America has long obsessed over celebrity and the quest for fame. Thirty years ago, millions of moviegoers got to see that desire up close thanks to the groundbreaking documentary Hoop Dreams, which focused on two teenage basketball players, Arthur Agee and William Gates. The pair never fulfilled their dream of making the NBA, but Agee and Gates ended up making more of an impact than many who did.

… “[Hoop Dreams] shared with the world the reality of when you don’t make it,” says Gates. “There’s a lot more [people like that] on our side than the ones that make it … And what you got to do when the new dream [forms after]. Maybe it’s coaching or something else in the sport. But I had to channel what the new dream looks like at that point.”

The two remain as inseparable from each other as they are from the story of basketball itself. At first then exposure from the documentary was fun and glitzy. The two made money (though not necessarily millions) thanks to the movie’s success. They were invited to speak to schools and teams, to present at awards shows. They met political figures and rubbed elbows with celebrities at parties. Gates met Michael Jordan and later even worked out with him and was offered a workout with the Washington Wizards. But his body couldn’t hold up with his ambitions and injuries forced him to retire from the sport. Agee chased his dream of playing as far as it could take him, from college to semi-pro. He also dabbled in acting. Now, he runs a Hoop Dreams clothing line and continues to do speaking events. He and Gates, who is a preacher in San Antonio and recently published a memoir and has his own clothing line, host a Hoop Dreams podcast. And they are planning a sequel to the movie, too. But despite their fame not every door flew open.

“When I was doing the NBA thing [trying to work out for a team], it was like ‘Arthur who?’ When my agent made those phone calls, it was ‘Arthur Agee who?’” Agee says. “That’s how GMs and scouts would be. I had to go the semi-pro route. Really, the actual NBA players – those are the guys who give me and William our respect because they understood.”

More at https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/mar/07/hoop-dreams-anniversary-arthur-agee-william-gates-today?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Urgency. It was never treated with sufficient urgency. For the first time in American history, a President lost an election and then tried to overthrow the election. And NOBODY treated it with the urgency it required. Because what Trump did was so unprecedented, our entire political and justice systems froze, and they ALL simply waited too damn long to deal with it.

The 93-year-old widow of a Wall Street financier has donated $1 billion to a Bronx medical school, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, with instructions that the gift be used to cover tuition for all students going forward.

The donor, Dr. Ruth Gottesman, is a former professor at Einstein, where she studied learning disabilities, developed a screening test and ran literacy programs. It is one of the largest charitable donations to an educational institution in the United States and most likely the largest to a medical school.

The fortune came from her late husband, David Gottesman, known as Sandy, who was a protégé of Warren Buffett and had made an early investment in Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate Mr. Buffett built.

The donation is notable not only for its staggering size, but also because it is going to a medical institution in the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough. The Bronx has a high rate of premature deaths and ranks as the unhealthiest county in New York. Over the past generation, a number of billionaires have given hundreds of millions of dollars to better-known medical schools and hospitals in Manhattan, the city’s wealthiest borough.

Gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/nyregion/albert-einstein-college-medicine-bronx-donation.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Is it frustration? Something deeper, or more shallow? I woke up this morning to see that the front page of the Times has five stories above the virtual fold. All five were about Joe Biden’s memory, press conference, special counsel report. Full news day, I guess. Yesterday I noticed the Times’ Astead Herndon on this on Twitter. He is not some slightly younger version of David Broder. He’s a pretty new entrant to the upper echelon of elite DC news media. I think he graduated from college as Trump’s first campaign was getting underway. But the acculturation appears complete. After Hur’s report dropped he wrote that despite questions about Biden’s age being “the most impt non-Trump issue in this elec[tion]” the DC press corps has “a sorta gentleman’s agreement for the last year to pretend like it’s not. Maybe that ends now.”

Am I taking crazy pills here? Do I have dementia? I think it’s fair to say that at least a third of the political chatter about President Biden for the last year, and quite possibly half of it, is about the President’s age. But maybe the omertà is about to end? I’m still trying to process the idea that a top Washington reporter really thinks there’s been some kind of fix-is-in ban on discussing the President’s age. As David says, the press sees the blood in the water and this will keep up for a while now. As for the report itself, if you missed it, I shared my thoughts on that yesterday. The President’s ongoing verbal gaffes speak for themselves. I wanted to zoom in on something a bit different about yesterday’s spectacle. Aside from discussions of the President’s cognitive faculties, the main focus — actually the two were melded together — was commentary about his anger. This seemed to be a universal response from the DC press corps, that the whole impromptu press conference was a mess because the President displayed clear and clearly genuine anger.

…It’s probably not lost on you that Donald Trump is basically permanently angry. And not just angry in response to particular events but the kind of perpetual and often peristaltic anger that in day to day life most people find threatening or at least off-putting. But we virtually never hear anything about the purported damage from expressions of anger when it’s Donald Trump. That’s not bias. It’s simply that it’s assumed. So it just doesn’t come up. It’s no longer policed. That’s just what Donald Trump does. But there’s an additional factor that people don’t notice. Being responsive to this kind of press policing signals a basic weakness, a perpetual hedging, a practice of being controlled and responsive to the press chorus rather than indifferent to it. Trump’s able to work outside this framework of policing because he simply ignores it and because of that reporters decide it doesn’t apply to him. This isn’t just Biden. It’s not even just Trump. Democrats for a host of reasons tend to be far more responsive to this kind of policing. People want to see expressions of agency and power from political leaders. Trump’s ability to set the terms for how the press reacts and interprets his actions is itself an expression of power.

All of which is to say that it wasn’t just okay that Biden showed some anger. It was good. And he should do more of it. Both because people expect people to have normal and appropriate human responses and grow latent suspicions when they don’t see it but also because it’s Biden showing some energy and direction. They should put him in front of reporters and the cameras more, not less. If you are responding to the tut-tutting and line-drawing of the prestige media you’re losing. It’s as simple as that. You’re always either reacting or being reacted to. The latter is always better.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/more-angry-biden-please