Last week celebrity couple Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer announced they were calling it quits after over a decade of marriage. The news came as a shock, but that was nothing compared to what happened Saturday, when someone on Twitter posted screenshots of what seemed to be a truly sick burn from Gaiman to his soon-to-be-ex: His Goodreads suddenly said he was currently reading a book about how to split from someone with “borderline or narcissistic personality disorder.” A mere handful of hours later, Gaiman — who tends to be calmer and more cutting with his public tussles — claimed he was simply hacked.

Still, there was still a good stretch of the day in which social media addicts at least assumed it the first public throwdown in what could be a nasty divorce. The book in question was Randi Kreger and Bill Eddy’s Splitting: Protecting Yourself While Divorcing Someone With Borderline Or Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and one eagle-eyed follower on social media’s most popular reading site noticed it had prime real estate in the comics legend’s bedside reading pile.

To some, it seemed like legit shade, especially as Palmer announced their split on, of all places, her Patreon page. Of course, it might have seemed a stretch that the creator of Sandman, Good Omens and American Gods could be that vindictive. And it seems like he wasn’t: As per The A.V. Club Gaiman quickly updated his Goodreads page, eliminating the Kreger-Eddy tome, and adding a quick note, painting it as untrue. “Whoa,” Gaiman wrote. “Someone with a dark sense of humour just hacked this account. (I suppose that’s what I get for leaving it here and not doing anything for a long time.)”

So there you have it. The A.V. Club leaves open the possibility that Gaiman simply backed off of a really, comically nasty joke, but it’s worth noting his Goodreads page is more of an author’s page, with no mention of what good reads he is indeed reading. Does this mean we’re spared a brutal public famous people divorce? What would Morpheus do? He probably wouldn’t start a flame war with an ex over social media, that’s what.

(Via The A.V. Club)

The primary focus of the seventh episode of The Last Dance is Michael Jordan’s stunning retirement from basketball in 1993, his stint as a member of the White Sox organization, and return to the Bulls 18 months later. The documentary explores what went into that decision, from apparent consideration of retiring during the summer of 1992 to his father’s murder in July of 1993 that only further pushed him away from basketball and towards baseball.

When Jordan first told Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf he wanted to quit, Reinsdorf says he didn’t try to talk him out of it but said he couldn’t make that decision until he sat down with Phil Jackson. For Jordan, he felt he had done everything he wanted to in basketball and was mentally and physically exhausted.

“We were coming off of three championships,” Jordan said. “I fulfilled my responsibility to the city, to the Bulls, to my teammates.”

Jackson and Jordan met, just the two of them, in Reinsdorf’s office in the Bulls practice facility, and Jordan explained where he was at.

“I told Phil, look, I’m about here,” Jordan said while raising his hand to the top of his head. “I’m done. I have no more challenges. I have no motivation. I was done.”

Phil recalls not making too big of a push for his superstar to come back, but did note that by leaving the game in his prime was taking something significant away from society.

“This was a young man that had gone through some heart rending things,” Jackson said. “You’re denying a gift to society, but I understand, you know, I understand.”

One of the things that’s really shined in this documentary has been how incredibly understanding Jackson was as the coach of the Bulls, understanding his players in a way few do, or are willing to do. He got Dennis Rodman and understood his unique needs in a way few coaches could — Chuck Daly did this as well — and even though he was seeing the best player in the world retire in his prime and leaving his team, he understood why and understood that, if nothing else, Jordan needed some time away from the game.

Jordan, of course, would eventually return — and he even addressed that as a real possibility in his retirement press conference — but Phil Jackson handled a difficult conversation about as well as he could given the circumstances.

Michael Jordan shocked the world when he opted to retire after the 1992-93 NBA season. This ground gets covered in episode seven of The Last Dance, with longtime reporter Andrea Kremer alluding to the fact that “nobody could rationalize” why the best basketball player in the world, fresh off of three championships and still in his athletic prime, would hang them up.

Of course, there was a lot of speculation at the time — some of which still exists to this day — about whether this was a retirement at all. For a myriad of reasons, people found it plausible that Jordan’s time away from the league was actually a league-mandated suspension.

“Look at some of the events that have recently happened,” Kremer said. “His father was tragically murdered, there’s a number of questions about his gambling, you start to connect some dots and you think, ‘Is this all related? Was this a secret suspension?’”

“The retirement, there were any number of people who would say, ‘Well, David Stern suspended him, right? Wink wink, a suspension, right?’” ESPN’s Michael Wilbon said. “And that was out there.”

Plenty of folks interviewed made cases for why the case for this was tenuous at best, but prior to his passing earlier this year, former NBA commissioner David Stern — who presided over the league at the time of Jordan’s first retirement (and, for that matter, his next two retirements, too) — addressed this in the documentary.

“The folklore, the urban legend, that I sent him away because he was gambling, ridiculous,” Stern said. “No basis in fact whatever. I can bang on a table and say it’s a calumny, slanderous lie or whatever. It’s just not true. Never was, never will be, no matter how many times people ask the question.”

Jordan confirmed in the doc that he just needed a break, while longtime associate Mark Vancil claimed that Jordan laid out, in detail, what he was going to do a year before he pressed the eject button.

“The conspiracy stuff was stupid because I had sat with him a year earlier, he had told me what he was gonna do,” Vancil said. “In tummer of ’92 and it’s the Dream Team summer, you could tell he was really tired, as tired as he’d looked and as beat up as he looked. And I said, ‘So what’re you gonna do?’ There’s a long pause and he said, ‘I’m gonna shock the world.’ He said, ‘I’m gonna quit and go play baseball.’ And I said, ‘When?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’d do it right now, except Bird and Magic never went three in a row and I gotta do the Olympics. But if it wasn’t for that, I’d be playing this summer.’”

As the doc touched on, it is quite easy to piece together how a secret suspension could have been plausible. But either the NBA is full of a whole lot of people who are incredible liars, or Jordan really did retire for the reason that everyone has said led to his retirement for decades.

Episode 7 of The Last Dance delves into a couple things relating to Michael Jordan’s first retirement in 1993 that many were curious if they would even discuss. One is the conspiracy theory of Jordan’s first retirement being an 18-month “secret suspension,” which David Stern addresses and insists is totally false.

The other is speculation that the murder of James Jordan, Michael’s father, in the summer of 1993 was in some way related to his gambling. It was something theorized almost immediately, as Jordan’s gambling had come into focus during the 1993 playoffs, and remains something people still believe.

Jordan addressed it quickly in the documentary, noting that at the time it did hurt but he believes it was only coming from people that didn’t know him and wanted to hurt him.

“It did hurt, but you had people who were throwing darts that wanted to hurt me anyway,” Jordan said. “It wasn’t from the people I love or the people that knew me or the people that cared. It was the people that got tired of me being on top.”

Others like Sam Smith and Bob Costas called the public speculation of that in the papers “cheap shots” and noted there was no evidence to link the two things.

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