Texans, it turns out, don't know their U.S. history. A new study from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation found 63 percent of respondents in Texas failed a quiz based on questions from the U.S. citizenship examination.

A good amount of people abandon their New Year's resolutions by February, but Fox News' Pete Hegseth? He's just getting started.

On Sunday morning's episode of Fox & Friends, Hegseth, for some reason, came *clean* about his resolution on air, and the result was both unexpected and absolutely disgusting.

"My 2019 resolution is to say things on-air that I say off-air. I don't think I've washed my hands for 10 years," Hegseth admitted, without being asked.

More about Fox News, Hygiene, Fox And Friends, Culture, and Media Industry

“I am often written but rarely read. You spend hours changing me, but I am always the same. I discuss all your accomplishments, but make you feel like a failure. What am I?”
A Cover Letter

“I am filled with experts, but say nothing useful. I exist to help, yet offer only stress. I am right next to you, but impossible to find. What am I?”
The Office of Career Services

“I am the most difficult thing you have ever done, yet I am the product of laziness. I am the most valuable thing you own, yet I am worthless. What am I?”
A Degree in English Literature

“I am the most important thing you can learn, yet I am not taught in any class. I am the only way to get a job, but I have nothing to do with your ability to do a job. I am inevitably forced and awkward, yet must always seem relaxed and natural. What am I?”
Networking

“You must already have me in order to get me. I am almost always required but almost never actually needed. What am I?”
Previous Relevant Experience

“The people who need me don’t have me. The people who have me don’t need me. What am I?”
Paid Internship Opportunities

“I cannot be held, but I am constantly felt. I am the source of all your problems, but also the result of all your problems. What am I?”
Crippling Anxiety

“I am filled with impressive words, yet I say nothing impressive. What am I?”
Your Thesis

“I am both deathly terrifying and exceedingly boring. I am both a series of letters whose meaning is unimportant, and a number whose meaning will define the rest of your life. I include many games but am in no way fun. What am I?”
The LSAT

“You got me for free, but I am impossibly expensive. I was supposed to help you make money, but now I take away your money. You were told I would be temporary, but I will never go away. What am I?”
Student Loans

“I was only ever high before weed entered the picture. What am I?”
Your GPA

After 130 years, it can be hard to come up with new flavors, so the world's largest spice company is becoming the latest food producer to turn to artificial intelligence for help. From a report: McCormick -- the maker of Old Bay and other seasonings, spices and condiments -- hopes the technology can help it tantalize taste buds. It worked with IBM Research to build an AI system trained on decades worth of data about spices and flavors to come up with new flavor combinations. The Baltimore, Maryland-based company plans to bring its first batch of AI-assisted products to market later this year. The line of seasoning mixes, called One, for making one-dish meals, includes flavors such as Tuscan Chicken and Bourbon Pork Tenderloin. Hamed Faridi, McCormick's chief science officer, told CNN Business that using AI cuts down product development time, and that the company plans to use the technology to help develop all new products by the end of 2021.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phishing is clearly bad, but it’s not always easy to suss out a sketchy email from a legitimate one. To help, Alphabet subsidiary Jigsaw has made a quiz with Google to teach people how to better spot malicious emails.

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Wall Street Journal reports Cohen paid John Gauger to set up WomenForCohen account to promote him as a ‘pit bull’ and ‘sex symbol’

Michael Cohen is a sexy pit bull terrier with a fantastic smile, according to a Twitter account that it turns out was started at the instruction of one Michael Cohen.

Cohen – Donald Trump’s former friend, attorney and fixer, now flipper – hired an IT firm called RedFinch Solutions to manipulate an online CNBC poll about the country’s top 100 leaders, and later to run a sock-puppet Twitter account, @womenforcohen, to promote his sexual desirability, the Wall Street Journal reports.

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Huddle up, men. I don’t know if you’ve seen the new Gillette commercial, but our worst fears have been realized. Radical feminists have mobilized and — under cover of darkness — overthrown the Procter & Gamble marketing department. We don’t yet know what tactics they employed or how they gained entry to the building, but our reconnaissance suggests they may have flashed their boobs at some point.

I see your skeptical faces and let me assure you, the battle lines have been drawn. While we were sleeping comfortably in our beds, these men-hating she-Satans have infiltrated male grooming, the last bastion of masculine identity. Where once our preferred brands served us visuals of flannel-clad men triumphantly holding dead fish, we’re now being subjected to images of male facsimiles holding hands with children and breaking up wrestling matches. We will not stand for this level of sissification.

If I may be so bold to ask, how dare they? How dare they suggest that men are anything less than perfect just the way we are? How dare they imply that there are some among us who might benefit from behaving more thoughtfully or with more compassion? Men don’t need advertisers butting into our lives, trying to dictate how we should look, feel and behave. We’re not women, okay?

This disgusting piece of virtue signaling propaganda is a direct attack on our entire gender, but more importantly, on each of us as individuals. Not all men are toxic. I’m not toxic. Brad’s not toxic. Frank’s not toxic. Bill’s not toxic. Pete’s not toxic. Steve is probably toxic, but he’s only like that because his bitch of an ex-wife won’t stop nagging him for child support payments. But Levi’s not toxic. Joe isn’t toxic. And that’s just the men in this room. I could go on and on.

Folks, here’s what we’re fighting for: the ability to continue doing the bare minimum. Just because some men agree that society has a problem with sexual harassment, bullying, and misogyny doesn’t mean all of us should be required to help correct it. Not all of us grope women or make sexually aggressive comments. Some of us just laugh about it afterwards! Why are we getting lumped in with everyone else? If one woman lied about being sexually assaulted, we wouldn’t immediately assume that all women were lying.

I mean, we would, but that’s a completely different story.

No, it’s time for men to stick together and toe the party line. If we admit there are some places where we, as a gender, might make improvements, what’s to stop humanity from demanding even more of us? If we disavow bullying, what’s to keep our wives from asking us to pick up our dirty socks or take out the trash or stop farting on them in bed? These are concessions we are unwilling to make and this is a slippery slope we’re navigating here.

I’ll tell you what, if Gillette wants to play like this, we’ll show them the worst a man can get. Forget boycotts — this calls for a full-scale man-cott of their complete product line. I’m talking razors, shaving cream, aftershave balm, and deodorant. By the time we’re finished not grooming ourselves, we’ll make our no-shave November beards look like a thirteen-year-old’s wispy-ass soul patch. We’ll fight fire with body odor and we will triumph!

It’s time to take up arms, men. Grab your phones and prepare your Twitter fingers for battle. We shall defend our toxic masculinity, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the internet, we shall fight on the message boards, we shall fight in the Reddits and in the sub-reddits, we shall fight in the comment section — we shall never surrender our right to not improve ourselves. We will defend our status quo to the death! I’ve slogged up this molehill and I’m prepared to die on it.

NEW YORK—As part of its effort to provide the most comprehensive reporting possible on the freshman congresswoman, Fox News announced Wednesday the debut of a new premium television channel that will offer continuous, around-the-clock updates on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). “For an extra $8.99 per month,…

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Gary Clark Jr. is fed up. That’s the first takeaway from his new single, “This Land,” which dropped with a music video on Thursday morning. The song opens with the words “paranoid and pissed off” and only gets more incendiary from there, accompanied by stunning visuals—of Confederate flags, of black children haunting a plantation landscape, of Clark himself in spaces built to be hostile toward black Americans—and the sort of righteous rage that Clark exudes with his voice, his guitar, his face. The second thing to take away from “This Land” is that Clark has something to say, and he’s fully in a position to say it. Clocking in at over six and a half minutes, “This Land” is perhaps the first truly great song…View Original Post

The post Gary Clark Jr.’s New Music Video, “This Land,” Is a Furious, Beautiful Statement appeared first on Texas Monthly.

A scathing takedown can be cathartic, thrill-inducing, or necessary—sometimes all at once. But with the collapse of monoculture and the rise of social media, the critiquing game has changed. Have reviews gotten harsher? Softer? Writers from Pitchfork, The New York Times, and others reflect.

“I’ll tell you a big life lesson,” John Krasinski enthused to The New York Times in early January, recalling the time his good buddy and fellow famous movie director Paul Thomas Anderson taught him to keep his lack of enthusiasm to himself.

Paul was over at my house, I think it was my 30th birthday party, and I had just seen a movie I didn’t love. I said to him over a drink, “It’s not a good movie,” and he so sweetly took me aside and said very quietly, “Don’t say that. Don’t say that it’s not a good movie. If it wasn’t for you, that’s fine, but in our business, we’ve all got to support each other.” The movie was very artsy, and he said, “You’ve got to support the big swing. If you put it out there that the movie’s not good, they won’t let us make more movies like that.”

A lovely and heartening sentiment, perhaps, when it’s the guy who did Phantom Thread counseling the guy who did A Quiet Place. “Dude, Paul Thomas Anderson is out there on the wall for us!” Krasinski continued. “He’s defending the value of the artistic experience. He’s so good that maybe you project onto him that he’s allowed to be snarky, but he’s the exact opposite: He wants to love everything because that’s why he got into moviemaking. And ever since then, I’ve never said that I hate a movie.”

Another way to get out there on the wall and defend the value of the artistic experience is to take the precise opposite approach. Roger Ebert, on the 1994 family comedy North: “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it.” The New York Times’ A.O. Scott on the 2008 Will Smith melodrama Seven Pounds: “Among the most transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made.” Every film critic in America, myself included, roughly paraphrased on 2018’s farcical mob biopic Gotti: “LMFAO.”

This sort of scorched-earth denunciation has proved itself useful and necessary (and memorable!) across every medium, including reviews of books of other people’s movie reviews. Renata Adler, on Pauline Kael’s 1980 collection When the Lights Go Down: “Line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” It works, increasingly, in the Peak TV era. Vulture’s Jen Chaney, on the tasteless 2018 Netflix satire Insatiable: “It turns out the show is not as bad as you imagined. It’s actually worse. Like, worse in ways that you can’t even anticipate.” And it perhaps works best of all in the uncouth and anarchic arena of rock criticism. Robert Christgau in 1972: “Another thing that interests me about the Eagles is that I hate them.” An unnamed reviewer on Spinal Tap’s early-’80s hard-rock opus Shark Sandwich: “Shit sandwich.” It is a proud, ever-evolving tradition. Pitchfork, in lieu of text to support a pseudonymous 0.0 review of Jet’s own 2006 hard-rock opus Shine On, instead simply posted first a GIF, then a YouTube video, of a monkey pissing in its own mouth.

An unapologetically mean review, too, is a big swing, and the ultimate weapon for passionate but principled critics who want to love everything but will not hesitate to really, really, really hate something. A truly vicious pan, a merciless slam, a full-scale ethering is born of a righteous fury that can transmute into pure joy. “The secret of the bad review is that you can get a lot of pleasure out of it,” A.O. Scott tells me, chatting via phone in late December. “It is a kind of a dopamine rush. First of all, editors—especially editors at The New York Times—love it. They love bad reviews. And they’re fun to do because they give you access to a lot of writerly tools that are fun to use. You can be funny. You can be clever. What you’re doing is, you’re demonstrating your superiority to a thing that you’re writing about.”

Which can be intoxicating, and for the sharpest-knived critic, a source of tremendous pride. “The first paragraph of my review of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor,” Scott says with a laugh, “if I can get to blow my own horn, is a classic to be studied in every How to Write a Negative Review class.” But “you can get too hooked on that feeling” of writing slam after slam, he warns. “They’re definitely more fun. But positive reviews—where you can make a case for something that you really feel enthusiastic about, and still write as well as you can—that’s a lot harder, and a lot more valuable.”

It is also, in the age of the Twitter Mob, safer. Scott knows this well: His excellent 2016 book Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth opens with the infamous tale of his politely skeptical NYT review of 2012’s The Avengers, and Avengers star Samuel L. Jackson’s disproportionately indignant response.

This potential for fearsome, mentions-ruining clapback was only magnified in 2018, which happily generated some of the harshest reviews in recent memory. In October, Pitchfork’s Jeremy D. Larson lambasted Anthem of the Peaceful Army, the full-length debut from the ludicrously Led Zeppelin–aping young rock band Greta Van Fleet. (Opening line: “Greta Van Fleet sound like they did weed exactly once, called the cops, and tried to record a Led Zeppelin album before they arrested themselves.”) This Larson tweet summarizes the resulting online conversation.

Later that month, fellow longtime critic Jeff Weiss, writing on behalf of The Washington Post, attended Post Malone’s inaugural Posty Fest in Dallas and did not care for it at all. (Opening lines: “Him? The most popular young artist in the most unpopular young nation is a rhinestone cowboy who looks like he crawled out of a primordial swamp of nacho cheese. Post Malone is a Halloween rental, a removable platinum grill, a Cubic Zirconium proposal on the jumbo screen of a last-place team.”) The result, as Weiss recounts now, was death threats, amid an avalanche of Twitter invective that included Post Malone’s own father referring to Weiss as “a petty little cuck.”

The film-review universe, meanwhile, is relatively more civilized lately, save the occasional gleeful mass beatdown visited upon the likes of Gotti or Fifty Shades Freed or the treacly Life Itself, which Scott himself described as “inadvertently hilarious.” As for television, in an overstuffed year more notable for its daunting quantity than any consensus as to any one show’s quality, Kyle Paoletta’s polarizing November essay for The Baffler took TV critics to task en masse for abandoning criticism in favor of pure cheerleading. “Left to their own devices,” he wrote, “our most prominent television critics seem solely interested in defining the best and the greatest, as determined by increasingly esoteric criteria.”

But Emily Nussbaum’s hard-nosed New Yorker takedown of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel last month suggests otherwise, a thorough and thoughtful disruption of that show’s general aura of universal praise, a valuable service Nussbaum also provided in 2014 when she punctured the awestruck bubble encasing True Detective Season 1. Still, for my money, the best, and meanest, and funniest TV review of the past few years remains Slate critic Willa Paskin’s “Excruciatingly Clear Plot Breakdown” of True Detective Season 2 in 2015, a riotously detailed explainer that doubled as a cry for help, or at least mercy. “As I was starting to do it,” Paskin recalls of that piece now, “it was very hard to organize the information.”

But in 2018, for pure vitriol, it was hard to beat Andrea Long Chu’s electrifying November Affidavit review of the Jill Soloway memoir She Wants It: Desire, Power, and Toppling the Patriarchy. “As a book about desire, power, or toppling the patriarchy,” the first graf concludes, “it is incompetent, defensive, and astonishingly clueless.”

People loved it. People wanted it. Who are Extremely Bad Reviews written for? What do they hope to accomplish? Are they spiteful acts of vengeance, or more principled demands for justice? Are outright slams more prevalent now, or more effective now, or both, or neither? The answers change with the medium, and the target, and the reviewer in question. Chu, for one, had compelling reasons to be so unsparing; with apologies to the unerringly supportive likes of Krasinski and PTA, the best and the meanest critics always do.

“Do not be critics, you people, I beg you,” wrote budding literary superstar Dave Eggers in a prickly 2000 email interview with The Harvard Advocate. He knew of which he begged:

I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.

“I just remember reading that,” Jeff Weiss tells me now, “and being like, ‘Honestly, you’re a contemptible hack.’”

What matters, to a professional critic, is sometimes saying no. Weiss’s Post Malone roast is a dazzling onslaught of one-liners, from “He looks like he got clubbed over the head by a cartoon peacock” to “He makes Macklemore look like Mac Dre.” It is based on long experience, not all of it wholly negative: Weiss notes that he cautiously liked Post Malone’s 2015 breakout hit, “White Iverson,” which got a very early semi-positive notice on his long-running online critical hub Passion of the Weiss. (He also realizes, midway through our phone conversation, that the coffee shop he’s sitting in is playing Post Malone.)

Less positively, he’d caught Post’s set at Coachella 2018: “‘The worst show I’ve ever seen’ is probably the most accurate statement.” But for the Washington Post piece, he showed up at Posty Fest in October willing to have his mind changed, if not fully blown. It didn’t go well.

But that, Weiss insists, is nothing personal. “No, no, I don’t care,” he says. “Post Malone is probably a nice guy. I don’t need criticism to enact vengeance on people. Nothing is personal in criticism. It’s art. You’re doing art. I think that’s this weird misunderstanding now, because everything has become this me, me, me, personal, like, this is my brain, this is my brand. All that bullshit. Criticism’s art and culture. That’s a thousands-of-years-old tradition. It’s one that’s probably broken down on the rocks right now, but like I said, I assume Post Malone is a pretty nice guy.”

You could hardly blame Post, of course, for what appeared to be his initial response, tweeted the same day the article ran.

But as the resulting online fan invective, much of it directed at Weiss personally, ramped up, Weiss says Post apologized over DM, and the two came to something of an understanding. “Judging from our interactions, he was a pretty sweet kid that was trying to write really great songs,” Weiss continues. “I don’t know. I know about me, I want to write books one day, and if someone really wrote a horrible, horrible review, I mean, yeah, would I want to murder them? Sure, no question. Would I poison their first-born child? Of course! But I would think about it, and maybe think [about] what I did wrong.”

Post Malone, naturally, is no stranger to bad reviews. Same with the Chainsmokers, and Florida Georgia Line, and latter-day Justin Timberlake, and Imagine Dragons, all wildly successful and vividly polarizing pop artists who do not, to Weiss’s mind, therefore qualify as easy targets undeserving of discouraging words. “I think that I honestly find that a repugnant take, that there are some artists that are too safe,” he says. “I wouldn’t even know what a hard target is. Is Drake a soft target? These are the most popular artists in the world. They matter whether we like it or not.”

Nor will even the harshest review endanger that. “I have no delusions about criticism changing the trajectory of an artist’s career,” Weiss says. “Post Malone was going to be rich and successful with or without that review. The soft-target thing, it really pisses me off, because I feel like I don’t see any negative reviews anymore. That’s why I think my and Jeremy’s things resonated. … There’s always been those things. Writers have written entire books devoted to hating other writers. I don’t know. The notion of a soft target is just like—yeah, we have Donald Trump as our president. That’s the softest target there is.”

Greta Van Fleet, in their short but already luridly fascinating career, have likewise attracted a great deal of attention and stoked a great deal of indignation. But Larson’s Pitchfork review, for all its finely honed mockery—“At least Zeppelin knew how to separate their sweet-lady-I’m-horny songs from their howling-about-literary-fantasy songs”—was careful to take the absurdity seriously, and cite other 21st-century artists, from Andrew W.K. to the Darkness, who’ve updated classic-rock tropes with more verve and personality.

“I think to show fans that I wasn’t just a hired assassin just out to take this band out from 500 yards away,” Larson tells me, “I wanted to show that, like, ‘Look, I’m experienced. I know these songs. I know this style.’ And then, yeah, the response I got, it was a lot of people being like, ‘You don’t understand.’ And I’m like, ‘Ah! I really do. I really did. I promise you I do.’”

Another common complaint about mean reviews is you didn’t give this a chance, the sense that a critic hits play or sinks into a theater seat or slinks through a festival gate with an operatic takedown already written. That certainly happens; precious few critics are never guilty of letting their assumptions overwhelm their opinions. But it’s also true that a piece of art that’s terrible in a genuinely memorable way can take awhile to sink in. “I think it actually kind of tumbled around a little bit,” Larson says of the Greta Van Fleet album. “I find that it’s really easy for me to tell whether a record is mediocre right away. Like, I can kinda know, it’s like, ‘Oh, this isn’t doing anything special.’ But then when it’s something bad, you’re worried that you’re going to galaxy-brain it, and maybe this is really good. And so you’re kind of playing against being too cold. It’s like, ‘Well, it’s something that I find really repulsive right away. Now I have all of these feelings about it.’ And donating critical value to all of these feelings is not easy, I think.”

Pitchfork, in its 20-plus years as the chaotic focal point of rock criticism, has itself amassed a reputation for a singular sort of gonzo hostility. Devoted readers can likely reel off a half-dozen infamous 0.0 reviews and the calamity they wrought on those artists’ careers. The writing back then was often wilder, and loopier, and, sure, meaner.

“I think there’s a recognition of Old Pitchfork and New Pitchfork,” Larson says. “And there isn’t really a line there, but you know it when you see it. Like the Jet review, or the old Tool Lateralus review, which was written from the point of view of, like, a mega-Tool fan. Which I still think is really funny. That’s a form of criticism that is different from what Pitchfork is doing now. So, you know, I always foolishly start out a draft by being way too clever, and then eventually, you’re just like, ‘Ah, just write a normal thing,’ you know? And it always ends up better.”

What this means in practice is that the Chainsmokers aren’t liable to get a glowing review from Pitchfork in 2019, but they’ll get a fair hearing in a tone that’s a little less barbaric and surreal and detached. “I can’t really speak to if it was like a meeting one day where it was like, ‘No more monkey-piss GIFs,’ you know?” Larson says. “But I think it’s just sort of a, ‘Well, did we accomplish all we needed to accomplish with doing criticism like this? Is there a way we can challenge ourselves more?’ … I don’t think there was a meeting of the High Council of Pitchfork Reviews being like, ‘We are done having fun now.’ I think we sort of realized it’s a strong spice. You know? You gotta use it a little more conservatively.” And one way to hit harder is to lash out less often, and for that matter to hit smarter, not harder in the first place.

One common denominator in many of Pitchfork’s most caustic reviews, from Travis Morrison to Liz Phair to Black Kids, is the idea that only an artist the site used to love can inspire such visceral hatred. There’s a not-mad-just-disappointed air; there is, artistically speaking, almost a moral dimension.

This feeling is only heightened when there’s an actual moral dimension—when real-world values are at stake. The ferocity that goes along with that sort of argument can be thrilling, but critics invariably get much better at knowing how (and when) to channel that anger as they get older. And they learn to do that sparingly. “I think that this is often true, that the negative reviews—the sort of vicious, stinging pan—you’re used to doing, is more gratifying to do, and feels more justified when you’re younger,” A.O. Scott says. “Partly because you feel like you have something to prove against the world, and also, you do want that kind of revenge. And I did, when I was starting out as a film critic, I did take bad movies as a kind of personal affront—like, ‘How dare you put this piece of shit out in front of me? And expect me to watch it, and take my time?’ But, over time, I think that I saved the really harsh negative reviews for something that I think is a greater betrayal than that.”

From Scott’s perspective, there are, unfortunately, very recent examples. “It’s not just, ‘This isn’t a very good movie,’ but something cynical or meretricious—especially, something that kinda abuses the good faith of the audience at play,” Scott continues. “It’s kind of a moral lapse, almost, on the part of the movie. I really did not like Bohemian Rhapsody. And not just because it was dumb in the way that it was dumb, or kind of a clumpy biopic in the way that it was, but in the way that it took a figure that a lot of people loved and cared about, and just sort of didn’t do right by him or by the fans. I mean, a lot of people loved it anyway. But that just felt like something more than just not succeeding at making the movie as interesting as it should’ve been.”

That sense of purpose drives Andrea Long Chu’s review of She Wants It, the memoir from Transparent showrunner Jill Soloway that grapples awkwardly with both the accounts that Transparent star Jeffrey Tambor committed sexual harassment (which led to his exit from the show) and Soloway’s own decision to come out as nonbinary. As Chu writes:

This is a story about someone who responds to criticisms of her TV show by taking “a glamping writers’ retreat” to El Capitan: “We had a shaman come. She did magic incantations as we lay on the floor of a yurt.” It is an unwitting portrait of a rich Los Angeles creative type with a child’s knack for exploiting the sympathies of others, a person whose deep fear of doing the wrong thing was regularly outmatched by an even deeper distaste for doing the right thing. The nicest thing that can be said of this oblivious, self-absorbed, unimportant book is that it proves, once and for all, that trans people are fully, regrettably human.

“It makes it possible to bring a kind of moral clarity to a piece like that,” Chu tells me. “Like, obviously, there is the pleasure of dunking—I mean, I would be lying if I said that wasn’t part of it, but absolutely. The fact that there’s bad writing is bad, and as a critic I feel totally empowered to get really angry about bad writing, because it’s sort of my province. But there were parts of the book that were really attempting to exculpate Soloway, while actually doing the opposite.”

What elevated this particular review, then, from a satisfying artistic takedown to a viral phenomenon was Chu’s larger point of asserting that personal identity alone does not make Soloway’s thoughts or art important, or for that matter even tolerable. “It’s pernicious and condescending, because it’s a different kind of dehumanization when you assume that the aesthetic contribution of a minority group is simply existing, as opposed to actually producing things of interest and value,” Chu says. “It’s important for me not just as a critic, but as a sort of public trans person for better or worse to be able to say, ‘No, actually, extending humanity to historically dehumanized people means that when they make shitty art, you tell them they have made shitty art,’ you know? Like, that is actually where dignity lies.”

Transparent was far easier to grapple with critically when it was merely one prominent TV show out of what seemed to be 10,000 prominent TV shows. Pure volume and a near-total lack of critical or audience consensus are the guiding principles of TV criticism now, which affects not so much the shows critics hate as the shows critics regard as worth hating.

Slate’s Willa Paskin does not necessarily consider herself a harsh reviewer—“Someone once told me I was ‘unimpressed,’ in a complimentary way”—but she can still appreciate the joys of reviewing something harshly. “The thing about pans is that they’re very invigorating,” she tells me. “Any time you feel strongly—if you love something or you hate something—is a rarity, and so it’s really fun to write about. And when you hate something, you almost get to be freer. When you love it you have to explain it—it’s actually harder. It can be much harder. Explaining why you hate something is the easiest thing. So it’s the most fun thing to write. I mean, the simplest.”

And so her 2015 pan of the medieval FX dirge The Bastard Executioner radiates a nauseating sort of delight: “The Bastard Executioner is monstrously fetid, a mound of gorgonzola stuffed into a dead catfish’s gullet, smoked in sulfur, doused with heavy cream and left to rot for weeks inside a port-o-potty in full sun.” But the question now, less than four years later, is whether a show like that would deserve her attention, let alone her enmity.

“Because of the amount of TV, for something to be worth a pan, it’s harder,” she says. “When there were less shows, if it was on a network, maybe that was worth panning, just because of that. But now, it’s like, I’m gonna take this nothing show and shit all over it? I’ll just skip it. So if it’s something like The Romanoffs, that rises to the occasion, where I can be like, ‘Oh, I have nothing good to say about this, and I can say nothing good about it. It’s worth it.’ But if not, if you really hated something—like now, if The Bastard Executioner came out now, I just would never write about it. Why would I have written about that show? Of course it’s not for me, it’s like a minor offering from FX. There’s no way.”

There is a different but just as pervasive sense of futility to even those few shows everyone’s actually watching. The final season of Game of Thrones will inspire tens of millions of words of content, but is it beyond the point of inspiring provocative, effective criticism? And will the final season, as a stand-alone piece of entertainment, actually be “good”?

“Whether it’s good or not is not actually important,” Paskin says. “It’s not the question we’re litigating every time we talk about Game of Thrones. … We already know how it’s ending. Everyone’s gonna be all very excited about it, even as they’re shitting on it. And everyone’s writing like 10,000 recaps of things, and then there’ll be the finale. And then there’ll be like 100 pieces about how, whatever the finale is, whether it’s a good or bad finale. It’s kind of irrelevant. Then there’ll be 100 billion more pieces, and 100 million more things to come. I mean, it’s just so irrelevant. Game of Thrones is a thing to me that, it just feels like it’s so irrelevant what any person has to say about it. And it just gets great traffic.”

The calculus of when something is too powerful to be criticized or not powerful enough—or a critic is too emotionally invested to be impartial or not emotionally invested enough—continues to vex criticism as a whole, and complicate the question as to how criticism, in the past several decades, has or hasn’t changed. Reviews aren’t necessarily meaner now, nor are there necessarily more of them, but the social-media outrage that necessarily follows a righteous takedown might convince you otherwise. Is the critical conversation meaner now? Possibly. Is it louder now? Undoubtedly.

“One of the things that I noticed when I was working on the book is that when people make statements about the general state of criticism, both things are true at the same time,” Scott says. “So you have, almost simultaneously, people publishing essays about how criticism has gotten so harsh and so mean and we’re just trying to take everyone down. And, the next month, someone will publish something that says, ‘The reviews have gotten too soft and too permissive, and everyone’s just being cheering and encouraging, and no one’s harsh enough.’”

Meanwhile, the hits—and the hit pieces—keep on coming. In early January, Leonard Cohen, of all people, took a shellacking in The New York Times Book Review, via William Logan’s dismissive review of Cohen’s posthumous new poetry-and-drawings collection The Flame. “Monotonous scribbles of the moody-undergraduate school.” “At any moment of the day, ‘Suzanne’ is probably playing in an elevator somewhere.” “If singing badly is no bar to stardom, everyone who stands caterwauling in the shower should take hope.” Is Cohen a soft target? A hard target? Does it matter that he’s … dead? It’s something new to argue about, at least. So sound off in the comments—after all, that’s where all the best, or at least the meanest, criticism gets written nowadays.

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK | How is this band this famous?

When San Antonio artist Michael Esparza opened his Etsy store in late May, he’d already done a bit of market research. He planned to focus on his paintings that sold best at art markets in his hometown: a series that features beloved Texas chains in romantic, pastoral landscapes. In the online store, Esparza sold maybe one a month, at $15 per print. That is, until this week, when Jezebel senior staff writer Maria Sherman discovered his work. the bad news is i want all of it pic.twitter.com/MJonNkXX4l — maria sherman (@mariasherm) December 11, 2018 Texans often display their enthusiasm for homegrown chains without a hint of irony, but placing a Whataburger or Buc-ee’s or Bill Miller’s Bar-B-Q in the middle of a Thomas Kinkade-esque landscape…View Original Post

The post This Etsy Store Is Just Paintings of Texas Fast Food Chains in Romantic Landscapes appeared first on Texas Monthly.

A giant rhino that may have been the origin of the unicorn myth survived until about 35,000 years ago.

This is our 7th most-read article of 2018.
Originally published November 16.

Why did the scarecrow win a prize? Because he stood alone in his field! He stood there for years, rotting, until he was forgotten.

I tell my kids, you’re allowed to watch the TV all you want… Just don’t turn it on! This way they will begin to understand the futility of all things.

How does a penguin build a house? Igloos it together. Like all animals, it is an automaton, driven by blind genetic imperative, marching slowly to oblivion.

Why don’t skeletons go trick or treating? They have no body to go with them! The skeletons are like us: alone, empty, dead already.

I don’t really like playing soccer. I just do it for kicks! Like all of humanity, I pretend to enjoy things, and others pretend to care about my charade.

You hear about the moon restaurant? Good food, no atmosphere! If you eat there, you forfeit your life, which would make no difference to the universe as a whole.

Why did the blonde focus on an orange juice container? It said concentrate! She realized that society’s depictions of her were like the juice: formulaic, insipid, fake.

My wife told me to put the cat out. I didn’t know it was on fire! By the time I could act, it was incinerated, a harbinger of the path we all must take.

How come the invisible man wasn’t offered a job? They just couldn’t see him doing it! This man stands for all of us: unseen, misunderstood, irrelevant.

Today I gave away my old batteries… Free of charge! No one wanted them, so I became angry and threw them in the yard. The battery acid now leaks into the soil, killing a colony of ants. A sparrow eats their bodies and is poisoned. Somewhere in the Serengeti, a lion devours his rival’s cubs. Then the lion is shot by a poacher and sold to an unloved rich man whose father was an unloved rich man. In five billion years, the Sun will become a bloated giant, boiling the oceans and consuming our pointless cruelties with flames. I wake sweat-drenched and screaming, staring at the visage of a faceless god. “WHAT HAVE I DONE?! HOW COULD I BRING A CHILD INTO THIS WORLD!?” But this god, like all gods, is nothing—just my son’s Wilson baseball mitt, sitting on my dresser, mocking me.

Will February March? No, but April May! Soon we become ash, and time forgets us.

Read an interview with Alex Baia about thew making of this piece.

Follow @lamebook on instagram for more content!

AmiMoJo writes: A startup in the Netherlands is developing the "Crowbar," a bird feeder that takes discarded cigarette butts as payment for dispensing food. A camera recognises cigarette filters and rejects any other objects placed in the Crowbar. The idea isn't entirely original, a gentleman in the US has already built a similar device and trained crows to deposit coins. The hope is that crows will be able to keep cities clean, sort through refuse and perform other tasks for our mutual benefit. Popular Mechanics notes that crows "are some of the smartest animals in the world," suggesting this means "we could harness their abilities for the greater good of our planet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Choose your game piece wisely!

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Hey, pssssst, citizen: Wanna have your mind blown?

Post-Apocalypse Blacksmithing: Workshop in Basic Toolmaking

Viral marketing campaigns on the internet are nothing new, but Initiative Q is something else. 

The project that calls itself "tomorrow's payment network" has people buzzing, signing up, and sharing invites. For their troubles, users who successfully invite more users are promised a "future currency" called Q, with potential value that supposedly goes into tens of thousands of dollars. The project claims the value of all Qs might reach "several trillion dollars." No wonder everyone's jumping on board — on Oct. 30, the project boasted 2 million users. 

And yet, there's no product here, nor is any being developed. At least, not yet.  Read more...

More about Money, Initiative Q, Tech, and Cryptocurrency Blockchain

UPDATE giveaway is now over.

Austin City Limits will be taping a performance by Willie Nelson on Monday, November 19th at 8 pm at ACL Live at The Moody Theater (310 W. 2nd Street, Willie Nelson Blvd). We will be giving away a limited number of space available passes to this taping. Enter your name and email address on the below form by noon on Thursday, November 15th.

Winners will be chosen at random and a photo ID will be required to pick up tickets. Winners will be notified by email. Passes are not transferable and cannot be sold. Standing may be required. No photography, recording or cell phone use in the studio. No cameras computers or recording devices allowed in venue.

As Apple continues to fight independent repair, Motorola has partnered with iFixit and pledged to support the right to repair movement. From a report: It is excellent news that Motorola has decided to make it as easy as possible for you to repair your phone. The company announced that it would begin selling replacement parts for all of its recent phones to customers, and it has partnered with iFixit to sell repair kits for phones like the Moto X, Z, G4, G5, and Droid Turbo 2. The kits come with tools, genuine Motorola-branded replacement parts, and instructions on how to fix your device. iFixit is currently selling replacement batteries, screens, and digitizer assemblies. "Motorola is setting an example for major manufacturers to embrace a more open attitude towards repair," iFixit wrote in a blog post announcing the partnership. "For fixers like us, this partnership is representative of a broader movement in support of our Right to Repair. It's proof that OEM manufacturers and independent repair can co-exist. Big business and social responsibility, and innovation and sustainability, don't need to be mutually exclusive."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two weeks ago, a hullabaloo broke out over a lawsuit alleging that canned seltzer from LaCroix contains an ingredient found in “cockroach insecticide.” Suddenly, the canned water with the cult-like following didn’t sound so appetizing. But there was never any bug killer in the seltzer. Instead, the incident highlights an uncomfortable truth: Food and beverage production is essentially chemistry. Any discomfort we feel about that fact isn’t based on science.

LaCroix has drawn fans with its claims to be “natural” and free of many things found in other sodas and bottled waters — sugar, calories, artificial sweeteners and artificial flavors. But a new lawsuit filed by the law firm Beaumont Costales contends that LaCroix includes “synthetic” ingredients, including limonene, which the lawsuit claims “can cause kidney toxicity and tumors,” as well as “linalool propionate, which is used to treat cancer; and linalool, which is used in cockroach insecticide.”

It sounds like scary stuff. But even if the chemicals are in the water, raising the alarm about them is a little bit like warning about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide — a substance that’s a major component of acid rain, that is known to corrode and oxidize metals and that can be fatal if inhaled. It is also better known by its common name, water.

Similarly, limonene, linalool propionate and linalool are common plant chemicals and far less nefarious than they might seem from the lawsuit’s description, said Gary Reineccius, a flavor chemist at the University of Minnesota. Linalool, for instance, is found in many fruits. “It’s a key to blueberry. If blueberry didn’t have it, it would taste totally different,” Reineccius said. It’s true that linalool is sometimes used in products that help control cockroaches, but implying that linalool is insecticide is like saying that citric acid (the thing that makes lemons tart) is a kind of paint remover simply because you found it on an ingredient list at your hardware store. Limonene is another naturally occurring plant compound (also found in some prized cannabis strains), and linalool propionate is found in ginger, as well as lavender and sage oils.

The lawsuit claims that these ingredients have been listed by the Food and Drug Administration as synthetic, but that’s misleading. It’s true that these three ingredients appear on FDA lists of synthetic flavorings, but that’s just because they can also be synthesized in a lab. When they’re made that way, the FDA calls them “artificial” flavoring, and when they are extracted from a plant or animal they’re considered “natural,” though the FDA does not verify that labels of food products are accurate. So what’s really at issue here is not what ingredients are in LaCroix but how these ingredients were produced. In response to our questions, LaCroix’s parent company, National Beverage Corp., pointed us to a press release that insists that “natural flavors in LaCroix are derived from the natural essence oils from the named fruit used in each of the flavors.”

“There’s really no difference” between chemicals synthesized in a lab and the same chemicals extracted from plants, Reineccius said. “From a scientific standpoint, they are exactly the same. There is no risk from one versus the other.” The major difference, he said, is that they cost a lot more to derive from plants than to make in the lab. “It’s exactly the same chemical, but you’re going to pay three to five times more for the natural one. The customer pays through the nose, it’s foolishness.”

Although the FDA defines what a “natural” flavor is, it doesn’t currently have any official definitions for what “natural” means when applied to a whole product. FDA press officer Deborah Kotz said the agency would expect the term “natural” to mean that nothing artificial or synthetic had been added. The FDA recently called for public comment on the use of term “natural” for describing food products, Kotz said, and the agency is currently reviewing these comments to determine whether and how to define “natural” products.

The lawsuit highlights the disjunction between the things a food or beverage producer might call “natural” flavor under the FDA’s rules and the common understanding of what “natural” means, said flavor historian Nadia Berenstein. “The idea of ‘natural’ is radically undefined,” she says, but from a cultural standpoint, the word tends to evoke a mystique of pureness or wholesomeness. She said the relative naturalness of various foods started to become important to consumers when food production became industrialized, which made it difficult for people to know what had happened to their food between the farm and the grocery store. Justifiably or not, the term “natural” may give consumers a reassuring sense of purity and a belief that the product is free from adulteration.

But the ingredients and techniques you use to whip up a pleasant “natural” product in your kitchen might not be well-suited for commercial production. If you’re at home and want to make a fizzy, fruity drink, you might squeeze a little grapefruit juice into some sparkling water. But a drink that’s being commercially sold has to do many things a homemade drink doesn’t. “It has to be relatively uniform, it has to be shelf stable, it has to conform to safety regulations,” Berenstein said. The squirt of juice might perk up a glass of seltzer at home, but when the beverage is produced on a industrial scale, the juice could be subject to issues like sedimentation and oxidation that make the end product less appealing.

And so food chemists use their tools to create products that taste good when they reach your table. When you read the phrase “natural flavor” on a label, you might assume that, say, a coconut beverage contains some extract of coconut, but in fact some coconut flavoring is actually derived from castor oil. “It makes a beautiful coconut flavor, and it’s perfectly safe and wholesome,” Reineccius said. “You can label it ‘all-natural,’ but it’s not from coconut.” To food chemists like Reineccius, that’s a shining example of science at work. Some companies are trying to boost their sales by closing the gap between what the word “natural” can legally cover and what their customers generally understand it to mean. A LaCroix competitor, Spindrift, aims to capture consumers turned off by flavors created in the lab, natural or not. The company’s sparkling waters are made with fruit and no other flavoring.

The great irony here is that, as food scientist Sarah Taber pointed out on Twitter, the whole reason that bug killers might contain things like linalool in the first place is because “makers realized people don’t want to spray ‘chemicals’ in their house to get rid of bugs, and preferred natural plant-based repellents.” Turns out, there’s no way around it: All the products we buy contain chemicals.

CORRECTION (Oct. 16, 2018, 5:55 p.m.): A previous version of this story incorrectly said that some coconut flavoring is distilled from castor oil. It is derived from the fermentation of castor oil.

This is scientific.

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WHAT: A video from a beautiful day at Barton Springs Pool in Austin, shared to Facebook by Hannah Waitt. WHO: One brave little girl on the diving board and a crowd full of supporters cheering her on. WHY IT’S SO GREAT: When the video starts, the little girl is already at the edge of the diving board. She’s wearing a pink bathing suit, and you can tell she wants to jump: She crouches, gets ready, and then—nope, not yet. She stands back up and looks down again. Jumping into a pool for the first time is scary. There are some people in the audio of the recording who seem to be shouting encouragement, and on the left side of the screen, you can see a woman who’s…View Original Post

The post The Best Thing in Texas: Watch Barton Springs Pool Cheer on a Little Girl as She Jumps In appeared first on Texas Monthly.

Chen San-yuan, also known as "Uncle Pokemon," is a 70-year-old grandfather in Taiwan who equipped his bike with 11 phones to play Pokemon Go. He also rides around with a bag of batteries that allows him to play for up to 20 hours in a row. Read more...

More about Phone, Pokemon, Grandparents, Pokemon Go, and Culture

“In an instant classic, the Austin Sol (1-0) held on for the 23-22 win over the visting Los Angeles Aviators (1-1) in a thrilling AUDL Game of the Week showcase. 19-year-old Kyle Henke came up with the gigantic adjustment grab at the buzzer to give the Sol the win in their 2018 home opener. “

http://theaudl.com/league/news/2018-sol-stun-aviators-buzzer-audl-game-week

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY0P_w8WYCA

If we’re living in a golden age of board games, then the website BoardGameGeek is the internet’s sifting pan. The bounty of games overfloweth — one can now sit down at a table with friends and settle strange and bountiful islands, fight Cold Wars and terraform Mars. BoardGameGeek helps sort through it all, a kind of arbiter of popular taste.

A new game now tops those rankings: It’s called Gloomhaven, and it’s the current BoardGameGeek No. 1, having taken over the top spot this past winter. The game has won scads of awards, including more than a handful of Golden Geeks and a Scelto dai Goblin — the goblins’ choice. Its place atop the BoardGameGeek list cements its status as a flagship of the current golden age.

The BoardGameGeek list is valuable real estate in high-end board gaming, and the No. 1 spot is, of course, the prime position — Boardwalk, if you will.²² Only seven games have occupied it since the site launched in 2000. The seven No. 1s are a motley bunch, including a civilization-building game set in the ancient fertile crescent and a war game set in the 1910s. But they all have something that speaks to what’s en vogue among the kind of people who go online to rate board games: intensive strategy.

But the site recognizes that its most highly rated games aren’t all for everyone. “As with any other medium — books, movies, music, etc. — you can’t just pick whatever is rated No. 1 on some chart and expect it to provide a great experience for you,” said W. Eric Martin, a BoardGameGeek news editor. “You should look for games that match your interests.”

Now it’s Gloomhaven’s turn to try to interest you. Years ago, Isaac Childres, the game’s designer, like many budding board gamers, got his start in “serious” gaming with Settlers of Catan, then logged on to BoardGameGeek and worked his way down its empirically ranked list: the strategic farming of Agricola, the capitalistic infrastructure of Power Grid, the castle building of Caylus. The list, in many ways, dictates board-game culture. It represents an aggregated consensus of early adopters and fervent fanatics, which then trickles down to the broader gaming public — and to future star game designers of top-ranked games.

In Gloomhaven (which retails for $215), “players will take on the role of a wandering mercenary with their own special set of skills and their own reasons for traveling to this remote corner of the world. Players must work together out of necessity to clear out menacing dungeons and forgotten ruins.” The game’s website likens it to a “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel. Just don’t forget your swords or spells. Childres attributes his game’s success, at least among the hardcore denizens of BoardGameGeek, to the way it improves on the appeal of the roleplaying of Dungeons & Dragons, in which crawling dungeons can become rote. In Gloomhaven, you have special abilities that you can use over and over, and once you use them, you can watch them make cool stuff happen. It’s heavy on the fun stuff, rather than the grind of repetitious orc slaying, and as the BoardGameGeek leaderboard shows, gamers are appreciative.

The BoardGameGeek rankings, similar to movie rankings on IMDb, are based on user ratings, which run from 1 to 10.²³ Gloomhaven (8.62 Geek Rating) benefits from ratings that are extremely heavy on the 10s — more than half of its raters gave it that maximum score. Contrast this with former No. 1s such as Agricola, whose ratings follow a more expected bell curve that’s centered around 8, or Twilight Struggle, which is about equally weighted on 8s, 9s and 10s. Only Pandemic Legacy,²⁴ the No. 1 before Gloomhaven took over, is nearly as heavy on the 10-point ratings. Even still, Gloomhaven’s average user rating (which is slightly different from its Geek Rating) is a full 0.35 points higher than the second-place game, which may help it cement a lengthy legacy.

Most of the older No. 1s took a while to climb there, having been released years earlier and having slowly earned enough high ratings from loyal fans to rise to the top. Gloomhaven has been different: It was released just last year, and even then only to its Kickstarter backers. It isn’t available for wide public sale quite yet. So its raters so far are likely a specific subset of the gaming culture — people who find the concept so appealing that they were willing to shell out cash for a game that didn’t exist yet. “For the most part, people don’t rate games that they haven’t played,” Martin said.

Given Gloomhaven’s dramatically skewed ratings, are the geeks running out of room atop their list? As the top Geek Rating inches closer and closer to the perfect 10, it will become harder and harder to dislodge the No. 1. The game has its haters, of course. “Very over hyped game,” one user wrote this month, rating it a 3. But those who hope to see it ousted, and to see their favorite to take over, may have a while, or an eternity, to wait. When you’re rating on a 1-to-10 scale, a game can only go so high, after all.

But there will always be incremental progress, in human endeavor generally and in board game design specifically. “Human athleticism always seems to be increasing,” Childres said. “There’s always someone who is able to reach farther and farther limits, for whatever reason, maybe some small-scale human evolution. Board games are evolving as well, standing on the shoulders of the great games and iterating on them.”

Darwin, grab a sword.

Read more: The Worst Board Games Ever Invented

Pop’s honesty helped bring Tim Duncan back in 2000. Can he do the same with Kawhi this summer?

If the Summer of Kawhi feels familar, it’s because the Spurs have been here before. Most fans will remember the Summer of Tim Duncan (a.k.a. 2000). Duncan was worried about the state of the aging Spurs (among other things), and Gregg Popovich was tasked with convincing him to stay and proving he could build another championship squad.

Suffice it to say, he succeeded. Duncan stayed after some serious flirtation with the Orlando Magic, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili soon followed, and together The Big 3 formed the arguably the greatest basketball trio of all time with four championships and near-unmatched success.

So how did Pop do it, and can he perform the same magic with Leonard as he did with Duncan 18 years ago? In his new book The Soul of Basketball, Ian Thomsen details all the conversations Pop had with Duncan that summer and provides the key to their now-unbreakable bond: brutal honesty.

“We’d sit there and we’d get to the point where it’s like being slap happy,’’ recalled Popovich in my new book The Soul of Basketball. “I’d say, ‘Okay, there’s a guarantee, sure you’re going to win there — so go! Yeah, that’s fine, we’ll be fine here.’ That kind of thing. And he’d say, ‘David’s getting older, what are you guys going to do? Who are you going to bring in?’ We’d joke with each other, but then we would lay it on the line. And I’d say, ‘Timmy, I can’t guarantee. I don’t know if we’re going to win a championship. Hell, I didn’t know—did I know, did you know we were going to win in ’99? Did I know? I didn’t know. It just happened. Are we going to win again? Maybe not. I can’t guarantee it.’”

“I think our relationship grew stronger. Well, I know it did,” said Popovich of his private talks with Duncan in the summer of 2000. “Because we were both—and this is a huge key—we were both totally, totally honest in every single respect. Even if I was going to lose him, or even if he was going to hurt my feelings by leaving, it didn’t matter. We were still going to lay it all out there.”

“There were some real reasons why Timmy might go,” Popovich explained in The Soul of Basketball. “David was in his later years, and he wasn’t ‘David’ anymore. David was on the other side of performance and still playing, so there were a lot of things to think about. And so it was just like that, back and forth, but we sat there together. It wasn’t like he was with his agent, and I’m calling, and we’re doing the separate kind of baloney. We did it together. Just figuring out what would be best, and he came to me one day and he said . . . what a jerk . . . he goes, ‘Yeah, I’m going to Orlando.’”

Popovich remembered holding his breath.

“And I just, I just stared at him,” Popovich said. “And about five seconds later, then he smiled and he said, ‘I had to do that.’”

Duncan was punking him. That was how he told Popovich he was staying in San Antonio.

“‘You asshole. You had to do that,’” recalled Popovich. “But that’s Timmy. He just wanted to screw with me. And I do the same thing with him. But the relationship grew stronger because of it.”

There’s no saying if the same approach will work with Leonard or not, but the only way for both sides to work things out is to be completely honest with each other, as Tim and Pop were back at the turn of the century.

Only time will tell what happens with the Summer of Kawhi, but this is only one story of many in The Soul of Basketball. If you are interested in reading more, click here to see where you get can a copy.