This is the memoir of an addict. While bad stuff is flying in Vietnam, Chicago, our universities—and where not?—it matters to me whether a team of strangers wins or loses a game. Which is madness. I like to think of myself, in the privacy of self-concern, as a serious man. What are the New York Knicks to me? What am I to them? What am I doing throwing in my emotional lot with a group of basketball players I’ve never met, exhausting my energy in the frustrating non-activity of fandom? During last year’s play-offs I discovered that a number of my acquaintances—all serious men—were harboring the same secret passion. Somewhat reassuring this discovery. Somewhat. The comfort of a madman who discovers that there are other lunatics walking around. I figure that if there are enough of us, we can vote ourselves demonstrably sane. Madness in all societies is minority activity.
This past summer a contentious friend, fresh from the battlefield of San Francisco State, taunted me about what he considered my frivolous pastime. “How can an intelligent man concern himself with a bunch of goons running up and down the court trying to put an oversized ball through a goddamn hole?” Rather than answer him—actually, I couldn’t think of anything to say—I affected to overlook his remarks as well-meaning aggression, though I understood him better than I pretended. One is hard pressed to define the nature of one’s pleasures. This is written less to answer my friend’s objections than to come to terms with my own, which I suspect include his. What I want to do, insofar as memory allows, is to observe myself—New York novelist as New York Knick fan—observing the game as played through a season. And what is it all about?
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When I started on Ozempic, in April 2025, my appetite was by definition abnormal: I ate too much, too often, with little regard for anything besides quieting whatever compulsion drove me to this sort of behavior. A weekly dose of the GLP-1 agonist semaglutide, which is sold under brand names like Ozempic and Wegovy, transformed me. It diminished both my hunger and my cravings for processed sugar and fried foods; it made me into the sort of person who eats when hungry and at no other time, which is something I hadn’t experienced for at least a decade.
We tend to talk more about the way these drugs reshape our bodies than the effect they have on our thinking. There is real psychological power in feeling, at long last, like you are in control of the appetites that once controlled you. Semaglutide slows the digestive process so that one meal keeps a person feeling fuller for longer, while also curbing cravings, so that all calories become more or less equal. Fried foods and processed sugar are no more appealing than a salad or some chicken breast, making it easier to tell yourself: No, I’m not going to eat a doughnut or some pizza. Instead I’ll have a protein bar or an apple or maybe nothing at all.
In my case, Ozempic lived up to its burgeoning reputation as a miracle drug. The weight came off so quickly at first that I found myself with questions about the effects this might have. Was it possible to get all the macronutrients I needed while eating so little? Would my fats and proteins spin out of balance? Was my skin ready for the body it contained to shrink so quickly? These questions were not always easy to answer.
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Sometimes you just can’t get a song out of your head. You hear it everywhere you go, like a haunt. For Stephen Root, it’s the sea-hag song from episode 3 of Widow’s Bay. The 74-year-old actor stars on the Apple TV horror-comedy series about a cursed New England town as the island’s crazed believer, a fisherman named Wyck. Opposite him is the skeptic town mayor (played by Matthew Rhys), who tries his best to ignore Wyck’s warnings until he comes face-to-face with one of the island’s wacky monsters: a sea hag. She’s one of Root’s favorites.
“The first scene Matthew and I did was that scene in episode 3, me telling him about the hag,” Root tells me. The gag was always that she kills you by crawling onto your bed and sitting on your face (“I laughed so hard when I read that,” the actor says), but the shanty song didn’t include Root’s raspy refrain until he gave it a try on set. “Every sailor knows the story of the hag,” he begins, then he takes a beat and whisper-sings, “Aawoo... Aawoo.”
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First, conjure an image of Jacob Elordi. Tall and charismatic? Of course. But what’s he doing? Maybe gazing meaningfully into someone’s eyes, tamping down a deep-seated rage, smoldering, in some sense or another. After breaking into Hollywood with Netflix’s glossy Kissing Booth movies, Elordi quickly established himself as an actor drawn to more dramatic roles. The angry, insecure Nate Jacobs in Euphoria. The tortured Creature in Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. The also tortured Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. This guy yearns for intensity, something to sink his teeth into.
Or maybe he just enjoys taking a load off.
“I still like a kitchen-table drama,” he tells me. “Sitting, with words. You don’t have to run so much.”
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Jack Huston is thinking about the wounded. Not the scarred or deformed but the people with rough exteriors who tend to have sensitive souls. "We're surrounded by angels, and we don't notice them," the 43-year-old actor tells me over breakfast. "I don't want to tell stories about bad people. I find it more fascinating when people think somebody's bad and they end up being wonderful. To not judge a book by its cover is great. It's what I tell my kids a lot."
Huston's work as an actor taught him that. Nearly 16 years ago, he broke out in his acclaimed performance as Richard Harrow, a disfigured Army sharpshooter in the HBO drama Boardwalk Empire. Characterized by his sandpaper voice and an uncanny tin mask to cover injuries from his service, Richard was a walking tragedy, a lonesome golem with a gun, a silent-movie monster under the employ of gangsters. Inside, Richard yearned to be whole. He often dreamed of a beach with a woman to love and his feet in the sand.
Now Huston is back in the headspace of veterans struggling to find peace back home. It's a late morning at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan when I meet Huston for an interview pegged to his role as Flint Marko, aka the Sandman, in the new Marvel series Spider-Noir. I'll refrain from spoiling too much, but just know that Flint's ability to harden and shape-shift his body is anything but a superpower.
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A video popped into my feed last week showing Kevin O’Leary, one of the Shark Tank hosts, extolling the virtues of drinking wine for breakfast. “This is my biggest weakness—I love wine,” he says on Logan Paul’s vodcast, Impaulsive. “But if you drink wine three hours before you go to bed, you really screw up your sleep. You get no REM. The best thing to do is get up in the morning and drink.”
Paul and his cohosts roar with approval, then O’Leary adds, “I haven’t gotten to that place yet.”
The clip is three years old, but by some trick of the algorithm it’s resurfaced and gone viral, inspiring social-media users and media outlets to declare: “Shark Tank Star Kevin O’Leary Reveals He Drinks Wine at Breakfast.” He didn’t reveal that, actually, but why let the facts get in the way of a good story?
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