Jun

6

2025

Daniel May (publisher): Diversion—from the Latin, “to turn aside.” The term’s neutrality suggests that what we might turn aside is of lesser importance than what we are turning toward, but in general parlance we understand that, as a noun, an effective diversion allows us and even compels us to turn aside, and turn away from, what we know is of less urgency and less meaning than what the diversion calls us toward. This is the danger of the diversion, of course, and of an economy that so relentlessly produces it. But in bleak and demanding times, who among us is immune from the mental rest that a good diversion provides?

But what makes a good diversion? Let’s propose three conditions. First, of course, it cannot be overly demanding; it must pull us out of the pressures of family and the obligations of politics (this is why almost all great art makes for bad diversion) but it can’t lead to their neglect (heroin: bad diversion). Second, it must be demanding enough to hold one’s attention, lest the wandering mind return to the horrors of the day’s news or the anxieties of, say, the last conversation with one’s parent. Third, and by far the most difficult, it must not actively make one feel worse about themselves. This is the fundamental problem not only with say, opioids, but with so much of what counts as diversion in an economy that has come to depend on it; the numb what-am-I-doing-with-my-life hangover that follows an hour of scrolling on Twitter or TikTok and lasts almost as long as the scroll itself.

So let me submit: the NBA podcast. Bear with me.

Given the pride of place that it holds in the formation of American masculinity, sports as such offers an ambivalent candidate for diversion. The central problem is that those invested in sports tend to be, well, invested in it. However preposterous and patently ridiculous it is to those free from the gravitational pull of fandom, for the vast majority of the inhabitants of Planet Sports, life is either frustrating or heartbreaking—and the latter only in the good years. I spent no small amount of psychological energy in my twenties actively working to unburden myself of the hold that the Minnesota Vikings—a multimillion-dollar company that exists in order to make it easier for other companies to sell their products to viewers of its games—had over my mental well-being.

Perhaps that is a bad example, as football is particularly ill-equipped when it comes to the third condition. The sport is straightforwardly brutal, and however much I can still find myself getting sucked into a playoff game, watching more than a half makes me feel like I’ve been sniffing glue (disclaimer: I’ve never sniffed glue). But I can hazard a defense of basketball, on aesthetic and even political grounds. That defense would point to the accessibility of the sport (it can be and often is played in parking lots and playgrounds), its historical connection to America’s underclass, the relative (compared to other leagues) political engagement of its stars and even executives, and above all the nature of the game, which revolves around how to make space for others (or, if you’re good, how to let others make space for you). I can, however, understand why such a defense would ring hollow to anyone aware of the actual economics of the NBA, or those that may grow annoyed at the screams of partners or friends potentially waking up sleeping children because some guy put some ball in something. More personally, and I write this as someone who has loved basketball for as long as I’ve been sentient, the trouble is that actually watching basketball takes up too much damn time. In this respect, it cannot meet our first condition; it is just too demanding.

But! The NBA podcast—and more specifically the trio of shows that are the crown jewel in “The Ringer’s Podcast Network”: The Bill Simmons Podcast, The Ringer NBA Show, and The Zach Lowe Show—is just demanding enough, easily assimilable into dishwashing or exercise, providing escape with minimal self-loathing.

While the hosts of all these pods are constantly on each other’s shows, each one manages to retain a distinctive vibe. While Simmons is bombastic, encyclopedic in his knowledge of NBA history and histrionic in his enthusiasms (and resentments), the NBA Show trio of Justin Verrier, Rob Mahoney, and Wosny Lambre (Big Woz) come off as friends that like hanging out to talk hoops while gently mocking each other’s non-basketball related hobbies.

But the best of these is The Zach Lowe Show. Lowe is a former high school teacher and PhD student in US history who worked as a criminal justice reporter at The Stamford Advocate and The American Lawyer before turning to the NBA. I like to think that his politics and academic training have something to do with my affection for him, but the truth is that it would take an exacting, and creative, reading of his work to draw the connections. He clearly just loves basketball. He loves the strategy of it, he loves the players, he loves the executives, he loves the coaches, and he loves those that love the game. That love leaves him with a generosity toward those in the sport but a general annoyance with the vast majority of those in sports media, who he subtly but clearly considers insufficiently respectful and considerate of the talent and brilliance of the people that play and make the sport. To wit: after a 20-minute monologue describing all the limitations of recently fired Knicks coach Tom Thibodeou, he imagined a conversation with the subject of his criticisms: “The counters that Thibs would have to all of this shit that I’m saying now, I would be like, oh, oh, so you actually thought about all of this and then charted it out five steps ahead; if I do that, they’re going to do that. These are not original ideas to this coach. He knows more about basketball than I will ever know. He forgot more about basketball today than I will ever know.”

In substance, none of this is remarkable. But it’s hard to care deeply about something as ultimately trivial as sports while also being careful with it. We want our diversions to mean less to us than what we truly value. But we also don’t want to feel like suckers for caring about them. It’s a hard balance to strike, but when it is struck, it is just pleasurable enough.

Jonathan Shamir (contributing writer): The first of many times that I picked up The Sellout, the Man Booker Prize-winning novel by Paul Beatty, must have been shortly after its release in 2015. My inability to commit to reading the novel was not because I couldn’t get into it, but the exact opposite: the prose was so alive, so dense that I found myself paralyzed every time I tried to read it, deferring until I felt I had the necessary lucidity of mind to fully grasp its genius. Needless to say, that fabled state of mind never arrived, but I did finally read the book, and it was everything I imagined it would be.

The Sellout begins at the Supreme Court with the trial of the Black protagonist—known in his case by his surname Me, known to his lover by the nickname Bonbon, and known to his father’s erstwhile frenemy as The Sellout—for reinstating slavery and segregation in his Californian hometown, the agrarian ghetto of Dickens, in order to put it back on the map (literally, after its erasure). From the courtroom, where the narrator lights up a joint because charging him for such a minor misdemeanour would be “like charging Hitler for loitering or a multinational oil company like British Petroleum for littering,” he gives us his life story, and explains how he found himself pioneering the violent reversal of American history’s not-so-relentless forward march.

Beatty’s novel is a carnivalesque critique of ‘post-racial’ America, playfully taking ideas about race to their logical extremes to expose the hypocrisy, and often the emptiness, in their wake. In other words, he’s trying to bring back overt racism to force America to confront the lie of its disappearance. In the picaresque adventures across Dickens, a group of Black thinkers known as the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals rewrite a “politically correct” version of the American canon, excising the n-word and replacing the word “slave” with “dark skinned volunteer”; a washed-up child actor volunteers to be the narrator’s slave in order to feel “relevant again,” quipping that “true freedom is having the right to be a slave”; gangs perform historical reenactments of the glorious turf wars of the past; and white children playact their own freedom rides to the newly-segregated Chaff Middle School (even though, given that only Blacks and Mexicans live in the area, it is already de facto segregated) after the narrator puts up a punny sign that the whites-only Wheaton Academy will be set up next door.

What drew me in more than anything else was Beatty’s remarkable prose, overflowing and overloaded with everything from legalese to psychoanalytic theory to a full array of erudite African American cultural references and vernaculars, not to mention flashes of Spanish and Latin, and even a line of Cyrillic at one point. The language is alive and thrashing with all these different registers, as though this kind of maximalist cognitive overload can meet the questions about race that are overdetermined to the point of absurdity, and, of course, have no easy answers.

It’s also been a long time since literary fiction made me laugh so much. (Special mention to one early scene when the narrator’s father—“the sole practitioner of the field of Liberation Psychology”—mugs the narrator to test whether the bystander effect applies to Black people, only to instigate a pile-on because he didn’t account for the “bandwagon effect.”) But for all the times I laughed, there were times I felt like I shouldn’t, and jokes that flew miles over my head. The raucous and irreverent humor felt like it was also probing what laughter might be revealing, and what it might be staving off. In the penultimate chapter, the narrator recalls going to a comedy show with his father where the comedian evicted two white audience members for laughing. “Do I look like I’m fucking joking with you? This shit ain’t for you. Understand? Now get the fuck out! This is our thing.” The room goes silent, and the narrator reflects on why he didn’t confront the comedian. Not because the aggrieved white people needed him, but because there is a void in the center: “So what exactly is our thing?”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The exhibition of paintings by René Magritte at the Luxembourg + Co. gallery on the Upper East Side, on display until July 12th, provides visitors with an opportunity to do something rarely possible with such a well-known and omnipresent artist. The show, titled The Phantom Landscape, allows us to examine Magritte’s paintings—so beautiful, so rich, so disarming—away from the crowds and distractions of museums that are little more than stops on the tourism checklist. Magritte’s playfulness, his wit, and, most importantly, the questions he slyly poses about language and images as they exist separately and in relation to each other can best be appreciated in the gallery’s quiet, well-laid-out sixth floor space.

The show features works any Magritte aficionado is familiar with, but sometimes with a curious twist. In the famous La Clef des songes (The Interpretation of Dreams) from 1935, which is nearly as emblematic of the artist’s oeuvre as Ceci n’est pas une pipe, we are presented with images of a horse, labeled “the door”; a clock, labeled “the wind”; a pitcher, labeled “the door”; and a valise, labeled “the valise.” Magritte’s questioning of the nature of language’s falsely assumed necessary relationship to the object named is presented here with the greatest simplicity, the objects painted as they would be in a child’s primer. And yet the simplicity is denied by the artist’s refusal to fix them with their commonly accepted names. The version on display in the show is not the most familiar version, captioned in French; rather, here we get a rare work in English by the francophone Belge. This was an opportunistic choice by Magritte—the Parisian gallery at which he was shown had gone bust, so he repainted the original in English in an effort to sell to an American. I assume it worked.

Magritte provides no answers to the questions his paintings pose. Le Paysage fantôme (The Phantom Landscape), from 1928, is a portrait in muddy colors of a plain-looking woman—Magritte’s wife Georgette—with the word “montagne” written across the middle of her face. Is it that her nose is a mountain in the landscape of her face? Is the face obscuring the landscape, rendering it a ghost? Many possible answers work, and this is the central richness of Magritte.

There are several paintings in which the scene being painted, often an actual landscape, is interrupted by the canvas within the canvas that continues the landscape that is being painted. Does the painting continue the landscape, or vice versa? The opposition and collaboration of artifice and reality are ever-present in Magritte’s work. Bright blue skies with banks of clouds predominate, reinforcing the oneiric quality of the paintings. Dresses in human poses with no bodies in them, the torsos of classical sculptures at an otherwise deserted seaside, a solitary gravesite on the sand, a unicorn with a castle tower as a horn—these are images unmistakably by Magritte. The gallery has wisely kept explanatory texts to a minimum. Even the French titles are untranslated. I approve wholeheartedly. The Phantom Landscape allows and even obliges us to truly consider the works on show. It insists that we spend more than the 17 seconds surveys have shown most museumgoers spend before any painting. The rewards are immense.

“Under the pavement, the beach!” So goes a famous slogan of the French student protesters of 1968. When they ripped the stones from the Paris streets to build their barricades, they found sand beneath—and a potent symbol for the idea that capitalist modernity was but a thin veneer atop an anarchic and idyllic natural world, which promised both political and sexual liberty. Oddly, the rabbis imagined a parallel process occurring in the ancient Temple, though for opposite purposes. For the sanctuary floor, which was made entirely of marble, contained a ring attached to a single square-cubit block, which a priest could remove to access the earth below. He did so to perform the weird and distasteful “sotah” ritual, described in this week’s parshah, Naso. In this procedure, a husband who suspects his wife of adultery drags her to the sanctuary and forces her to imbibe a bitter cocktail of water, earth, and crumbled parchment bearing a conditional curse, which the priest recites and she affirms; by the terms of the curse, either the ordeal would magically inflict a physical punishment, or her immunity would prove her innocence. Our parshah assumes that the priest reaches down and grabs some of “the earth that is on the floor of the Tabernacle,” a simple directive given that the travelling sanctuary is, after all, a glorified tent. But in the permanent Temple, floor dust is harder to procure, a sourcing conundrum that prompted the rabbinic invention of this escape hatch.

Beneath the superficial similarity, there is a deep opposition between the Parisian students dismantling the city to uncover a libertine utopia and the Israelite priest lifting the polished marble to reveal the Temple’s darker side: a punitive, misogynist ritual of sexual discipline. And unlike the gleefully rebellious students, the priest, I imagine, must have been grimacing as he lifted the stone; as the rabbis’ little trapdoor highlights, the sotah ritual seems always already to have been an embarrassing anachronism. For us, of course, it is the shameful holdover of a patriarchal past, but the biblical author may have had his own reasons to be abashed. The sotah ritual is cultically anomalous, unlike anything else found in the priestly instructions: a magic trick involving a dissolved curse-scroll, requiring the (otherwise forbidden) erasure of the divine name. The Bible scholar Tikvah Frymer Kensky argued that Bamidbar stresses the efficacy of the curse-oath over the thaumaturgic potion, which suggests to me that the biblical writer is revising an inherited ritual he regarded as uncomfortably superstitious, rationalizing it by emphasizing the woman’s oath and the judging Deity instead of the bitter waters’ intrinsic potency and the priest as sorcerer. In this sense, even in the wilderness, performing the sotah ritual involved exposing the archaic, primeval unconscious of orderly, priestly religion.

That square cubit of removable marble is thus also the cork stopping up a menacing, ancient past. In a remarkable Talmudic legend, when King David dug the drain pipes for the Temple, he unwittingly released the watery depths known as the Tehom, which threatened to drown the world. He only prevented this deluge by throwing a pottery shard inscribed with God’s name into the water—a violation of the prohibition on erasing the divine name that King David’s advisor justified using the precedent of the sotah ritual. The detachable floor-block installs in the Temple a permanent reminder of that mythic encounter with the uncanny Deep, the chaos that precedes creation itself and which, as Rabbi Lexie Botzum suggests, strives to unmake static, fixed orders of domination. Like many rulers, King David finds that his program of modernization, centered on a fancy construction project, unleashes unintended revolutionary forces, which he then scrambles to suppress.

Much as I envy (and respect) the joyous, optimistic students of ‘68, I think the sotah ritual ultimately provides a more mature account of what lies beneath the modern surfaces of our world. Awaiting us there is not a hippy paradise, but a genizah of past traumas, social worlds forcibly remade by new elites, revolutions accidentally unleashed and violently put down. “Under the Temple floor, the watery Deep” is hardly as alluring as the offer of a sottovia beach community just waiting to be accessed. Nonetheless, it challenges us to march—not under the flag of naive utopianism, but with the awareness, eternally bitter and finally hopeful, that history is bristling with struggle and transformation.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents.