Bynumhoekstra

Update: Statement from Dean Smith's family via UNC.

"This is an extraordinary honor," says Coach Smith's family. "We were touched by those who asked for the recognition and by the President's decision to give an award to Dean for his work both on and off the court.  We know he would be humbled to be in the company of President Clinton, United States senators, scientists, entertainers, the great Hall of Famer Ernie Banks and the other distinguished Americans who are receiving the award.  We also know he would take this as an opportunity to recognize all the young men who played for him and the assistant coaches who worked with him, as well as the University.  Again, this medal is a tremendous honor."

As noted by Inside Carolina on Twitter, the tense in the phrase "he would be humbled" is a sad and stark reminder of Dean Smith's condition.

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ESPN's Andy Katz has learned that legendary Tar Heel basketball coach Dean Smith has been selected to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom award.

President Barack Obama will announce Thursday that Hall of Famers Ernie Banks and Dean Smith as the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom award, multiple sources told ESPN.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom award is the nation's highest civilian honor. According to the White House, this award is given to individuals, "who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors."

The White House will announce a time and date about when the medals will be awarded in Washington.

Banks, 82, is widely known as "Mr. Cub" and recognized as one of the greatest baseball players of all time. He played in 11 all-star games, hit over 500 home runs and was the first National League player to win back-to-back MVP honors. He was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1977, his first year eligible.

Smith, 82, guided North Carolina from 1961-97, winning two national championships, and when he retired, he was the winningest coach in college basketball history. Smith is credited with 96 percent of his players graduating. Smith was also actively an advocate for civil rights in the 1960s.

Smith has been battling a progressive memory disorder recently.

While Smith's record as a coach places him as one of the best in college basketball history, his efforts in the arena of civil rights was even more important as noted in this 2011 ESPN.com piece from Richard Lapchick.

America was never the same after the Brown decision, but the young Dean Smith's civil rights advocacy did not end in Topeka. I've already mentioned that he signed Charlie Scott to play at UNC, and he played a major role in the dismantling of segregation in general across North Carolina. He helped integrate a local restaurant and assisted an African-American graduate student's purchase of a home in an all-white neighborhood. In a profession in which many coaches are either conservative or not political at all, Dean Smith opposed the Vietnam War, the death penalty and called for a freeze on nuclear weapons, among other causes.

I wrote about Smith and Scott for ESPN.com several years ago. In that column, I noted that Smith had called me about Charlie Scott nearly 25 years after he enrolled at UNC, when Smith read that the Center for the Study of Sport in Society, which I founded at Northeastern University, had started a program that was using former athletes to train young people to deal more effectively with racial tensions and conflict. It was named Project Teamwork. Lou Harris, the famed public opinion analyst, evaluated the program and called it, "America's most successful violence prevention program."

Smith thought Scott would be a perfect leader for Project Teamwork. Amazingly, the coach made the call during the week that UNC was about to play in the Sweet 16 in 1990. What coach calls someone during that week about a player who had left his program decades earlier? As it happened, we had already filled the position on Project Teamwork, and Scott was happy with his career as a marketing director for Champion.

So on this anniversary, it's worth remembering that five years before the Supreme Court decision that would forever change America, in the city where the decision was filed, Dean Smith was standing up for justice to integrate the Topeka High School basketball team. After that start, Smith knew what he could do on and off the court. Perhaps no one has ever done it better.

Smith's loyalty to his players, his representation of North Carolina and his work to better the lives of others make this award not only well deserved but long overdue.

Abortion clinics in North Carolina would have to be licensed as surgical centers under a bill, which started out dealing with Islamic law, that will undergo a final vote Wednesday…

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Join community members, Town and University leaders, and downtown business and property owners from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 25, for the first in a series of community meetings about Rosemary Imagined. The kick-off will be held in the Sky Lounge at Greenbridge, 601 Rosemary Street, Chapel Hill.  Rosemary Imagined is an innovative community-led planning initiative that will refine our thinking of how Rosemary Street fits into the development and growth of downtown Chapel Hill. Come for information, conversation, and imagination about Rosemary Street and share your thoughts! Light refreshments will be provided.

This community event is part of a 10-month process of engagement with the Town of Chapel Hill and the community to bring together several recent efforts by the community into a complete vision for the future of the Rosemary Street corridor. The Rosemary Street corridor was identified during the Chapel Hill 2020 process as one of the five Big Ideas; the “Big Ideas” are initiatives that embody the essence of the Chapel Hill 2020 goals and will serve as a beacon to guide the efforts of the Town and the community as Chapel Hill’s future is created. In addition, the 2010 draft Downtown Framework and Action Plan developed strong new ideas about connectedness of streets and neighborhoods and has been followed by the adoption of the Northside and Pine Knolls Community Plan.

Rosemary Imagined process began in April with a grassroots effort to identify community stakeholders. The stakeholders hosted focus groups and identified themes, ideas and opportunities for Rosemary Street.  The ideas generated from these meetings, as well as a series of community meetings, will be used in framing a plan for the corridor. The results of Rosemary Imagined will be the basis for reevaluating the draft Downtown Framework and Action Plan and providing a new recommendation for the Council to consider adopting as a part of the Chapel Hill 2020 comprehensive plan.

For more information, visit www.rosemaryimagined.com. Contact Dwight Bassett at 919-969-5015 and Meg McGurk at 919-967-9440 or contact them at info@rosemaryimagined.com.

Steel String Raises a Tent

I had the pleasure of drinking my first Steel String Brewery beer several weeks back, outside on a small sliver of sidewalk between the front door of the taproom and the parking row just off the street. I believe I had the Rubber Room Session Ale and it was terrific.

The Steel String Brewery Insta-Patio

I caught up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a few months, enjoyed a good beer and appreciated the light breeze in the afternoon shade of the building.  It was almost perfect, the lone negative being a few cars pulling in and out right in front of us while we enjoyed our beverages.

A few weeks later, low and behold, Steel String has solved this issue and made a short stretch of South Greensboro Street more civilized, SAFER, and pedestrian friendly in the process.  In short, they’ve filled in the two parking spaces that abut the Wendy’s drive-thru exit with tables and chairs, and at certain times, a tent.

Why has this small change made such a big difference?  Let’s take a look. First, below is a Google Street View orientation to Steel String’s location, which is in a storefront that used to be occupied by the Trading Post used furniture store. Use the mouse to pan left and right in the image below, and you’ll see that the pedestrian conditions deteriorate pretty quickly once you walk from the corner of Main St and S. Greensboro to the first of the two driveway access points in and out of Wendy’s.

After that, while there is a sidewalk between the two Wendy’s driveways, the space in front of Steel String and restaurant Glass Half Full is a continuous row of parking.  Any parked car could pull out at any time, directly back into a pedestrian, and anyone trying to park could pull in off the street at the same time.  This is a pretty unsafe situation for a pedestrian who needs to constantly be looking in multiple directions to avoid getting hit on this stretch of pseudo-sidewalk.

View Larger Map
By turning these parking spaces into seating for their patrons, the restaurant has effectively removed the hazard to the pedestrians described above in both directions.  No cars are backing out of those spaces anymore, and no cars are turning in off of South Greensboro Street.  As for two parking spaces being out of commission, well, the town just bought several dozen spaces across the street and…it’s a bar! Do we really need to encourage people to drive to bars by requiring free parking right in front of the bar?

This type of local, small-scale, but meaningful transformation is in keeping with some of the best ideas springing up from a movement called tactical urbanism, which seeks to make quick changes to streets and neighborhoods to make them more people-friendly. The most well-publicized of these activities is PARKing Day, in which people all over the world convert metered parking spaces to mini-parks, such as in this public radio story from Colorado.

My key point here is this- Steel String has done something to delight their customers and the neighborhood, and inadvertently struck a positive blow for pedestrian safety. Good for them and good for us. If this wasn’t pre-cleared with the Town, let’s hope the official reaction is in keeping with the best Carrboro traditions of simply not freaking out when an informal market asserts itself, or in this case, informal awesome streetside public space asserting itself.

If we want to double down on a good idea, let’s ask Glass Half Full if they want to convert some or all of the next ten spaces to sidewalk dining!

I’m taking my roomba, my duck, my cat and his shark suit, and going to my happy place.  See you tomorrow.

Where do people use iPhones, Android phones, Blackberries, and other devices? In our region, it appears Android is far more popular on the east side of the region than the west:

Tweets from iPhones are in red, Android in green, Blackberry purple. Image from MapBox.
Click to toggle: All devices  iPhone only  Android only

Tom MacWright, who has written for Greater Greater Washington about open laws, made the tool for MapBox using 280 million Tweets, each of which has information about which kind of device the tweeter was using.

I initially expected to see a big blob of purple (Blackberry) in the federal core, but there is none; probably this is a combination of many federal agencies moving to iPhones, and federal workers not using their government phones for tweeting.

But really, these maps look awfully similar to the same maps of DC's demographic divides:

Left: Race and ethnicity. Image from Wikimedia. Right: College degrees. Image by Rob Pitingolo.

Update: Several commenters noted that the combined map seems to overlay iPhones over Androids, so green areas are really areas with Androids but fewer iPhones. I've added a toggle to switch between the combined map, iPhone-only, and Android-only.

38 comments

Then and now

Our first public beta was released on June 13 a year ago. It had an ugly icon and default Bootstrap theme, but it was ok. At least, our friends said so. Looking back, I can’t believe what we have actually achieved in a year, and I absolutely can’t believe the amount of things that need to be done. The scale of things is also kind of scary.

One of our users suggested that we update our blog more often, another one posted the picture below, so we decided to write more regular updates of what we are up to. And even though The Old Reader is our free time project, we usually spend time on it every day.

Google Reader is due to be closed in less than a month, and our team can feel things heating up: new web-based RSS readers seem to be launching every week; we got some new code contributors aboard; and we started getting more and more questions about API and mobile apps.

Well, API is being cooked, and it is getting there. It is about 70% done, and I can already have first The Old Reader in-app experience (basic and painful, but still!). We really hope we can completely finish it in July, and it remains our top priority. I already have a mailing list for developers (thank you for your input on REST vs Google Reader API) and everyone else who expressed their interest in this topic, so the moment it’s ready we’ll spread the news as much as we can.

Besides working in API, we’ve been quite busy with other stuff during last couple of months: improved our feed refresh intervals significantly, fixed a number of nasty bugs that duplicated user posts in some cases, improved monitoring, and answered what feels like several thousands of emails, forum messages, and tweets.

We have also recently enjoyed crossing another milestone in user count – 2¹⁸ – and sorted some legal issues that seemed actually more difficult than all our technical challenges combined.

We also launched several new servers so that we could fit new users, and our hosting cost increased even more. So we will kindly remind you of that Flattr button (hopefully it won’t be there for too long).

Next planned post will be about our future plans, making The Old Reader sustainable, and probably some announcements.

(image from our Trending section which never fails to amuse)

Between Monday, May 13th and Sunday, May 19th, the below songs made the greatest gains in terms of DJ plays. Did you help their growth by spinning some of them?

1. Young And Beautiful - Lana Del Rey
2. Blurred Lines - Robin Thicke/Pharrell
3. Diane Young - Vampire Weekend
4. Step - Vampire Weekend
5. Too Close - Alex Clare
6. EDM Death Machine - Knife Party
7. Give Me Everything - Pitbull feat. Ne-Yo, Afrojack & Nayer
8. Riot - Three Days Grace
9. Sweet Child O’ Mine - Guns N’ Roses
10. POWER - Kanye West
11. Stronger - Kanye West
12. I Love It (feat. Charli XCX) - Icona Pop 
13. Clarity - Zedd/Foxes
14. Fuck You - Cee-Lo Green
15. Your Love - The Outfield
16. Power Glove - Knife Party
17. Carry On Wayward Son - Kansas
18. Somebody That I Used To Know - Gotye/Kimbra
19. Drive By - Train
20. You Oughta Know (Album Version) - Alanis Morissette

wnycradiolab:

Um, guys: public radio temporary tattoos.  Apparently some public radio stations will offer these at pledge drive time.  And WE LOVE THEM.

These are so cool!!!! Another good incentive to donate to your local member station! -Emily

or: How Mountain Bikers Saved the Forest.

This has been floating around for a couple years, but it's news to us and there's no better time to share it than now.

Chris Webber is at the game "[r]eppin' Michigan" tonight, but he and the school have had a strained relationship since he left following the infamous timeout call in 1993 and the Ed Martin scandal.

Just four days after Webber's lowest moment, though, then-President Bill Clinton decided to drop him a line and cheer him up.

Transcript:

April 9, 1993

Dear Chris,

I have been thinking of you a lot since I sat glued to the TV during the championship game.

I know that there may be nothing I or anyone else can say to ease the pain and disappointment of what happened.

Still, for whatever it's worth, you, and your team, were terrific. And part of playing for high stakes under great pressure is the constant risk of mental error. I know. I have lost two political races and made countless mistakes over the last twenty years. What matters is the intensity, integrity, and courage you bring to the effort. That is certainly what you have done. You can always regret what occurred but don't let it get you down or take away the satisfaction of what you have accomplished.

You have a great future. Hang in there.

Sincerely,

Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton: awesome dude.

The Letter Bill Clinton Wrote Chris Webber in 1993 [Mental Floss]

Part of playing for high stakes under great pressure is the constant risk of mental error [Letters of Note]

The term of art for time lapse videos in which the camera moves is hyperlapse. In playing around with the hyperlapse technique, Teehan+Lax developed a system to make hyperlapse videos using Google Street View. Like this one:

Make your own here.

On the streets of early 20th Century America, nothing moved faster than 10 miles per hour. Responsible parents would tell their children, “Go outside, and play in the streets. All day.”

(Credit: New York Times, Nov 23, 1924)

Much of the public viewed the car as a death machine. One newspaper cartoon even compared the car to Moloch, the god to whom the Ammonites supposedly sacrificed their children.

Pedestrian deaths were considered public tragedies. Cities held parades and built monuments in memory of children who had been struck and killed by cars. Mothers of children killed in the streets were given a special white star to honor their loss.

The horrors of peace appear to be appalling than the horrors of war. The automobile looms up as a far more destructive piece of mechanism than the machine gun. The reckless motorist deals more death the artilleryman. The man in streets seems less safe than the man in the trench. The greatest single lethal factor is the automobile. It left shambles in its wake as it coursed through 1923.

(From left: poster by Harry de Bauffer, reproduced in “Poster Wins Second Prize,” Milwaukee Journal, September 28, 1920; poster by George Starkey, reproduced in “Winning Safety Poster,” Milwaukee Journal, September 25, 1920.)

Has it really been 20 years?

If you are so inclined and have an hour and twenty minutes, the NCAA has the complete game online here. Of all the seasons of UNC basketball, 1993 might always be my favorite. It was my senior year of high school and remember watching most of that season with my father who passed away eight years ago this week. The 1993 season had the FSU Comeback Game in the Dean Dome. That game has been made even more magical because now we see it as our first clue this team was destined for greatness.

As for the game itself, in my mind it still stands as one of the best NCAA title games I've seen, especially in terms of the quality of play. Both teams shot a hair under 50% and there were a total of 28 fouls called for the entire game including only 11 in the second half and some of those came from Michigan playing catch-up. If there was one complaint it was the 24 combined turnovers but in most of those such turnovers were a result of good defense and not sheer slopiness.

Of course this game will always be remember for Michigan's Chris Webber taking a timeout his team did not resulting in a technical foul.

As Dean Smith once said, UNC's chances of winning the game at that point were favorable even if Webber doesn't call the ill-fated timeout. The Tar Heels were up two with 11 seconds left and had Webber trapped in the worst place on the floor by UNC's two best defenders Derrick Phelps and George Lynch. There was also the matter of fouls with UNC having three to give meaning they could force Michigan to inbound the ball three more times against pressure resulting in precious seconds draining off. Besides all of that, Webber traveled. Even Billy Packer said so.

It is also important to note this was Dean Smith's second title and the list of coaches who had one more than one is not a long one. Smith would end up topping the all-time wins list and while his greatness was never in dispute by rational people, the second title was the death blow to any notion that greatness was somehow undeserved. The game itself and the season as a whole were a masterful work of coaching art by Smith.

And the passage of years only makes us appreciate it more.

by Doug Allen

James Shakespeare encourages you to stop sharing your experiences on social media:

It’s natural to want to share experiences with the people you care about. After all, the classic postcard greeting is ‘Wish you were here’. But I think our reasons for sharing experiences on social media are more cynical than that. It’s not sharing, it’s bragging. When we log in to Facebook or Twitter we see an infinitely updating stream of people enjoying themselves. It’s not real life, of course, because people overwhelmingly post about the good things whereas all the crappy, dull or deep stuff doesn’t get mentioned. But despite this obvious superficiality, it subconsciously makes us feel like everyone is having a better time than us. We try to compete by curating our own life experiences to make it look like we’re also having non-stop fun and doing important things. It breeds in us a Pavlovian response that means every time something good is happening to us we must broadcast it to as many people as possible. …

The key thing to remember is that you are not enriching your experiences by sharing them online; you’re detracting from them because all your efforts are focused on making them look attractive to other people. Your experience of something, even if similar to the experience of many others, is unique and cannot be reproduced within the constraints of social media. So internalise that experience instead. Think about it. Go home and think about it some more. Write about it in more than 140 characters; on paper even. Paint a picture of it. Talk about it face to face with your friends. Talk about how it made you feel.

I’m always a little put off by sweeping generalizations about people’s motivations for sharing on social media, be it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or anything else. Sure, there may be a lot of people who use these services as Shakespeare describes, carefully curating their every post to make their life seem as fulfilling as possible. But there are also myriad other ways to use social media that are not nearly so cynical.

Personally, I choose not to have a big presence on social media, with one notable exception: Instagram.

I don’t like broadcasting the day-to-day details of my life to a wide audience with status posts, or tweeting my possibly deep but probably less-deep-than-I-think thoughts. But I thoroughly enjoy the cleanliness and focus of Instagram, and the way that it gives me a brief window into the lives of my friends. When I post Instagram photos (I’ll confess, the large majority of which are cat-related), I hope that those who follow me see it the same way: not as an attempt to package and reproduce my experience for others, or as a form of bragging, but as a way to share, if only briefly, my experiences with those I think might enjoy the opportunity to share in them. It’s not necessarily a “wish you were here,” nor is it a “look at how cool my life is”; rather, I think of it as “I enjoyed this, maybe you will too.”

(Photo: From my Instagram feed, watching the 2012 Presidential debates with my cat. Personally, I don’t think this makes me look like I’m “having non-stop fun and doing important things.”)

North Carolina and its counties and towns have the right to establish an official religion, notwithstanding federal court rulings to the contrary, a pair of Rowan County legislators assert in…

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Despite progress in recent years on causes and cures, colony collapse disorder has wreaked havoc on honeybee colonies across the country.

A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation's fruits and vegetables.

Which is like, yeah, big whoop, it's just bees, right? Except that:

The Agriculture Department says a quarter of the American diet, from apples to cherries to watermelons to onions, depends on pollination by honeybees.

wnyc:

ryanpanos:

JAY SHELL’S “THE RAP QUOTES” via Juxtapoz

Multidisciplinary artist, Jay Shells, has recently been creating legitimate looking signs containing rap quotes that reference specific locations in New York. After compiling over 30 signs, Shells set out installing these signs in the locations mentioned in the quotes. The artist has quoted many well-known rappers such as Jay Z, Mos Def, Kanye West, Gza, Nas, Jeru the Damaja, DJ Premier, and many more. Check out others via The Rap Quotes.

It was December 24th on Hollis Ave in the dark
When I seen a man chilling with his dog in the park…..

Google has been in the news a lot recently, and much of it has been for all of the wrong reasons. The vast majority of that news has swirled around the decision the company made to kill its Reader program. Ghacks has discussed this in detail, providing a list of alternative apps and commentary on the backlash the Google decision has caused.

In my quest to find a replacement before the Google clock clicks down to zero I have tried both Feedly and The Old Reader. Both had their  upsides and downsides. My latest attempt involves a service called Feedspot.

Unlike some of the ones out there, Feedspot is free. It is web-based and it can also import your Google Reader OPML file. To get started, you just need to sign up for an account., using your email address. The service prompts you to follow at least one of the feeds listed, which I suppose are partners and the revenue source for this model. These are not junk feeds though, so there is no need to panic on this. For instance, I chose to add National Geographic to my science section. I suppose you can unfollow later, but I will not because I actually like my choice.

After this, click the down arrow to the right of your name at the top of the screen and select "Import" to grab that XML file you took from Google Takeout. The import is almost instantaneous and you will be up and running in no time. However, it does not sync with Reader as services like Feedly do, so you will be face potentially thousands of "unread" stories.

There is an "Edit" button that allows you to arrange your feeds into categories, as I like to do. You can also follow people to see what they are sharing. There is a "Friend Activity" button at the top of the page -- it all looks very Facebok-like.

Conclusion

As far as the interface goes, Feedspot is by far my favorite service so far. It looks nice, works quickly and just appears slick overall. However, updates of new stories seem a bit slow. Overall, it is still the front runner to be my landing spot come July 1 when Google says goodbye to Reader.

The post Feedspot is one more good Google Reader alternative appeared first on gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials.

Originally published in Bloomberg View

If you’re wondering how Florida Gulf Coast University became the first 15th seed in the history of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament to advance to the Sweet 16, look no further than the ur-text of the school’s economics department: Atlas Shrugged.

Embedded in this long, ponderous novel—required reading for all undergraduate economics and finance majors at FGCU—is the formula for transforming your college from a bunch of trailers on a swamp into the most talked-about school in the country. It’s simple, really. All you need to do is practice what Ayn Rand called “rational self-interest.”

Don’t waste your time wooing Nobel laureates to your faculty or trying to recruit National Merit Scholars to a college they’ve never heard of. Do what any self-respecting entrepreneur would do: Devote your resources to building a first-class Division I basketball program.

It’s not going to happen overnight, but FGCU pulled it off pretty quickly. It might have happened sooner, were it not for that great bane of Rand and her acolytes: regulators. The Eagles basketball program started in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics and had to apply more than once before being accepted into the National Collegiate Athletic Association—at the Division II level. Even after being granted permission to move up to Division I, the team had to wait three years before becoming eligible for postseason play.

Florida Gulf Coast University won its first NCAA tournament game in the school’s second year of eligibility, a mere 16 years after graduating its first student. Harvard won its first tournament game this year, too—371 years after its first commencement. (They may be a little slow in Cambridge, Mass., but Harvard finally seems to have figured out the allocative efficiency of college basketball: This year, the Crimson managed to lure away one of the nation’s most coveted high-school prospects from the likes of Wake Forest, UCLA and Texas.)

Just how valuable is a strong showing in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament? As it happens, Butler, whose improbable run to the 2010 Final Four is still the stuff of legend, has studied this very question. Its near-championship run—it lost in the finals to Duke—generated precisely $639,273,881.82 in publicity for the university. That’s to say nothing of the increases in merchandise sales and charitable giving, or the 41 percent surge in applications.

FGCU didn’t need to commission any studies. It understands implicitly the crass commercial calculations that the NCAA promotes, against its own stated goals. FGCU recognized from the start that nothing would raise the young school’s profile like sports—men’s basketball in particular.

“I knew that the university would grow, and it will, as a result of the athletic program,” William Merwin, then the school’s president, said in 2001, after the chief executive officer of a local agribusiness company donated $5 million for FGCU’s sports programs.

A chunk of that money went toward finishing the construction on the basketball team’s $14 million arena. (Randians might not approve, but the state agreed to underwrite the bulk of the arena’s cost because it includes classroom space.) The balance was reserved for athletic scholarships and coaches’ salaries.

Everybody’s favorite underdog of this year’s tournament is less a Cinderella story than a college-basketball powerhouse in its infancy. FGCU’s athletic director, Ken Kavanagh, came from Bradley, a school with a storied hoops tradition. Its 43-year- old head coach, Andy Enfield, was a well-known assistant coach at Florida State, where he developed a reputation as an aggressive recruiter.

Enfield hasn’t exactly had to scrounge for talent at FGCU. His team’s point guard, Brett Comer, grew up playing youth basketball with Austin Rivers, a current starter for the New Orleans Hornets and the son of former NBA star Doc Rivers. The father of one of Enfield’s bench players, Filip Cvjeticanin, played alongside Vlade Divac and Drazen Petrovic on the Yugoslavian national team that won a silver medal in the 1988 Olympics.

Rand wasn’t much of a sports fan, but she would have loved Enfield. To begin with, he’s a proud capitalist: Before becoming a basketball coach, he made a fortune with a health-care startup. (Rand: “Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction.”) Enfield’s wife is a model, validating Rand’s belief that in order for a man to be truly satisfied, he needs “the highest type of woman … the hardest to conquer.” Rand would also have found a lot to like in the Eagles’ style of play: unconstrained, creative and utterly self-confident. “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”

Ayn Rand wrote that, too—right before dunking all over Georgetown and San Diego State. Hey, Florida Gators: You’re next.

Jonathan Mahler is a sports columnist for Bloomberg View. A long-time contributor to The New York Times Magazine, he is the author of the best-selling Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, The Challenge, and Death Comes to Happy Valley. He's @jonathanmahleron Twitter.

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