In Shouts & Murmurs, Jesse Eisenberg imagines what happens when a marriage counselor tries to heckle at a Knicks game: “If we’re going to count the score, why not count smiles? Or pats on the back? Or simple gestures that tell the other person, ‘Hey, I get it’?”http://nyr.kr/15RSI5O

On the eve of the Sweet Sixteen, Ian Crouch categorized and ranked the surviving teams, with an eye toward tame mascots: http://nyr.kr/10etgA3

(Source: newyorker.com)

March Madness could cost you some serious bucks, and not just in the office bracket pool. Daniel Fromson explains: http://nyr.kr/10o0HDP

Marshall Henderson may be a P.R. nightmare for the N.C.A.A., says Ian Crouch— but one of its own making: http://nyr.kr/ZOeGiz

Photograph by Andy Lyons/Getty.

Optimism vs. Past Experience

In what promises to be the first of its many wins in this tournament, top-ranked Unjustified Optimism tips off against Everything You’ve Learned Over the Years when that guy Jonathan stops by your cubicle to see if you want to chip in a hundred dollars for this year’s March Madness pool. Note that neither of Optimism’s traditional first-round rivals—Self-Control and Awareness of Your Own Limitations—even qualified for the postseason this year.

 … and other personal March Madness match-ups: http://nyr.kr/WzhbsH

Nilkanth Patel on dunking—and being dunked on—in the age of YouTube, Twitter, and 24-hour sports networks: http://nyr.kr/YUmPUz

The response to Rodman’s trip also seems connected to a larger, more troubling phenomenon, which is the persistent strain in the popular imagination that there is something simply funny about North Korea itself. The country’s secrecy, its technological backwardness, its ham-fisted and anachronistic public pageantry, and the Kim regime’s well-documented eccentricity all add up to a subject for which the Onion headlines write themselves. When the most you know about a country’s leader is that he was a fanatical devotee of Michael Jackson, and the most you know about his son is that he loves basketball, then it is easy to look for the next joke in the news that trickles across that country’s borders. So last week, there was a sense that North Korea and Rodman, two versions of strange and damaging excess, somehow deserved each other. There are, of course, twenty-five million or so North Korean citizens who may disagree. Leave it to Gawker, which illustrated a post on the trip with photographs of North Korean famine victims, to remind us of the moral questions posed by Rodman’s goofy escapade. The world has turned on its head: dystopia, indeed.

Ian Crouch on Dennis Rodman’s trip to North Korea as the guest of honor of Kim Jong-un: http://nyr.kr/Z2Msnf

Photograph by Jason Mojica/VICE/AP

(Source: newyorker.com)

“The conventional wisdom, though, was that James needed to “grow up” as a player and a teammate in order to win games and the affection of fans. But James was compelled to grow up long ago, way back in his late teens—to become the savior of a unlucky franchise, a torchbearer for several multinational corporations, and the public face of an entire sport. Maybe what we’re remembering now is what sentimental sports fans have always known—that we like our athletes most when they play the game the way that we swear we’d do it if we had the chance. At twenty-eight, it seems, LeBron James is finally old enough to act like a kid.”

Continue reading Ian Crouch on LeBron James’s transformation: http://nyr.kr/XLBY8g

Photograph by David Santiago/AP.

(Source: newyorker.com)

Reeves Wiedeman on the small, smart decisions the New York Knicks made in the wake of Jeremy Lin’s departure: http://nyr.kr/U88uDC

Photograph by Aaron Vincent Elkaim/Canadian Press/AP.

“Desire is suffering. The Lakers are an illusion. Jobs are an illusion. Kobe is an illusion…”