He is having the night of his life. Thirty-one-year-old Shams Charania is ESPN’s Senior NBA Insider, but not tonight. Tonight he’s at his cousin’s wedding in Toronto, where drinks are flowing, music is blasting, and he’s trying not to check his phone. A single text message slices through his defenses: The Phoenix Suns are close to a deal to trade Kevin Durant to the Houston Rockets.
“As soon as I got that text, I wasn’t dancing anymore,” Charania tells me now.
Charania remembers every trade he’s ever reported, including Houston’s earth-shattering move during what was meant to be a night off. After receiving that text, it was on to fact-checking, then catching a flight back to Oklahoma City to report the news live on TV because, as if all of that weren’t enough, the trade went down right before game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals. (He also dropped the bomb on social media.) “How these things usually work out is that the fifteen minutes you’re not on your phone?” Charania warns. “You miss it.”
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Things have been so weird between us for so long, and I’m at the point where I need to get some things off my chest. I’m sitting here in my bedroom, and the wind outside is screaming like a half-flayed martyr. The moon is coming up huge, in a way that I’ve seen only once before this far north, with the soothing off-whiteness and happily crooked roundness of a communion wafer. I have candles lit, James Taylor’s on the hi-fi, they’re forecasting rain for tomorrow, and I’m thinking of you. Yes, again. Don’t get annoyed; don’t get defensive. (Why are you so defensive lately? Don’t say you aren’t. You are.) It’s just that, as you well know, this is the time of year when we’ve usually had our biggest problems—oh, April, you cruel, cruel month!—and it’s also the month when, one year ago (if you care to remember), we last communicated.
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The easy answer is one you already know: A record is reassuringly not the insubstantial electromagnetic waves that emanate from your phone and travel to your AirPods in streaming; a record is a physical manifestation of music. Going through the stacks, getting the tactile feel of each album, the physical sensation, building the anticipation about what you might find next: These are experiences a streaming service simply can’t give you.
Yet this is no mere nostalgia I’m talking about here; it’s much deeper than that, imbued with maybe even more melancholy. I believe I speak for a large portion of my generation when I say that we yearn for a pre-Internet age we never got to live through, an age when loving music meant collecting your favorite albums, clutching the lyric sheets and reading them over and over, poring over the liner notes to swallow each word whole, to see the stanzas stacked up and wonder how so few words could make you feel so deeply. When music wasn’t just listening—it was learning, studying, holding.
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The room is too small for him. Even when he’s sitting, his presence overwhelms the space almost comically. Fernando Mendoza, the improbable national champion, unquestioned Heisman Trophy winner, and soon-to-be number-one NFL draft pick, is immured in a conference room in an office park in Irvine, California, at Excel Sports Management, the agency to which he has entrusted his future, talking about the daily drills and exercises he’s doing to make himself a better quarterback. There’s an idle flat-screen hanging on one wall, a whiteboard and some dry-erase markers, errant water bottles, and an Office Depot table with swivel chairs, one of which he is swiveling in.
Mendoza is explaining how he’s handling what they call the fishbowl, through which masses of people are watching him, analyzing him, prognosticating about him, doubting him, praising him, and expecting unreasonably high achievements from him at an age when he still gets carded. These masses include football fans broadly, of course. In his case, more specifically, they include the front office of the Las Vegas Raiders (including part owner Tom Brady), the team that appears certain to draft Mendoza with its number-one pick; Catholic and Cuban American communities back in Miami, where he grew up; TV analysts and online columnists; and stud high school quarterbacks in every corner of America who believe they too might rise up to become a star through hard work and prayer.
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Michael Cruz Kayne’s son Fisher died from sepsis in 2009, just 34 days after he was born. Fisher’s twin brother lived, and Kayne and his wife, Carrie, also have a daughter. The family’s world was destroyed. It needed to be rebuilt.
Exactly ten years later, Kayne, a stand-up comic, started writing on Twitter about his grief over Fisher, and about grief itself, and what he wrote was frank and beautiful and sometimes very funny. The comments started blipping in by the thousands upon thousands, people starving for a voice that talked about grief in a way that didn’t sound like a Hallmark card with watercolor lilies on the front.
The tweets turned into a one-man show that Kayne titled Sorry for Your Loss, which is the kind of phrase that shows up on those cards. If it’s possible for a piece of art to shock you with joy, that’s what Kayne’s work does. It shreds you and then somehow leaves you feeling whole, and feeling good, and feeling like everything’s going to be okay.
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Many other writers and fans picked up on The Pitt's obsession with car and motorcycle crashes this season—but just about all of us assumed that the series was foreshadowing trouble for Robby. For one terrifying moment in the finale, it almost feels as if The Pitt is about to pull a Grey's Anatomy-esque shocker in which Al-Hashimi enters her car, drives away, and suffers another seizure on the way home. Just as we feel the twist coming, Al-Hashimi breaks down crying in her car, and we never see her again this episode. Will she even return to PTMC after this? If she does, you can expect a hell of a heel turn.
Or, more likely, something as icy as what we see between Robby and Langdon in the finale. Just like his run-in with Mohan, Robby seemingly has the best intentions to apologize to Langdon after shunning—and humiliating—him on his first day back at work from rehab. But while Mohan bit her tongue, Langdon wasn't so forgiving. "You know who I saw in rehab?" he asks. "I saw a bunch of guys just like you. The only difference is, they’ve accepted that they need help. I think that you’re afraid to admit that the mighty Dr. Robinavitch isn't perfect."
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