PicoBlog

Tim Duncan was never one to seek attention. He never cared about fame or flattery or any of that stuff. The only things he cared about were being the best basketball player you could be and winning championships. So when he decided to make the 2015-16 NBA season -one of the San Antonio Spurs’ best campaigns ever- his final one, no one knew. No one knew that Game 6 of the 2016 Western Conference Semi-Finals was going to be the last time he would step onto the court as a professional basketball player.

LOS ANGELES — They say that he who laughs last, laughs best. The Minnesota Timberwolves enjoyed the spoils on Monday night as they dispatched the LA Clippers by a final score of 121-100. Then they enjoyed the laughs. Following the game, a trio of Minnesota players and a few other members of the traveling party could be heard in the back hallways of Crypto.com Arena loudly singing together as laughs bellowed out from the group.

Monday night after the Met Gala, E! premiered its new fashion competition show, the annoyingly-spelled OMG Fashun, hosted by and starring Julia Fox, with a heavy assist from stylist Law Roach. The log-line is pretty simple: It’s Project Runway in 30 minute increments if all the challenges are Unconventional Materials, and the client is always Julia Fox, a woman who I believe would have been a Club Kid Extraordinaire if she’d only been born twenty years earlier, and who currently our kookiest Famous For Wearing Crazy Shit Around Town celebrity.

There’s a stroller sitting in the back room of my garage. It’s been there for months. Untouched. I really need to list it on Facebook Marketplace, but I’m not quite ready to part ways. It’s bittersweet. I don’t miss schlepping around All Of The Things now that my kids are self-powered. But, when I think back on the hundreds of miles that I covered with our pram, my heart feels a sting.

Directed by Michael Haneke France/Austria/Germany, 2003 This week’s film is a disaster movie but like no disaster movie you have seen before. Released in 2003 between Michael Haneke’s critically acclaimed films The Piano Teacher and Hidden (Caché), Time of the Wolf does not seem to have had the same cultural impact which is surprising given its proximity to 9/11. But then again, that may be the explanation for the film’s muted presence.

Timothy SnyderSnyder is an American historian of Europe and a public intellectual on both continents. Among his books are On Tyranny and Bloodlands, which appear in new editions in 2022. His work inspires art and music, and is read at protests around the world. ncG1vNJzZmirpZfAta3CpGWcp51kjbS62J2cqw%3D%3D

Hey movie lovers! As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word! This week: The plastics are back once again with a new version of Mean Girls, featuring an emergent pop star. Jake Johnson directs an indie thriller for Hulu. Plus, movies as digital tourism and a true masterpiece come to Netflix. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Adam Sandler gets a serious acting showcase on Netflix next month.

Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my tech and media newsletter. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button: The last year has been a good one for newsletter publishing platform Substack. After securing a $15.3 million funding round in July 2019, it went on to lure hundreds of high profile writers onto its service. In late 2019, a group of prominent never Trumpers from the National Review and Weekly Standard banded together to launch a magazine on Substack.

When I head north to visit family in Norway, I've usually got three ingredients in my suitcase. Pomegranate molasses. Pul biber (aka Aleppo pepper). And za'atar. These ingredients aren’t only essential to the food I make, but living in Turkey, I’ve been able to source excellent versions of each. What’s more, they’re still hard to find in Norway, which is lagging much of continental Europe in discovering the cuisines of the Eastern Mediterranean (my first book, published in 2018, was many a Norwegian’s very first meeting with these cuisines and ingredients).