#117. Anthony Davis and You

The tradin' is the hardest part.

Josh Gondelman

Feb 03, 2025

Hi everyone,

Sorry again for another few-hours-late newsletter! I’m still on west coast time, and I was visiting family all weekend. So my free newsletter that I write out of…a fear of disappearing entirely I guess…is a little behind schedule. But now here we go!

On Saturday morning I was sitting on a restaurant patio in Los Angeles with Maris and our friend Emily when a little girl, maybe two years old, walked over and offered me a packet of Stevia. “Thank you,” I said. “That’s very generous of you, and I appreciate your kindness.” She smiled and toddled (age appropriate method of conveyance) away.

Obviously her gift was not super helpful. I didn’t need a small amount of sweetener, especially not one a little kid had germ-fingered all over. But her enthusiasm for sharing was so charming to witness, and I wanted to encourage it. Two days later, I found the little paper tube in my shirt pocket and it made me laugh. What a wholesome interaction to have with a stranger’s kid. It reminded me of how I love road trips but don’t have a car.

PEP TALK FOR ANTHONY DAVIS

Former Lakers star Anthony Davis in a Lakers uniform looking slightly befuddled in front of a crowd in a stadium. — I bet he also made this face when he found out he was traded. //Stephen Lew-Imagn Images

I don’t want to go on too long here, because I know not every reader is a big NBA fan, but I do want to offer a few words of encouragement to The Brow, a nickname whose provenance even basketball novices can glean from the above photograph.

Anthony Davis! People are really talking a lot of shit about your basketball skills because you, the tenth or fifteenth best player in the NBA, were traded by the Lakers for Luka Doncic, the third or fourth best player in the NBA. They are saying it was a bad deal for the Dallas Mavericks because you are a geriatric 31 years old in contrast to Luka’s youthful-if-occasionally-sluggish 25 years of age.

Look, big guy (an objectively accurate monicker). Tune out the noise. You are still near the top of your, and consequently the, game. You’ve made so much money. You’ve won a championship that I’d rather not talk about unless I’m besmirching it with insults that are, if I’m being honest, dubious at best. I will not light a rhetorical torch and take my readers deep into the archives of NBA rivalry lore to explain what these insults are or why they are specious. They literally did not sign up for that. But just know that I resent you for that championship, and I will make up excuses to diminish its significance.

There is literally no shame in being the twelfth best at something rather than the fourth best at that thing. There’s less glory in it, sure. But there’s no reason to feel bad about being near the top of the mountain instead of finding yourself slightly nearer to the summit. Discussions of legacy are for other people to fill time with on their podcasts, not your own satisfaction. When you do the best you can, and that best is close to the best that’s possible, you deserve to feel proud, not insufficient. The greatness of great is not diminished by the existence of greater or greatest.

If it helps, I’m personally rooting for you much more now now. As a Boston Celtics maniac, this trade condenses my birthright hatred of the Los Angeles Lakers with my recent spiteful feelings towards Luka Doncic stemming from last year’s NBA Finals matchup between the Celtics and the Mavericks. This is not “being mad.” It is actually an efficient streamlining of my emotional energy. I am excited to (as I said to a friend) turn into the Joker in a relatively benign way that takes a little of the sting out of the ongoing political Darth Vaderization I’ve been feeling. So thank you for that as well.

PEP TALK FOR ALL READERS

It appears that, heading into the weekend, before the seismic NBA trade discussed above and the honestly-pretty-good Grammy Awards, the world’s richest man (presumably by…asking the president nicely or waiting for him to doze off?) was (apparently) given access to all of America’s personal information and control over several government agencies. Some people are calling this a coup, and I’m too dumb and have been spending too much time watching Ally McBeal with my in-laws to have figured out whether I think that word applies. I’m not sure if it’s a coup when the leader of a nation is too lazy to drive a country into the ground on his own and decides to privatize that function to keep his most annoying friend busy. It is, however…bad.

If you’d like to stop here for a moment and imagine some kind of tragedy befalling Elon Musk, I welcome it. For legal reasons, let’s stick to stuff that is not a threat and maybe can’t even actually happen. Close your eyes and picture a dragon crushing him to bits with her (going by Shrek’s dragon gender science here) big old teeth and then swallowing him in little chunks. Or envision him stranded alone on Mars as a pinhole-sized leak in the oxygenated biosphere slowly allows the breathable air to escape.

That feels good, right? It doesn’t help anything, but it definitely takes a little of the edge off of the realization that all the safeguards build into American government are so many crispy dead pine needles scattered before the leaf blower of late capitalism.

It’s easy (and comfy!) to get discouraged and unplug. And, honestly, there’s only so much news even the most informed U.S. resident can consume before they’ve scratched that particular bug bite raw. It can seem really hopeless, knowing we (most people) are up against a few wealthy monsters and the folks who are lining up to gobble their boots raw and unseasoned like high-quality sashimi.

While we’ve seen some big picture pushback from Democratic governors and attorneys general (I love that pluralization, and I’m trying to be grateful for small things), it’s certainly not enough to stem the bullshit tide (nautical term) considering the proliferation of ostensibly left-leaning politicians like, I don’t know let’s pick one at random, NYC Mayor Eric Adams who seems entirely interested in stopping by the Corruption Store that is our executive branch to ease his own legal troubles.

The silver lining (which, when you think of it, is not even that great a thing) is that we don’t have to wait around for some kind of legislative solution. There are people who need help now, and we can help them any time we want. I recommend…now?

Here’s a doc of ways to be helpful and politically engaged that writer and activist Mariame Kaba put together! Not everybody has the same capacity for all forms of engagement, so it can be beneficial for both you (whoever you are) and your community to review what’s on the menu. Maybe you’re not a “call your reps” person, but you have time to volunteer at a food bank. Or maybe you are busy but have a couple of bucks to direct towards a nearby mutual aid organization. Perhaps you can learn how to use Narcan and carry some in your bag when you’re out and about.

I don’t mean to be too sincere here, but it’s a real mitzvah to do good where and when you can. And doing that helps to relieve a little of the stress over how much you can’t change even with a lot of effort and stress snacking.

PICK-ME-UP SONG OF THE WEEK:
”Severance Opening Titles (Maris’s Version)”

Last week, our friend Bex asked my wife Maris what she thinks the words to the Severance opening titles would be, and she replied with these kind of beautiful impressionistic lyrics. (Inspired by the fact that it always seems to be snowing near Lumon hq, and some of the show is shot in the Garden State.)

Snow in New Jersey…
Snow in New Jersey…
Bitter winds
Icy storms
Bitter winds/Bitter winds
Icy storms/Icy storms

Anyway! Try not to think those words next time you hear that tinkling piano music and try to decipher what the images of the show’s opening sequence mean.

Similarly stuck in my head is this week’s bonus song “California Stars” by Billy Bragg and Wilco. One of the great pleasures of living in a big bright city is how beautiful the night sky looks when you’re anywhere else. I don’t think if I lived out in the California desert, I’d be able to maintain a nightly wonderment for the constellations (which between me and Maris we can recognize exactly one of), but for three nights a year, it’s a marvel to consider the vastness of the universe. For most of the rest of the time, I don’t need to feel so cosmically puny. Sorry, the cosmos!