Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert has once again stepped into controversy by releasing a new video demanding that Nancy Pelosi remove the protective fencing around the U.S. Capitol building that was erected after the January 6 insurrection attack. Considering the assault on the Capitol was the direct result of former President Donald Trump and other Republicans inciting right-wing violence by pushing the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, Boebert doesn’t help her case by ending the video with audio of two gunshots and the sound of a shotgun reloading. Alluding to violence to demand the removal of fence built to stop right-wing violence is the kind of bizarre argument that only further cements Boebert’s reputation as “Sarah Palin 2.0.”
The video received swift condemnation from Boebert’s fellow Colorado congressman Jason Crow, who has voiced his concerns with the new brand of “depraved” GOP politicians like Boebert and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Via Mediaite:
“What we have seen over the last three years, and certainly on January 6th, is that words have consequences, especially if you’re an elected official. People listen to you and they act on what you say, and very real people are getting hurt and getting killed, because some people don’t understand that. That’s a leadership failure and we can’t tolerate it.”
Boebert’s video also faced backlash on social media for its tone-deaf gunfire:
Remember when you tweeted out Pelosi’s location to your fellow terrorists as they stormed the Capitol on 1/6?
On top of the Pelosi video, Boebert’s obsession with guns shot her the foot a second time this week. While speaking on the floor of the House on Wednesday, Boebert recounted the tale of a man who “died in a fight” outside of her restaurant. According to Boebert, the man would still be alive if he armed himself, which prompted her and her employees to start carrying while at work. It’s a story she’s told before in an effort to promote gun rights, but there’s just one small problem: The man died of an overdose.
According to the Washington Post, the subject of Boebert’s anecdote, Anthony Green, was in a minor “scuffle” where Green actually attacked another man who had a prosthetic leg. A third party stepped in, and Green fled only to be found dead the next morning. While his death was initially investigated as a homicide, the autopsy report revealed that Green had suffered only a small gash from the bar fight and died of “methamphetamine intoxication.” Contrary to Boebert’s claim, carrying a gun would have done nothing to prevent that outcome.
It’s been a while since Khalid’s last album, Free Spirit, but he’s kept busy in the interim, popping up on collaborations with Kane Brown and Swae Lee (“Be Like That“), Alicia Keys (“So Done“), Victoria Monet (“Experience“), and Justin Bieber (on “Peaches” with Daniel Caesar from the upcoming Bieber album Justice). He lends his latest vocal assist to singer-songwriter Watts, remixing Watts’ 2018 single “Feels” and releasing a trippy, 3D-contrast visualizer to bring new life to the mellow ballad.
There’s little information out there about Watts, other than his real name, Jacob Watts, and origins, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A Genius profile for Jacob Watts lists his songwriting credits: He’s got a song called “Talk About It,” another called “Right, Alright,” and a collaboration with Adam Agin titled “Quicksand Arms.” Whatever he’s been up to since 2018, it looks like he may intend to make a comeback this year, and judging from his scant discography, he’s got the chops to craft a solid career if he can turn up the consistency of his releases.
Khalid, meanwhile, plans to follow up Free Spirit this year as well, according to what he told a fan on Twitter in September.
Tucker Carlson’s takedown of female soldiers angered top military officials, and Sen. Tammy Duckworth isn’t done with the Fox News host yet. This may or may not be the cap in the feather of Tucker’s headline-making month, so let’s do a brief recap here. Today, Jon Stewart apologized to d*cks for comparing them to Tucker, and this week, Tucker patted Piers Morgan on the back over his racist bashing of Meghan Markle. This happened after Tucker made up a story about low sperm count and weed, but he actually may have gone too far when he ridiculed women in combat while declaring, “Pregnant women are going to fight our wars. It’s a mockery of the US military.”
Prominent members of the military community (including several officials and the Pentagon spokesperson) of all political persuasions came for Tucker, and Joe Walsh declared, “Every woman in the military I’ve ever met could absolutely kick Tucker Carlson’s ass.” One of the most notable pushbacks, however, came from Senator Tammy Duckworth — the retired Army National Guard lieutenant colonel, Purple Heart recipient, and Iraqi War vet who lost both legs in combat — who joined in with some justifiable profanity.
“F*ck Tucker Carlson,” Duckworth tweeted. “While he was practicing his two-step, America’s female warriors were hunting down Al Qaeda and proving the strength of America’s women.” The Asian-American senator included a frightening GIF from his Dancing With The Stars stint.
F*ck Tucker Carlson. While he was practicing his two-step, America’s female warriors were hunting down Al Qaeda and proving the strength of America’s women.
Happy belated International Women’s Day to everyone but Tucker, who even I can dance better than. pic.twitter.com/E4wchht9lA
Tammy followed up with a tweet, in which she pointed people to July 2020 New York Times coverage of Tucker’s beef with her. “Tucker never learns,” the senator tweeted. “This wasn’t the first and probably won’t be the last time he goes after women who sacrifice in uniform so he doesn’t have to. But no matter how many times he insults our Armed Forces, I won’t be silent.”
Tucker never learns.
This wasn’t the first and probably won’t be the last time he goes after women who sacrifice in uniform so he doesn’t have to.
But no matter how many times he insults our Armed Forces, I won’t be silent. https://t.co/BPjuo6SCzs
It bears reminding that Duckworth previously tweeted, “Does @TuckerCarlson want to walk a mile in my legs and then tell me whether or not I love America?”
Does @TuckerCarlson want to walk a mile in my legs and then tell me whether or not I love America?
With the linked piece, Duckworth reheated her previous criticism (as detailed by the New York Times) how Tucker strenuously proclaimed his right to attack both Duckworth and Sen. Ilhan Omar because he felt “allowed to question their patriotism.” He also referred to Duckworth as a “moron” on Fox News while complaining that she wants to “tear down our statues.” He added, “Tammy Duckworth is not a child, at least not technically; she is a sitting United States senator.”
To that, the NYT previously pointed out that Duckworth’s ancestors have long served in the military, all the way back to the American Revolution. And vote Vets pushed back at Tucker, too, while describing Tammy as “tough as hell” and describing Tucker as “on a suicide mission to take her down.” It looks like Duckworth’s continuing mission against Carlson is a far more successful one.
Riz Ahmed doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would like the shape of a square.
Those four lines that box in and neatly categorize everything from talent to personality to potential in ways that not only feel uninspired but dangerously limiting often pop up, in the real world and in the fantasy Hollywood peddles on-screen. They task artists (and, in many ways, audiences) with filtering their selves through an unyielding prism. The lens of a camera can be in the shape of a square. The boxes on a customs form often are too. Squares separate and contain, but they also segregate and cheapen our individuality and unique backgrounds.
But, again … Riz Ahmed doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would like the shape of a square.
And the trajectory of his career feels like proof of that. Rather than finding one lane to spend his career coasting through, the multihyphenate has spent the better part of two decades dismantling the barriers that have gridlocked his contemporaries.
A north London kid and the son of Pakistani immigrants, Ahmed never really fit. He spent his youth freestyle battling on the streets of Wembley, fully-embodying what he describes as the “Brit-Asian rudeboy culture” that dominated the UK in the early 90s. But he’d trade in spitting verses on pirate radio for the posh classrooms of private schools — ones he attended with the help of scholarships — and eventually Oxford in his teen years. A childhood spent straddling disparate worlds, learning to “code-switch” and acclimate himself to circles no one else from his block moved within lent itself to a career that refused to conform.
Music was Ahmed’s first outlet. It’s what he turned to when he couldn’t find space to express himself in school.
“I felt like I was unable to relate to many people. We were different on a very basic level,” Ahmed told Skin Deep magazine about his early days at university. “And then I thought – ‘what would I like to see exist here? Why don’t I just make that happen?’”
That led Ahmed to co-found Oxford’s Hit & Run night, an event that celebrated club culture and changed the city’s underground music scene. Ahmed also spent his university run as a member of the 12-person jazz-house and electronica ensemble called Confidential Collective. He gravitated to jungle and hip-hop, injecting satirical comedy into his rhymes that made an impact on fans, even as his lyrics stirred wider controversy. In 2006, Ahmed’s social-commentary rap track entitled “Post 9/11 Blues” was leaked and then quickly banned by British radio stations for its “politically sensitive” language — he jokes about everything from chemical warfare and racial profiling to Osama Bin Laden’s cave making an appearance on MTV’s Cribs on the track. Ahmed quickly created an independent record label to release more music, eventually playing at Glastonbury and the Royal Festival Hall and being named the “Emerging Artist in Residence” at the Southbank Centre in London. He dropped his debut album Microscope under the moniker Riz MC, became one-half of the hip-hop group known as the Swet Shop Boys a few years later, and released a scathing mixtape titled Englistan in 2016 — one that saw Ahmed donning the persona of a fake EDL rapper to confront racism and xenophobia in the UK.
“Englistan, as a mixtape, is about stretching the flag so that it’s big enough for all of us,” Ahmed told Dazed when the record was released. “It’s about identity – from what it means to be English today, to what it’s like growing up living a double life, or feeling like you don’t fit in.”
But it’s that same restless energy and relentless drive to build the world he wishes to see that pushed Ahmed to expand his own borders creatively.
Acting had been just another outlet when Ahmed was young — a suggestion from a school teacher, a way to avoid violent confrontations on the streets of Wembley. He pursued drama at Oxford, and after, but found, like with his music, if he wanted to see representation, he’d have to fuel that himself on-screen and on-stage.
“Depending on how you look at it, not seeing yourself within the culture can be seen as an invitation for you to insert yourself within that landscape because really, there is something not being voiced there,” Ahmed explained. “I think that you’ve got to be prepared to try and at least be part of the engine for change, rather than just kind of riding the bus to where you want to get to.”
So, as Britain’s entertainment industry and drama programs focused on period pieces that had no room for actors who looked like Ahmed, he began directing, producing, and acting in non-traditional projects — plays like “The Colour of Justice” and Stephen Adly Guirgis’ “Jesus Hopped the A Train.” He starred in films like Michael Winterbottom’s award-winning The Road to Guantanamo which tells the story of three British citizens unlawfully detained for years by the U.S. government in Guantanamo Bay. Ahmed and his co-stars were infamously detained at London’s Lufton airport after premiering the project at the Berlin Film Festival where Ahmed was questioned not only about potential ties to terrorism but about how he intended to use his film career to spread certain political ideologies.
That incident wouldn’t be the last time Ahmed was racially profiled thanks, in part, to his burgeoning acting career. In an essay he wrote, Ahmed detailed how he experienced the same demeaning treatment when he came to the U.S. looking for work, where his passport — stamped with Middle Eastern countries thanks to some of his filming schedule — and his skin color subjected him to the kind of interrogation tactics that terrify so many minorities. After landing the role of Bodhi Rook in Star Wars: Rogue One, Ahmed was forced to miss the film’s premiere because he had been detained by Homeland Security while trying to board a flight.
But, instead of internalizing the boxes that kept creeping into the peripheral of his budding career, Ahmed pivoted again by pursuing projects that forced audiences to see Muslims and minorities in a different light. He humanized the struggles of those who are homeless in Dan Gilroy’s thriller Nightcrawler. He forced us to question our own ingrained prejudices by portraying a college-student-turned-accused-murderer in HBO’s The Night Of. He brought the journey of an emotionally-tortured, addiction-plagued deaf musician to life in The Sound of Metal. He made history, becoming the first Muslim and the first South Asian man to win a lead acting Emmy. He’s earned Golden Globe and SAG nominations, taken home VMAs for Hamilton mixtapes and even had a diversity test that aims to draw attention to how Muslims are portrayed in movies and on TV named after him.
But because Riz Ahmed is the kind of artist who hates boxes, he’s not done yet.
Recently, Ahmed launched his own production company, entering into a deal with Amazon Studios to produce content for the streaming platform that will “nurture under-served audiences” and “stretch culture” to include rising talent and inventive new voices within the industry. He’s started funding, writing, and directing projects that speak to his own lived experiences — like his most recent drama Mogul Mowgli — while lifting up other creatives looking for spaces where they too can avoid being labeled, limited, and typecast.
For Riz Ahmed, changing the culture means infiltrating its subsets, carving out corners in the world of music — then acting, then writing, directing, producing, and so forth — to where he can not only innovate, but educate, inspire, and impact the people that look like him … and the people that don’t. After all, if art really has the power to affect change, why not create as much of it, in as many different genres and meaningful ways as you can?
From the night the pandemic arrived on the NBA’s doorstep, settling into an arena in Oklahoma City a year ago, the response from the league was firm, with a domino effect throughout the sports world. On March 12, 2020, the day after the Jazz-Thunder postponement that saw the 2019-20 season suspended, the NBA released a set of policies restricting players from group workouts and practice, as well as requiring them to remain in the home markets of their teams for six days. Players on teams that had played the Jazz within 10 days of March 11 were advised to self-isolate for two weeks. Another 24 hours later and the season moratorium was extended to April 10, which eventually stretched to May 1 in a statement from Adam Silver, ultimately shifting to the decision by the league’s board of governors to resume at Disney, in a Bubble, on July 30.
In those four months between stop and restart, the NBA would springboard into COVID-19 relief efforts. NBA Together, the league’s targeted pandemic response initiative, was launched eight days after games stopped and was by and large more focused on early public health messaging than many municipal U.S. governments and the Trump administration. The league urged the use of science-based information in the early and particularly anxiety ridden period of the pandemic, with the handful of players who had tested positive hosting live Q&As in an effort to share information.
By the end of April 2020, the NBA had raised nearly $80 million internally to support frontline response efforts, with a focus on vulnerable communities experiencing higher infection and fatality rates from the virus. Steph Curry interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci, Kevin Love helped shape the mental health focus of NBA Together, front offices and players donated money to offset job loss of arena workers in their markets. Even if the end goal had always been an eventual return to play, there was a collective sense of care and urgency from within, that good and actionable work could be done while waiting.
The Orlando Bubble, as meticulously made as it was to withstand the outside world (the virus and to some degree the social unrest in cities worldwide all summer) and make up for stalled revenue, still put the health and wellbeing of players at the center of its shiny, idyllic circle.
In contrast, this season has seen the NBA attempt to toe the line of normalcy and rather than continue to err on the side of concentrated caution, there’s been a perceptible shift in approach. Returning to a Bubble was deemed a non-starter by players for its psychological toll and by the league for its financial one, but returning to home markets, fans and travel signaled a shift toward assuming risks in exchange for revenue.
“The big issue, earlier in the year, was how did the owners who are largely white, overwhelmingly white, keep their players motivated?” Alison Kemper, associate professor specializing in business ethics at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management says. “And so, we saw a lot of support for Black Lives Matter, we saw a lot of support for using the stadiums as voter registration sites. A lot of messaging around Black Lives Matter. So, they could do that without risking anything really. They could become closer to their audiences and to their players, it didn’t cost them much. It was a way of staying in a different game. But how long can you own a very expensive asset, like an NBA team, without any revenue coming in?”
In October, Tim Reynolds reported that a source inside the league estimated a loss of $1.5 billion in revenue projections for the 2019-20 season. If the 2020-21 season were bumped from mid-January to December, there was potential for the NBA to generate a difference of $500 million to offset some of that loss. Game 6 of the Finals had been played little over a week before plans for a Dec. 22 start were made public, which means the conversations that informed them were likely being held well before LeBron James hoisted his first trophy as a Laker. Some players hadn’t been home with their families in as long as three months, let alone had any downtime to recoup, when next season was suddenly moved up a month.
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Money wasn’t the only cause for a sense of accelerated alarm from the league; with 50,000 Americans testing positive for coronavirus each day at the beginning of October, a number that would accelerate to 75,000 by the end of the month, infection rates were on the rise. Initially, Adam Silver had cautioned that the current season’s start would “be better off getting into January” until it was clear what the impacts of a potential second wave would be, especially when it came to gameplay, fans in attendance, and the general logistics of holding a regular season out of the bubble. But when the decision was made to announce the late December start date on Nov. 10 — less than a month after Silver had admitted December was “feeling a little bit early to me” — the number of new daily cases had hit 140,000 in the U.S. and would swell to over 250,000 by tip-off, Dec. 22. The NBA didn’t wait for the second wave to crest, it got right on and rode the swell. Opting to start the season at an ill-planned sprint rather than delay to a further date that likely would have made it impossible, in terms of positive optics, to even responsibly suggest the same.
“The idea of an event or a set of events, like the basketball season, going back to normal at a time at which people are still dying in fairly large numbers, seems a little bit tone deaf, to say the least,” Chris MacDonald, ethics professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University and Senior Fellow at Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics, says.
Sprints aren’t sustainable, and it turns out neither was operating as-is during the height of a pandemic’s second wave. One day after the season start, the NBA had its first postponement due to COVID-19. Three players on the Rockets returned positive or inconclusive tests while an additional four players had to quarantine due to contact tracing. In January and February, 21 and nine, respectively, games were postponed due to the league’s health and safety protocols, with COVID-19 creeping into injury reports daily in what felt like a bizarre and altogether grim exercise of normalization through continuation at all costs.
Which is why, as much as the NBA has tried to hang on some unraveling thread of stoicism at withstanding a tumult of wholly external forces, it had never been an outside, creeping nefariousness affecting the league, this was always a rupture from within. When the reality of the wider world broke through the league’s veneer of diversion, we were made aware of how uncomfortable and unnecessary it all was.
“I think sports leagues, and I’m frankly only starting to understand this, sports leagues are really odd kinds of entities,” MacDonald admits when asked about the public persona of a brand like the NBA, built around a progressive set of moral characteristics.
The NBA has long relied on a sense of corporate personhood, an identity that tries to balance business interests with a progressive persona. At best it can be an awkward if affable dance, at worst a stark and unsettling reminder that like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the pointed teeth still work to rend when they need to. When pressed, as we’ve seen in the past, the straightforward if cold calculations of the league’s business interests tend to win out. With revenue losses looming for its billionaire owners, and broadcast partners and sponsors to appease, the NBA expedited the product. The result was a pre-Christmas start date, an overpacked and hastily planned All-Star Game, and a condensed 72-game season to appease corporate obligations while ending early enough as to not compete with viewership for the Olympics.
“These contracts are long-term and they’re very, very big,” Kemper says on the pressure felt from the league’s broadcast partners. “And so it’s not just the NBA owners or the league. It’s also the broadcasters that are part of the moral matrix here.”
There was a sense that once the whole, strange machine was put in motion there would be no stopping it. Watching the lurching mechanics as teams with outbreaks that overtook half their rosters attempted to cobble together lineups made it clear that it wasn’t just that the machine couldn’t stop, but that it was never designed with brakes. The league had told teams to push through even in times where the better answer was to pull back, and with make-up games and postseason pressure ramping up, the downhill slope is even steeper.
“There’s an old quote that said in an avalanche, no snowflake feels responsible,” MacDonald says. “All of our decisions go into this net pattern, but when it’s a corporate entity none of us may feel responsible. Or we may be able to rationalize, ‘Look, I’m not the one telling that player to go out onto the court before they’re ready. I’m just the finance guy who said if we don’t get games rolling by this date, we’re not going to make our financial targets.’”
Whether writ large in an exhaustive schedule riddled with back-to-backs (the second half of this season has some teams playing as many as 11), shifting health and safety measures, emotional and physical burnout, the long-term effects of the league’s insistence in pressing on can be measured on the bodies of its players, too. Jayson Tatum, who tested positive for coronavirus in January, has said he’s felt lingering longterm effects of the virus “from time to time.”
“It messes with your breathing a bit,” Tatum said. “I have experienced some games where, I don’t want to say struggling to breathe but, you get fatigued a lot quicker than normal.”
Mo Bamba, who tested positive in June, played a total of ten minutes in the entire duration of the Bubble. This season, and six months post-diagnosis, Bamba’s only played 16 games for the Magic, spending most of his time out of rotation.
“There’s no real timetable for him to be able to come back and fully participate,” Magic head coach Steve Clifford said. “I think that he’ll be able to do some things that are more organizational and everything. But he’s a ways away, and there’s no timetable on his return.”
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For a virus so new in our understanding of its impact on the general population, there’s less data to show the specific longterm effects COVID-19 could have on elite athletes. Among all athlete groups, basketball players face the highest incidence of sports-related sudden cardiac death in the U.S., and while early studies have shown no increase of lingering heart issues in players who previously tested positive for coronavirus, the reality is that it is too soon to have a full or clear understanding of what the longterm physical effects on players could be. This reason alone seems enough to be cautionary, to not leverage the sustainability of a single season against a player’s future career and personal livelihood.
“The thing that makes it additionally unclear, is that these players, mostly we’re talking about young men, I think the common perception is they’re out there risking their health all the time anyway,” MacDonald says. “They’re running down a court to put a ball in the net, and some other guys nearly seven feet tall, 240 pounds, is trying to stop them. That’s dangerous.”
It comes down to that “ball is life” mentality, especially when there’s livelihood involved.
“From an ethics point of view,” MacDonald explains. “it’s what we call an autonomous or a free choice to engage in a risky behavior, because you love the game, and because you’re going to make money. Of course we know there’s all kinds of other things, pressure from coaches, pressure from family,” he adds, “the pressure of knowing that once you retire, who the hell knows what you’re going to do in life. From one perspective, COVID is just another risk, but it’s unlike tearing your ACL, a torn ACL isn’t something you can give your partner.”
The league’s haste to put together this season has also been evident in confusion about protocols. By not providing teams with specific personnel to enact and enforce protocols, but instead mandating teams designate “protocol compliance officers” out of their existing staff pool, the constantly shifting rules fall to already exhausted athletic trainers to make sense of. In this way, sickness and strife become contractual obligations for someone else to uphold, and the somewhat foreseeable pitfalls in that plan of stretching existing staff thin is laid publicly and painfully bare.
When Kevin Durant, initially held out of a Feb. 5 game against Toronto when a test result for a Nets staffer he’d been with earlier that day came back inconclusive, was cleared to play only to be pulled in the third quarter when the test was then deemed positive, the issues the league has had in consistent contract tracing practices appeared to trip itself up out in the open enough that real questions around the dangers of pretending could be leveled. Instead, Nick Nurse and Steve Nash, head coaches on court that night, lamented at the disruption to gameplay.
When Karl Anthony-Towns, who has lost seven members of his family to COVID-19 since his mother died from complications from the virus in April, shared in early January he’d tested positive, the league announced new in-game protocols for players, including “cool down chairs” and calling on team security staff to limit postgame contact between teams to quick fist-bumps instead of hugs and conversations. The timing of Towns testing positive and new ambiguous in-game half-measures were unrelated — it was the increase in postponed games that pushed the NBA into the strange, winking concessions, and that’s the problem. It seems a convenient ruthlessness that methods meant to streamline play, to remove entirely the small comforts of contact that were left as buffers between games, be facilitated in a time where the toll of a virus the league has worked so diligently to evade its season succumbing to has diminished so entirely one of its brightest stars.
“One of the things that people worry about in large organizations is what we would call the diffusion of responsibility,” MacDonald explains. “So if you say, well, the league did it. What are you going to do? Word came down from the league. I don’t have quotes but I can imagine a coach saying look, the league just decided. Well, in that sense, it may well be true that the league decided, but it also means that a bunch of people got together and made a decision, and those people need to be accountable for their decisions.”
The onus being on someone else was also evident in the way the league approached fans in stadiums. Silver said the NBA had been studying the practices of other pro leagues to inform its decisions upon return, but the glaring omission was that the NFL, MLB, MLS, most of these game are played outdoors, in open-air arenas. In the markets where state laws would allow fans in attendance, they were to be 30ft back from the court, leaving a clear delineation between active players and fans. The distance was for players, not the safety of fans.
“They’re saying that you can go into the game and you don’t need a test unless you are within 30 feet of the court, which seems to me to be related to how close you are to the players and the safety of the players,” Dr. Abraar Karan, an internal medicine doctor at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School said in a Nov. 2020 interview with Slate.
Considering the care the NBA took in supporting hard-hit communities last spring, there is little consideration now for the league’s role in the broader communities in markets supporting its teams. It’s why All-Star, denounced by the Mayor of Atlanta, optically seemed like nothing but a convenient cash grab to appease a large stake of the NBA’s broadcasting commitments. The monetary support of HBCUs won by players throughout the night, while undeniably impactful, used as a kind of too-late leverage considering the city never wanted it and will deal with whatever deeper, public health fallout settles past the event’s whirlwind 24 hours.
“I think they’re not different from almost any other corporation in that, you can be moral as long as the revenues keep coming in,” Kemper says. “It’s not a shocker that this has happened to the NBA. They are not structured in a way to act in the best interest of their cities.”
This season, the NBA has taken full advantage of the broad interpretations of coronavirus protocol within the states of its team markets, as well as the murky middle-ground between what is socially permissive and not in order to slip from the fixed constraints of integrity.
“The NBA, with the exception of the Raptors, is an American operation,” Kemper says from her home in Toronto. “And although our public health institutions here are weakened over time, theirs have been decimated. And so there’s no easy way for local authorities to say, this is too dangerous. There’s no center of gravity for public health in almost any part of the U.S.”
Even as the careworn mantle of practiced corporate personhood slips from the league’s shoulders and shows it testing what boundaries it can push, an exhausted, pandemic weary public can’t bring itself to care.
“Corporations want to push the risk outside the company and bring the games, the profits, inside the company,” Kemper says. “So by creating a season that puts cities at risk, that put players at risk, that put future seasons at risk because of the health of the players, they did what companies normally do, which is exogenize risk and bring all the gains on board.”
Silver has drawn wobbly parallels to what the league is doing, in its insistence on sustaining itself, its season, as something directly beneficial to the broader economy. And it’s true, there are thousands of people, beyond players, whose livelihoods are directly tied to the league, but the league and its owners are also economically insulated enough to withstand far more than the general population Silver was speaking about.
It should not be such an aspirational ask to want the NBA to operate within the same moral and ethical bounds it assigns itself as an entity of importance and leverage. So much of what the league is attempting to do in playing through is to prove this season isn’t an exception and doesn’t require better, more exceptional ways of operating. In straining to maintain the bare minimum the NBA, so often a progressive force, has not just fallen several staggering steps behind but come close to regression, at odds with a world longing to move forward.
Elton John recently interviewed Phoebe Bridgers for his Apple Music 1 show Elton John’s Rocket Hour, and that episode is set to air tomorrow. Ahead of then, though, some quotes from the show have been shared, including the two discussing Billie Eilish.
John asked Bridgers how she feels about both her and Eilish being up for four Grammys this year and she responded, “I feel great. I’m obsessed with Billie. I think she’s a genius. I think whatever she’s doing behind the scenes, industry-wise, just the fact that her team trusted her completely and was just like: ‘You know what we should do is listen to this 15-year-old, because we don’t know what’s cool.’”
John then asked if she had seen the film yet and Bridgers said she hasn’t. John continued, “Oh, it’s fantastic. It’s fantastic. It’s just wonderful… We watched the Britney Spears documentary [Framing Britney Spears], which is so upsetting. And then we watched the Billie Eilish documentary and it’s like, one is how not to be a parent, and one is how to be a parent and a brother and a sibling that Finneas is to her. And it’s a great documentation of everything she did from the age of 15.”
Bridgers then noted that she has heard about Eilish’s father Patrick O’Connell wearing multiple of Bridgers’ merch t-shirts in the documentary, saying, “Although I have to say her dad wears two separate Phoebe Bridgers shirts in that documentary, which I’ve been tagged in a couple of times. And it just, it makes me so happy. He has the coolest ones, too. I made this fake Insane Clown Posse shirt that he has. It just lit me up with joy. Yeah, Patrick’s awesome.”
The episode premieres on March 13 at noon ET, so when it’s available, check it out here.
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade had a pretty strange reaction to President Biden’s primetime Covid speech, in which he mourned the tragically-high death toll of the year-long pandemic: “Get over it, America!”
No seriously, that was Kilmeade’s hot take on his morning show with co-hosts Steve Doocy and Ainsley Earhardt as the network personalities discussed Biden’s address. Kilmeade was visibly irate over how much Biden focused on the lives lost to the Coronavirus — we’re up to 527,000 people as of now — and appalled that the president refused to acknowledge the previous administration’s efforts to combat the pandemic during his speech.
“We don’t need to go over the 500,000 dead, we had that moment,” Kilmeade said. “Let’s talk about the future moving forward. Every time he has a chance to praise the previous administration, he not only doesn’t praise, he kicks them in the groin.”
If you’d like to see the steam emitting from this camera-loving troll’s ears, here’s the clip:
Brian Kilmeade: “We don’t need to go over the 500,000 dead, we had that moment. Let’s talk about the future moving forward. Every time he has a chance to praise the previous administration, he not only doesn’t praise, he kicks them in the groin.” pic.twitter.com/n9OupjYfAF
Of course, one could argue that acknowledging how many people have been lost to the pandemic — nearly as many Americans have died from the virus as the number killed in World War I and II combined — is not only a sign of respect but a reminder to practice empathy for others during this trying time. And, considering how embarrassingly bad Trump was at managing this pandemic in its early days, Biden is probably doing the previous administration a favor by not mentioning their many screw-ups.
But really, do people owe it Kilmeade to educate him? Or, do people owe it to themselves to laugh at his callousness by rounding up some of Twitter’s most savage reactions to his on-air temper tantrum? (The second one seems to be winning.)
Brian Kilmeade is done talking about the half a million Americans who died of COVID. He has totally moved on. He’s like ‘Hello mourners, 2020 called, and it wants its news story back.’
Keep in mind Fox & Friends did more than 1,000 segments on Benghazi, where 4 Americans died.
Earlier this month, Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that it will stop publishing six Dr. Seuss books due to racist and insensitive imagery. Those books — And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer — are not being “canceled.” The decision was made by a private business for “moral” reasons, “not as a result of public pressure that has preceded other such decisions,” as the Guardian put it.
But don’t tell that to Ted Cruz, who has never met a “cancel culture” controversy that he couldn’t exploit for personal gain. Or financial gain in the case of Dr. Seuss: the Texas senator is signing and selling copies of the late author’s work on his website.
“Stand with Ted & Dr. Seuss against the cancel culture mob to claim your signed copy of Green Eggs and Ham!” the copy reads on Cruz’s donation website. For only $60, Ted will sign an autograph of the book — which is not one of the six titles that is being “canceled” — and mail it you. Or you can buy Green Eggs and Ham for five bucks here, and donate the other $55 to charity. Or go wild at Taco Bell. Or buy something nice for your cat. Or do literally anything other than pay Cruz to sign a book that he didn’t write:
“Right now, the far left is trying to ‘CANCEL’ Dr. Seuss,” Cruz declared in a paid Facebook ad. “As someone who has always been a big fan of Green Eggs and Ham, I won’t let that stand,” he wrote. “So please rush an urgent Contribution of $60 and I’ll sign a copy of Green, Eggs, and Ham just for you!” In an email, Cruz boasted Thursday of signing “another 175 copies” because “the response to this has been HUGE.” He described the book signed by him as a “cancel culture collectible.”
If you want to read a book that Cruz actually wrote (or at least slapped his name on), you have two options: A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America and One Vote Away: How a Single Supreme Court Seat Can Change History, the former of which is available for $1.53 on Amazon. Here’s a glowing review: “Book full of name-dropping and how Ted Cruz rescued them from their own mistakes. Boring book.” Check it out!
Ted Cruz, who did not write Green Eggs and Ham, is signing copies of that book and giving it to people who donate $60. pic.twitter.com/O9bcONQpLh
The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.
ITEM NUMBER ONE — I would like to talk about the cocaine bear
Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you sit around all day minding your business — drinking iced tea, watching action movies on mute while you work, wearing one of the multiple Beastie Boys shirts you own — and then, suddenly, as if dropped from the heavens, a piece of news will appear and alter your entire day. Maybe it happened to you this week. Maybe it happened on Tuesday when you, like me, discovered that Elizabeth Banks is now attached to direct a movie titled — and I need you to prepare yourself for this if you did not see the news or read the headline of this column — Cocaine Bear.
The true story, as reported in 1985 by The New York Times, was that a 175-pound black bear consumed the contents of a duffle bag filled with more than 70 pounds of cocaine that was dropped from an airplane by a local drug smuggler, Andrew Thornton. The bear was later found dead of an apparent drug overdose.
The last sentence of that paragraph is a bummer. I know that. But I needed to include it for historical accuracy. And to bring your attention to the thing where it said the bear that consumed 40 percent of its body weight in cocaine that was dropped out of an airplane died of an “apparent” drug overdose. Really covering all our bases there. Like, yes, it could have been the 70 pounds of cocaine, but could it have also been… murder?
(It was probably the cocaine.)
But this, and I realize how crazy this is going to sound after multiple paragraphs about a movie titled Cocaine Bear and a bear eating 70 pounds of cocaine, is where it all gets really wild. Note the human name in there: Andrew Thornton. It turns out Andrew Thornton was an interesting guy. Not so much interesting in a “refurbished old cars and raced them on the weekends” way. Interesting in a “he was the child of wealthy thoroughbred owners who went on to become a military paratrooper and then a police officer and then a lawyer and then, as we already knew, a prominent Kentucky drug smuggler.” There are lots of ways to be interesting, is my point.
And guess what: Turns out 70 pounds of cocaine wasn’t the only thing that fell out of that plane. Andrew Thornton fell out of the plane, too. And his parachute didn’t open. And he landed in someone’s driveway. And, as you will discover if you poke around a bit and stumble across a Los Angeles Times article about it all from 1985, the authorities were not entirely displeased to hear about any of it.
“I’m glad his parachute didn’t open. I hope he got a hell of a high out of that (cocaine),” said Brian Leighton, an assistant U.S. attorney in Fresno, Calif. He once prosecuted Thornton on a marijuana trafficking charge.
The body of Thornton, 40, a native of Paris, Ky., was found Wednesday on a driveway in Knoxville, Tenn. He was heavily armed, carried 77 pounds of cocaine in an Army duffel bag, and was attached to a parachute that had failed to open.
And he wasn’t just some traffic cop who did a little weekend skydiving after his stint in the military. Like I said, Andrew Thornton was interesting.
“He was an expert skydiver and the type of guy who wouldn’t even let anyone touch his pack. He was a fanatic” about his equipment, said a friend in Lexington.
He joined the Lexington police in 1968 and stayed for nine years. In 1981, the Lexington Herald quoted sources as saying Thornton had set up the department’s intelligence squad.
Now, again, maybe you’re like me. Maybe you read all these words I’ve typed and/or pasted into this box and you started thinking. And maybe after a little bit of thinking, you realized it all sounded familiar. And maybe, if you’re really like me, you slapped yourself on the forehead and shouted “THIS IS THE SAME STORY FROM THE DREW THOMPSON PART OF THE FOURTH SEASON OF JUSTIFIED, WHICH ALSO OPENED WITH A DRUG SMUGGLER FALLING OUT OF AN AIRPLANE WITH A BACKPACK FULL OF COCAINE AND LANDING IN SOMEONE’S DRIVEWAY.” Well, guess what: we’re both right. It is the same story that inspired the fourth season of Justified. It was written up in a book calledThe Bluegrass Conspiracy. I am going to read this book. And then I am going to watch Cocaine Bear.
This connection made me so happy when I realized it. Sometimes you can look into a cool story and research the fun right out of it. This one just kept getting better all the way through, right up to and including the thing where the movie with the title that stopped me dead in my tracks and one of my favorite seasons of my favorite shows stemmed from the same story about a crooked cop/lawyer who fell to his death while carrying enough cocaine to kill a bear. Literally. Wait, no. I’m sorry, “apparently.” Enough cocaine to “apparently” kill a bear.
Although, now that I type all this out, I guess I am kind of bummed that Justified cut the part of the story about the bear. I think I would have enjoyed seeing, oh, let’s say Dewey Crowe coming face-to-face with a speed-addled bear in the Kentucky wilderness. Dammit. Now I did the thing I said I didn’t do. I went and made myself upset by thinking too hard about a fun story. I suppose the only solution here is for Elizabeth Banks to cast Damon Herriman as a simple hillbilly with a bunch of tattoos and an above-ground pool. I think that would help.
ITEM NUMBER TWO — What is any of this?
I do not watch The Masked Singer. I say this not to cast judgment on anyone who does, in part because you should watch whatever makes you happy and in part because Lord in heaven knows I have watched enough hours of empty-calorie television to make my judgment on other people’s viewing habits beyond irrelevant. A few weeks ago I led this entire column with a section about a dog driving a car on 9-1-1. It’s crazy that I have a job where people let me recommend anything to anyone. No, the reason I say that I do not watch The Masked Singer is so you will understand that the first notion I had of the reveal in the above video was seeing this image all over the internet on Thursday morning.
FOX
This, to be very clear, is Kermit the Frog emerging from a giant snail costume on an episode of The Masked Singer. Kermit the Frog was hidden inside a huge fake singing snail, on a network television show, and he just popped himself right out of it, also on network television, in front of millions of viewers and God and Ken Jeong and Jenny McCarthy. Read that sentence a few times. Really let it sink in. I am an unapologetic Muppets fan and am therefore perfectly comfortable with chaotic Muppet behavior, but even I have to admit that this is… weird. Imagine showing that picture to someone who doesn’t understand the Muppets or The Masked Singer and explaining that millions of people watch that show on television. It’s weird!
And it gets a little weirder. Kermit did multiple interviews with multiple outlets about his appearance on the show. Here’s an excerpt from his chat with People:
Why did you pick the Snail costume? Were you ever tempted to eat the costume since some frogs eat snails?
I picked a snail because snails and frogs have a lot in common; we’re both menu items at French restaurants. As for eating the costume, I wasn’t tempted. The only Muppet who eats his wardrobe is Animal.
Is Miss Piggy jealous that you were picked to go on the show? Did she know you were under the Snail costume?
Miss Piggy did not guess I was the Snail. Snails eat geraniums, and she knows I’m allergic, so that threw her off the trail. And surprisingly, she was not jealous of my being on the show. Piggy loves the spotlight. If she’s going on TV, she’s not going to hide behind a mask; she wants everyone to know it’s her the first fabulous minute she steps on stage.
Incredible. Just perfect in every way. Except maybe for the part where Kermit kind of implies that Miss Piggy is an anti-masker. Which, be honest, you could see. But the larger issue here is that if Kermit was one of the contestants on this show, then, like… who else is in those suckers? I’m legitimately curious now. Not curious enough to watch an episode of The Masked Singer, but curious enough to spend five minutes trying to think of the funniest possible person who could pop out of one of those costumes.
The best answer I’ve come up with so far is Tommy Lee Jones. It’s a fun game.
ITEM NUMBER THREE — You know that thing where you’re reading something and come across a passage and think, “Hmm, I bet I’ll remember this for the rest of my life”?
Marvel
Liam Gallagher did a Reddit AMA a while back where he claimed to own 2,000 tambourines. I have mentioned this before and I will probably mention it again for the simple reason that it is always clanging around my brain, trapped, unable to escape. I think about it a lot. Too often. I think about it every time I see Liam Gallagher. Like, he’ll pop up in a news story or he’ll tweet something wild — as Liam Gallagher will do — and I’ll immediately jump to “that dude owns 2,000 tambourines.” It is so many tambourines. I want to know more. I want to know how he stores them. I picture like an expensive wine cellar but just with racks and racks of tambourines. I was not joking when I say I think about it a lot.
I bring it up again today both because it has been almost a month since I told someone Liam Gallagher owns 2,000 tambourines and because a new fact entered my brain with no sign of leaving soon. From a New York Times interview with WandaVision scene-stealer Katherine Hahn.
Before you made “WandaVision” did you have a burning desire to make a big-budget superhero project?
Oh, for sure. There was something about being thrust into the air, about fighting in the sky and working with wires. I had a very small part in “Tomorrowland” and Keegan-Michael Key and I spent a lot of time with stunts. I have such reverence and respect for that world. I actually did trapeze for a little bit as a hobby. Which went nowhere fast.
When was that?
That was when we first came out to L.A. We found a trapeze school. I just screamed the whole time — right off the bat, you just have to leap. But it was so fun. So there was something that I loved about the idea of someone with superpowers in plain sight and the metaphor of using your powers for good.
Did you see it in that blockquote? Did you see the thing where Kathryn Hahn picked up trapeze as a hobby? As a hobby?! This is fascinating to me. I do not know anyone who has ever done trapeze. It had not even dawned on me that one could just pick it up, casually. In my mind, prior to reading this, there were two kinds of people in the world: professional trapeze artists and people who had never done trapeze at all. This changes everything. Anyone could do trapeze now. Kathryn Hahn did it. She probably told someone, at some point, that she couldn’t come to lunch because she was doing trapeze that afternoon. Let that one marinate for a bit.
But not for too long, because I have another fact to share. For reasons that involved a lot of clicking and free time, I ended up reading an old New Yorker article about ketchup this weekend. And in that article, I read this.
In the cities where the ads ran, sales of Grey Poupon leaped forty to fifty per cent, and whenever Heublein bought airtime in new cities sales jumped by forty to fifty per cent again. Grocery stores put Grey Poupon next to French’s and Gulden’s. By the end of the nineteen-eighties Grey Poupon was the most powerful brand in mustard. “The tagline in the commercial was that this was one of life’s finer pleasures,” Larry Elegant, who wrote the original Grey Poupon spot, says, “and that, along with the Rolls-Royce, seemed to impart to people’s minds that this was something truly different and superior.”
Liam Gallagher owns 2,000 tambourines.
Kathryn Hahn used to do trapeze as a hobby.
The famous Grey Poupon commercial was created by a man named Larry Elegant.
I suspect I am taking all of these to the grave with me.
ITEM NUMBER FOUR — Hey Brian, are you interested in a four-part docuseries about the Gardner Museum art heist?
Yes. Yes, I am.
I came very close to ending this section after those two sentences, but I can’t help myself. I love talking about the Gardner Museum heist. I’ve read dozens of articles about it. I listened to a multi-part podcast series about it. These dudes walked out of an art museum with half a billion dollars worth of paintings and the crime was never solved. Google it this weekend. Google it today. Finish reading all the way to the bottom of this article and then Google it immediately. You’ll find all sorts of wild information. Like, for example, this.
No one has ever been charged in connection with the brazen theft, carried out just after midnight on March 18, 1990. Two thieves gained entry to the museum by posing as police officers and left after 81 minutes with the 13 objects.
The statute of limitations on the theft ran out in 1995. Still, the F.B.I. and federal prosecutors have joined the museum in what they say is an active, ongoing investigation.
The F.B.I. announced in 2013 that it knew the identities of the Gardner thieves but did not reveal their names, and later said they were dead. The bureau said they belonged to a criminal organization based in New England and the Mid-Atlantic and that it had traced the paintings to Connecticut and Philadelphia, but those trails had grown cold.
There is no limit to the amount of information I could consume about this. A four-part docuseries is a decent place to start, or, I suppose, if we’re being accurate about it all, a decent place to continue. But I will not rest until someone makes a very Boston-centric movie about this crime that stars multiple Wahlbergs and multiple Afflecks. Even extended members of the families who do not act. Call up uncles and cousins and everything. I am barely joking about this.
ITEM NUMBER FIVE — Love this guy
A24
Few things in the world of entertainment have brought me more joy in the last few weeks than interviews with 8-year-old Minari star Alan Kim. That dude rules. GQ got in touch with him this week for a little mini-interview companion piece to their profile of his Minari co-star, Steven Yeun, and you should read it all because it will make you happy, but you should especially read this part that I’m about to blockquote.
Now that you’re a famous actor, is there anything else you’re excited about?
In the upcoming movie I’m doing, I’m supposed to be walking home. And then I lock the door and I’m home alone. And then it says I order a pizza and watch TV!
That sounds very hard, ordering a pizza and watching TV.
I think if I need to do another take, I need to eat pizza all over again.
Please consider this your periodic reminder that kids are much smarter than adults. And that you should take advantage of any situation that allows you to eat free pizza. These are both important things to remember.
READER MAIL
If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.
From Eddie:
Do you ever wonder if a piece of writing on the internet will become as famous as actual printed books? It seems like that should happen at some point. If it does, what do you think it will be? Full disclosure: I ask this question because I’ve sent your “Every Actor Is Either A Batman Or A Joker” piece to everyone I know. Jason Sudeikis is a Batman, right?
Well, this is a lovely question, and I do not say that just because it contains a compliment. It’s actually two lovely questions, the second of which I will answer first; Yes, Jason Sudeikis is a Batman, but like a chill and well-adjusted Batman, not all dark and moody. Upbeat Batman. I kind of want to see this now. I need him to keep the Ted Lasso mustache. I want to see a mustachioed Batman.
To your other question, I… I don’t know. A lot of the best writing on the internet is republished in print somewhere or runs the risk of disappearing in a botched redesign. It’s strange. There’s not a big feeling of permanence to any of this, which is somehow both troubling and calming to someone like me who does all of his writing online. Weirdly, and maybe this is just the way my broken brain works, the things that stick with me most from the online era are tweets. I mean, look at this one…
“if theres a spicy brown mustard, why not a spicy brown ketchup?” The wise man smiled. “my friend, the condiment you seek is Barbecue Sauce”
[me telling my story how I survived a plane crash and lived on a deserted island for a year] it was crazy [friend who once got a text from me where I accidentally called the grinch the grink] was the grink there?
… and tell me those aren’t creative works on par with at least some of the quote-unquote classics you read in high school. Go read the Shoe Roast again and tell me it’s not a better use of your time than re-reading The Catcher in the Rye. Do not lie to me. Do not lie.
But keep in mind, I’m also the person who thinks the complete collection of Calvin & Hobbes should be required reading for all students in grades 6-8. I would either be a very good or very, very bad teacher.
A man is facing charges after he allegedly stole a 400-pound slide from a playground and mounted it on a bunkbed in his home.
Do…
Do we…
Do we have a SLIDE HEIST on our hands here?
I believe we do. We have our first-ever slide heist. And here’s my favorite part: the cop who broke the case wasn’t even looking for the slide. She was searching the house for something else. She solved a slide caper by accident.
Lee suddenly came face-to-face with the gigantic slide, which was reported stolen in December 2020, as she searched the home for catalytic converters.
CHIEF: How’d the search for the stolen catalytic converters go?
COP: … Good?
CHIEF: What does that mean? Did you find the stolen property or not?
COP: … I found some stolen property…
CHIEF: Dammit, spit it out. Was the search successful or not?
COP: [sound of partner shouting “wheeeee!” in the background as he goes down the slide] … Yes?
Bushnell sawed off the slide, repainted it, and mounted it on a bunkbed in a child’s bedroom at his mobile home, according to investigators.
You shouldn’t steal a slide from a playground. Let me say that just to cover myself in case one of you gets any ideas. I do not want that on my conscience. But if you do steal a slide from a playground, try to get at least one frazzled parent on the jury. They’ll hear all of this and take it all in and picture their own bored kids tearing up the house during various stages of quarantine and think, “Okay… I get it.”
Drinking bourbon whiskey “neat” is considered the purest form of the bourbon tasting experience. For whiskey purists, the idea is that the distillers, nosers, and blenders painstakingly toiled to create the exact whiskeys they wanted and we should honor that. While that idea is certainly valid (in some cases), all whisk(e)y changes with a few drops of water or a rock and that’s also a crucial (and fun) part of the tasting experience.
Today, we’re looking past the whiskeys that demand a rock or two to help them go down a little easier and staying focused on those bourbons that are pure silk all alone. Untouched. No fuss.
These 15 bottles aren’t always affordable or easy to find. But they are great sipping bourbons, smooth as can be, straight out of the bottle. We’re not saying these aren’t nice in cocktails, either — we just prefer these picks neat. Let’s get into it!
This expression takes the standard Woodford bourbon (triple distilled, matured for six to seven years in a climate-controlled warehouse) and gives it a finishing touch. The bourbon is blended and moved into new barrels that have been double toasted but only lightly charred. The juice spends a final nine months resting in those barrels before proofing and bottling.
Tasting Notes:
There’s a welcoming aroma of marzipan, blackberry, toffee, and fresh honey next to a real sense of pitchy, dry firewood. The taste drills down on those notes as the sweet marzipan becomes more choco-hazelnut, the berries become more dried and apple-y, the toffee becomes almost burnt, and the wood softens to a cedar bark. A rich spicy and chewy tobacco arrives late as the vanilla gets super creamy and the fruit and honey combine on the slow fade.
The Neat Experience:
What’s beautiful about this bourbon is you kind of get lost in it. The silken edges keep leading you down new flavor paths as you swing back and forth between the nose and the sip. It’s weirdly light (for a double oaked) as well, making it very easy to take straight.
This expression from Jim Beam’s high-end shingle is a masterful blend. The juice is small-batched from barrels that meet just the right flavor and texture profiles. That mix is then proofed all the way down to 80 proof, creating an incredibly accessible whiskey sip for beginning sippers.
Tasting Notes:
Classic notes of vanilla and caramel lead towards a hint of oak with a touch of dried fruit on the nose. The taste delivers on those promises while adding in layers of brown sugar sweetness and mild pepperiness. There’s a slight return to those dark dried fruits on the fast finish as you’re left with the vanilla and oak ringing on your senses.
The Neat Experience:
Beam was wickedly smart in making this a 40 percent ABV sip. There are zero rough edges. You’re left with a well-rounded and classic bourbon experience. It’s also much softer than a standard Beam, naturally. That softness goes a long way towards making you want to refill your glass once it’s emptied.
This high-end brand from the legendary Buffalo Trace campus is crafted as a sipper at a (fairly) accessible price point. The juice is aged specifically in Warehouse C, which was built by E.H. Taylor, Jr. back in the 1880s. The barrels live under federal regulations of bottling in bond. Once they’re ready, they’re small batched and proofed down to 100 proof.
Tasting Notes:
The nose greets you with a mild vanilla woodiness that leads towards a kettle corn vibe with a hint of caramel. The taste delivers on the caramel corn while counterpointing with a black licorice essence (similar to rye whiskey) and a hint of buttery toffee. The end brings about chewy and spicy tobacco with hints of that buttery and sweet corn lurking in the background with the woody vanilla.
The Neat Experience:
This is interesting in that it’s almost… cooling on the first sip. As you nose and sip, it starts to warm towards that spicy tobacco chew. But it takes a minute to get there. In the end, this is kind of fun to drink neat and feels like you’re on a journey along the way.
This expression uses six of Four Rose’s ten whiskeys in their small-batching process. The idea is to blend both high and low-rye bourbons with yeast strains that highlight “delicate fruit,” “slight spice,” and “herbal notes.” The whiskeys spend at least six years in the barrel before blending and proofing with just a touch of Kentucky’s soft limestone water.
Tasting Notes:
Raspberry and cloves mix with old oak on the nose and — boy, does it draw you in. The palate amps up the dark berry sweetness with a bit of tartness, as a stone fruit vibe comes into play. The spice heightens and leans more Christmas spice with a focus on nutmeg. Finally, a wisp of fresh mint arrives to counterpoint the whole sip as the oak, vanilla, fruit, and spice all slowly fade out.
The Neat Experience:
This expression will grow on you. At first, it’ll feel like a solid bourbon, maybe even a good cocktail base (it is, by the way). But as you go back to it, it’ll mellow while expanding in flavors when taken neat. More of those mints and fruits will surface, creating a refreshing sip of whiskey.
Jefferson’s Reserve is a masterclass in the power of blending. This expression is a marriage of only eight to 12 barrels from three different bourbons which are, for the most part, very old. How old you ask? There are 20-year-old barrels in the mix.
Tasting Notes:
The spice comes through with a slight nod to eggnog (especially nutmeg) with a rounded sense of fresh honey on the nose. The taste holds onto the spice but starts leaning towards a cinnamon bark while butter toffee adds a nice sweetness and vanilla almost hides in the background. The spice amps up to a tobacco chewiness as the sip slowly fades out, leaving you with a mouth coated in silk.
The Neat Experience:
The idea behind the blend is to create the ultimate sippable whiskey. And they hit it out of the park. This is the sort of dram where you’re sipping and nosing and you completely forget to add water.
Michter’s 10-yo Bourbon is a very sought-after and beloved bottle of booze. The barrels are hand-selected by Michter’s team for their taste and texture. Then the booze is bottled with only a touch of water just to take the edges off and make it more pleasant on the tongue.
Tasting Notes:
There’s a maple syrup sweetness with spicy tobacco, creamy vanilla, and burnt toffee next to leathery oak. The taste hints at a charred bitterness (burnt espresso bean?) next to a touch of caramel-meets-fruit that meanders back through that tobacco, leather, vanilla, and maple. The end is soft but surprisingly short while touching on the sweeter notes of maple and vanilla and leaving the spice, tobacco, and oak behind.
The Neat Experience:
You’ll take a sip and realize what bourbon can be when left alone for ten years. This is just a well-rounded whiskey in every way. It’s also the sort of whiskey that you can offer someone looking to take that next step from “I think I like bourbon” to “Oh, I really f*cking like bourbon.”
This expression is Woodinville’s award-winning five-year-old bourbon taken up a notch. That means you’re getting that grain-to-glass experience of local Washington craft along with the bespoke barreling process on those snowy Cascade Mountains. The juice is then finished for six to 12 months in port casks, adding a whole new dimension to the bourbon.
Tasting Notes:
Candied fruit, roasted nuts, and bourbon vanilla entice you into the sip. Those notes lead right into a Christmas cake full of dried fruits, spice, nuts, and plummy sherry depths. The end shines in all of those notes, adding a warming feeling that revels in all the candied fruit, cake, spice, nuts, and oak as it slowly fades away — leaving you with a silken mouthfeel and sweet warmth.
The Neat Experience:
This is probably the best workhorse bourbon on the list. We’d argue it works wonders in cocktails, but it really shines as a neat sipper. It’s so complex yet remains wholly inviting. It’s like a warm hug after a long rainy walk.
I.W. Harper has a long history with a new feel. The booze is made at Heaven Hill’s New Bernheim Distillery but aged at Diageo’s Stitzel-Weller Distillery — a classic contract distilling partnership. The juice spends 15 years mellowing before it’s married and proofed down to a very approachable 86 proof.
Tasting Notes:
There’s a clear sense of almost fresh off-the-stalk sweet corn and bright berries on the nose with hints of orange zest, oily vanilla, and cedar. The palate leads with the cedar towards tobacco spiciness, more of that concentrated vanilla, and a very mild whisper of minty dark chocolate nibs. The finish takes its time and starts with the dry cedar, passes through that spicy tobacco buzz, and ends up on a sweet vanilla/caramel softness.
The Neat Experience:
This really starts off bold on the fruit and corn. As you go back and forth on the nose and the sip, it just keeps getting deeper and more interesting. The dry-leading-to-sweet end is what’ll keep drawing you back in for more.
This is what you get when you take standard Elijah Craig and let it rest in just the right spot for 18 years. The 18-year-old barrel is hand-selected after a long search through the warehouses. Once chosen, the juice is cooled slightly with that soft Kentucky limestone water and then bottled.
Tasting Notes:
You get a sense of oak with a touch of a rock-hewn cellar, next to notes of dark chocolate oranges, mild brown spices, a touch of vanilla cream, and a hint of honey. That vanilla takes on a nutty edge as the spices build and the wood softens towards cedar with a hint of fruity tobacco chew. The vanilla creaminess really drives the finish towards a silken mouthfeel with plenty of spicy/fruity tobacco leaving you with a mild buzz across your senses.
The Neat Experience:
This feels like one of those expressions where you should “respect” the barrel selection process. It’s just … so refined. It’s also a dram where you’ll be so enthralled by what’s in the body of the whiskey that you’ll forget water is even needed to let it bloom even more.
This new release from Barton 1792 Distillery aims to highlight bourbons with unique finishings from the iconic distiller. This expression draws on the ever more popular port cask finish (they also released a Chardonnay and Cabernet cask finish this year, too). That port wood adds a nice layer to the bourbon, making it very sippable.
Tasting Notes:
There’s a nice softness on the nose that leads towards hints of Christmas spices, creamy vanilla, and light red fruit. The palate delivers on those promises and adds in a Christmas cake vibe with plenty of spice, nuts, dried fruit, and more of that velvety vanilla. The end is medium-length and warms up towards a mellow tobacco chewiness with a jammy depth.
The Neat Experience:
This is one of the easier, more approachable bourbons on the list. It’s not going to take you anywhere new. But what it does, it does well. It sort of feels like a nice end-of-the-day dram to take the edge off.
This whiskey is a new release from one of our favorite bourbon podcasts and whiskey reviewers, Bourbon Pursuit. The juice is a blend of three whiskeys hailing from Bardstown Bourbon Company in Kentucky, Finger Lakes Distilling out in New York, and an unnamed Tennessee distiller. The blend is crafted to be an accessible whiskey — or well-crafted “table bourbon,” if you will — that’s high proof and very drinkable.
Tasting Notes:
The nose is subtle, with notes of crème brûlée next to warm cornbread dripping with butter and honey and a touch of oak and spice. The taste is bold — hints of soft-almost-leathery wood, dark chocolate (especially with a little water), honey mouthfeel, light orange citrus, buttered popcorn, and… I want to say, Red Vines. The end is just the right length as the orange becomes jammy and hints of red fruits in pine boxes drop in.
The Neat Experience:
This bourbon has really grown on us as a sipper. Unfortunately (though great for the team behind the bottle), the initial run has sold out. You can still find a bottle on Drizly, though. It’s really worth diving into as a sipper to get a sense for the tastes of people who truly love bourbon and are now getting a chance to make some of their own.
We can’t wait to see what’s next!
Maker’s Mark Wood Finishing Series 2020 Limited Release
This limited edition expression from Maker’s Mark takes everything up a notch with a focus on vanilla and caramel, specifically. The whiskey is cask strength Maker’s that’s then re-barreled with two different staves in the barrels. The first is a virgin French oak stave that’s lightly toasted and roasted in a convection oven on medium heat. The other barrels have staves dropped in that are virgin American oak that have been baked in a convection oven low and very slow.
Tasting Notes:
This expression is meant to highlight caramel and vanilla and it sure does — while also adding a slight Christmas spice warmth. The body of this wheated bourbon is like eating the creamiest vanilla ice cream on top of a very caramel and molasses-forward pecan pie, with the butteriest crust ever. The whole experience is warm and spicy with hints of cedar next to vanilla pod skins and an almost smoked salted caramel on the very slow fade.
The Neat Experience:
This is a wonderful after-dinner sipper. The vanilla creaminess is like a digestif. It’s complex on its own and every time you go back for another sip, you’re going to find another nuance to enjoy.
This is the “original” single barrel bourbon. Buffalo Trace’s Blanton’s is hand-selected single barrels that meet the sky-high standards of former Master Distiller Elmer T. Lee, who created the expression back in 1984.
Tasting Notes:
There’s a clear sense of Christmas spices right away, leaning towards eggnog spiked with vanilla. The taste holds onto the spice, especially nutmeg, as caramel kettle corn, fresh honey, and vanilla husks dominate the palate. The end doesn’t overstay its welcome as hints of eggnog spice, dry vanilla, and popped corn fade away.
The Neat Experience:
This whiskey is built at Buffalo Trace to be the ultimate single barrel sipper. The juice is just so damned refined and accessible on its own. Sure, we like being a little cheeky and making cocktails with this one, but really, this is the perfect neat dram of bourbon.
Barrell Bourbon is one of the best blenderies in the bourbon game right now. This fairly new batch marries bourbons from Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana that are anywhere from five to 15-years-old. The juice is then bottled at cask-strength, allowing what was in those barrels to shine.
Tasting Notes:
There’s a fruity note on the nose that leans slightly savory — like a fall melon. Creamed corn with a bit of maple syrup offers up a counterpoint. The taste touches on notes of dark chocolate-covered marzipan as that savory fruit feel dances between rhubarb and fig, with dried orange tobacco chew and maybe a whisper of black licorice. The end is shockingly short and reveals an espresso bean bitterness and almost saltiness with a little mineral water note in the mix.
The Neat Experience:
The great thing about Barrell Bourbon is you know that these whiskeys are crafted to be drunk slowly, explored, argued over, dissected, and most importantly enjoyed. There are a lot of great batches from Barrell, especially in the last ten releases. But this one really reaches a new high in drinkability and taste that keeps us going back for more.
This is the mountaintop of what Wild Turkey can achieve. This is a blend of the best barrels that are married and bottled untouched. That means no filtering and no cutting with water. It’s just a classic bourbon with nothing to hide and no frills (in the best way possible).
Tasting Notes:
Crème brûlée greets you with a nice dose of Christmas spices, mild pipe tobacco, orange zest, and a distant hint of fresh mint sprigs. There’s a pine resin nature to the woody flavors on the palate that accents the orange oils, spices, vanilla, and sweetness. The sip takes on a Christmas cake-feel late, with a velvet end that is just the right amount of everything “classic” that you want from a traditional bourbon.
The Neat Experience:
This is our favorite Wild Turkey product. The main reason is that it’s just so easy to drink. There’s a real balance between bold bourbon notes and enticing and soft vibes that keep your attention. It’s also one of the best value-for-dollar bourbons out there.
This could easily cost twice as much and no one would bat an eye.
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(@JediCounselor) March 8, 2021
