The Knicks won!

It’s old news by now, but I’m still riding the high of the Knicks winning the NBA Championship. The last time they won, I wasn’t alive, and the last time they even came close was twenty-seven years ago. This is truly a historic and exciting win.

We moved to New York when I was really young, but those early years were formative in my sports fandom. The Mets (who won the Series when we were there in 1986) were my first love; my love of the Knicks came soon after. Even after we had left and established a life in Toronto (and now, in London), I remained a Knicks and Mets fan — for better and for worse, and for the recent past, mostly worse — and finally this year that fandom paid off.

It would have been lovely to be in NYC for the festivities, but instead I’ll celebrate here at home. It’s nice to know that, sometimes, the loves you cultivate in your childhood can be ignited again.

Sometimes, the world does its best to make things harder for you.

Over the past week, we’ve had problems with our garage (and garage door), a snafu with the car, a leak in our pool pump, and a few other home-care-related mishaps that have been time-consuming but also expensive.

For the most part, we’ve weathered the storm well, but there have been moments where I’ve felt overwhelmed. In those moments, I’ve had to remind myself to just take one thing at a time, to remind myself that challenges can be overcome one small step after another.

Mike Monteiro, drawing on an analogy about the Knicks, said it well in his recent essay on how to get out of bed:

There is no 28 point shot in basketball. The only way to come back from a 27 point deficit is one shot at a time. Two points here. Two points there. A few three pointers sprinkled in. Some timely foul shots. And you have to do all of this while the other team is trying to do the same thing. Trying to grind you down. You just have to score a little bit more than they do over a set span of time. And if you score just one more point than they do at the end, you win.

Things will keep breaking down, things will go wrong, life will keep throwing challenges our way. What’s important is to remember to never give up, no matter what the score may be.

Now, it’s time for me to get the garage door fixed.

For a four-year span starting in 2020, Canada Post told stories about its stamps.

The premise of the Canadian stamp stories section of the website was simple: take a deeper look into the new series of stamps that were released by Canada Post in that month or year. Each release was accompanied by notes on what the stamps meant, why the themes were chosen, and why that release was important. The stories were short, easily consumed in a minute or two, and gave meaning to the stamp you were putting in your envelope.

The section of the website was discontinued in 2023 — the archives are still available — and Canada Post usually embeds some short information about new stamps in press releases. But press releases aren’t stories, and there is value in having a section of the site where someone can learn about the stories of stamps without having to wade through corporate news.

Stamps tell us so much about who we are as a nation: what we value, what we honor, what we choose to celebrate and remember. Having a dedicated space (blog?) to tell the stories of stamps will end up being a place to tell the story of our Canadian identity.

Canada Post should revive Canadian stamp stories and make them a much more important part of the way they talk about their services; after all, our postal service is not just a way for us to send stuff in the mail, but a marker of who we are as a nation.

(And heck, if they want, they can hire me to run the blog. I’d be happy to do it!)

A poem

While Everything Else Was Falling Apart
Ada Limón

In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen
years ago now, the L train came clanking by
where someone had fat-Sharpied a black heart
on the yellow pillar you leaned on during a bleak day
(brittle and no notes from anyone you crushed upon).
Above ground, the spring was the saddest one
(doing work, but also none). What were you wearing?
Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?
A tall man was learning from a vendor how to pronounce
churro. High in the sticky clouds of time, he kept
repeating churro while eating a churro. How to say
this made you want to live? No hand to hold
still there it was: someone giving someone comfort
and someone memorizing hard how to ask for it again.

Some links

Everyone online has linked to this already but it’s worth sharing again: the disappearance of the public bench. I’ve written about building for serendipity before, and good public furniture is the infrastructure upon which we can build that serendipity:

Mild social friction also spurs the growth of helpful emotional callouses, the kind that allow us to bump up against desires that conflict with our own and come away not too badly bruised.

I abhor the trend to use the suffix -maxxing for everything, but this piece on “friction-maxxing” — on introducing inconvenience into our lives — was quite resonant:

We’ve become obsessed with optimisation while quietly eliminating the pauses, inefficiencies and idle moments that creativity, intimacy and even a coherent inner life have historically depended on. […]

The irony is that the very inefficiencies we try to eliminate are often the places where life actually happens. The walk to the shop becomes an unexpected conversation with a neighbour. Cooking dinner becomes ritual rather than fuel consumption. Getting lost without GPS forces observation. Even boredom, once considered intolerable, has historically been one of the great incubators of creativity. Many of our best ideas arrive not when we are consuming, scrolling or optimising, but when the mind is left unstimulated long enough to wander.

It’s impossible to go a day without reading something about AI, but if you have to read anything, it’s worth reading this piece by Ted Chiang titled “no, artificial intelligence is not conscious”:

It’s still a predictive-text game, but when the process is streamlined this way, the game becomes so engaging that some people find it addictive.

Related: a beautiful poem about using AI and the human experience.

A lovely rumination on the language we use for weather:

To many, weather is an inconvenience to be overcome rather than an ever-changing astonishment to be experienced.

“The first person to invent true buses was the polymath Blaise Pascal, best known for his eponymous wager. Apparently working from first principles, Pascal developed all the key principles of modern bus services: fixed intracity routes, fixed fares, fixed points for boarding and alighting.”

The First 18 Months: a satirical piece by Alexandra Petri looking back at the first eighteen months of her child’s life, coinciding with the same amount of time in the current presidential administration.

There’s something relatable about this piece on “buying a house and becoming part of the problem”: for me, it was going from an urban dweller with no hopes for home ownership to someone who bought a detached house in the suburbs, and rationalizing that at a time when housing unaffordability and precariousness is running rampant.

I’ll read anything by Wesley Morris, and will read anything about great directors of cinema, so this profile of Steven Spielberg was perfect for me. Even if you’re not a huge Spielberg fan, it’ll be enlightening for you too, if only to revel in Morris’ excellent writing.

An existential guide to making friends:

The first thing you need to know is that friendship is not natural. If you were natural you would be a moss. Moss doesn't have friends. Moss just spreads, cold and damp and indifferent, and sometimes another moss spreads nearby, and together they make a bog, and then the bog swallows a horse. But you, unfortunately, are not a moss. You are a person, and people are creatures that rot if they are alone.

“As far as artist signatures go, Jan van Kessel's seventeenth-century painting in which he spells out his own name with caterpillars and snakes must be up there with the best of them.”

We need more of this kind of fun (not frivolous, but fun) on the internet: the 100 greatest bird names of all time.

Over one million children around the world have used the LEGO MRI Scanner set, helping children who have to undergo the procedure understand the MRI procedures by learning through play. A brilliant and compassionate idea.

A gem by Heather Havrilesky: your mental health is physical health:

Your mind IS your body. And when your body is undernourished and dehydrated and weak and overworked or underworked, your mind is also suffering. When your mind is blunt and slow and resistant and dragging, something if off. You need more fuel, more rest, more water, more compassion for how your microbiome thrives and when it stalls out.

Best video I’ve watched in ages: every major fashion designer; explained and commented upon, with snippets from their fashion shows to complement the explanations. Loved this: