the rim at a pre-injury level. But he also is eligible for free agency this summer, when there will be oodles more cap space than available stars.
The windmills are an iconic feature of the Greek island of the Mykonos.The island is one of the Cyclades islands, which neighbour Delos in the Aegean Sea. The windmills can be seen from every point of the village of Mykonos, the island’s principal village, which is frequently called the Chora (which translates to “Country” in Greek, but refers to an island’s “Town”) on Greek islands. The windmills are the first thing seen when coming into the harbour of Alefkandra, as they stand on a hill overlooking the area. Most windmills face towards the North where the island’s climate sources its strongest winds over the largest part of the year. There are currently 16 windmills on Mykonos of which seven are positioned on the landmark hill in Chora. Most of them were built by the Venetians in the 16th century, but their construction continued into the early 20th century. They were primarily used to mill wheat. They were an important source of income for the inhabitants. Their use gradually declined until they ceased production in the middle of the 20th century. The architecture of each of them is similar, all have a round shape, white colour and a pointed roof and very small windows. Such windmills are found in almost all Cyclades islands. One of these windmills has been transformed into a museum. The whole village of Chora and part of the harbour are visible from this point.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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Photo by Rick Stewart
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James' World 2 