Alex Kirshner

@alexkirshner.com

30096 Followers 541 Following

@splitzoneduo.com @slate.com @theathletic.com alexkirshner.com askirshner at gmail

That's a bear
two trays of mac
Argentina have become the first side on record (from 1966) not to have a shot in the opening 70 minutes of a World Cup final. The previous longest wait in a final was France against Argentina in 2022 (68th min). They have failed to get Messi into the game at all thus far, and he has just 22 touches.
Early on in The Hawk, Netflix’s new sports comedy set in the world of professional golf, Will Ferrell’s and Molly Shannon’s characters share a moment. Ferrell, one of the century’s most renowned comics, plays Lonnie “the Hawk” Hawkins, a washed-up PGA Tour pro trying to get back on top. Shannon, an Emmy-nominated, SAG Award–winning powerhouse, plays Ferrell’s estranged wife, Stacy. “You haven’t been on the tour in seven years, you dickless cunt,” Stacy tells Ferrell’s character. “By definition, a cunt is dickless,” Lonnie counters.
“I gather that everyone here is 100% certain Graham Platner is a Nazi antisemite,” the left-wing journalist Ryan Grim wrote on Bluesky in early March. “I also gather you all are trapped in an epistemic chamber sealed tighter than the one around Fox News.” To be fair to Grim, Maine primary voters were with Platner, too, backing him by a wide enough margin that his main opponent, Gov. Janet Mills, quit before the July primary. But in the end, it turned out that Platner’s haters who had decamped to Bluesky had the right read on him—not that he couldn’t win votes because of the tattoo or extramarital sexts, but that a guy with these résumé marks was full of shit when he claimed more stories weren’t coming.
Kyle Schwarber
Dakar
Cook, 30, is a public relations manager for Burberry Beauty at Coty. She is from Oyster Bay, N.Y., and graduated from the University of Alabama with a bachelor’s degree in communication and information sciences.
This year’s social media tourism boom around the World Cup has been a different, bottom-up sort of thing. Its leaders are people who have loved their trips, seen the ability to get lots of followers by selling patriotism back to Americans, or a bit of both. There is no question that some of this lovefest is the result of algorithmic opportunism, but there’s also no question that it works. Freddy is definitely riding a tail wind from being on Elon Musk’s personal social media platform, which he has designed to be friendly to Trumpism and the Republican Party. You can get a lot of retweets by referring to the “land of the free” with bald eagle and American flag emojis as you drive over the bridge from Canada. But I doubt Freddy has appealed only to Americans working a partisan angle cloaked in patriotism. The thing about America is that it is an extremely cool country with countless cool places. How many people have either forgotten that or found themselves in the market for a little reassurance from a faceless German? Some, at least! We can learn something, then, from Freddy’s success. It’s that for various reasons, a lot of Americans are lusting after proof that America is good. Whether you are rolling around like a pig in slop at this political moment or devastated about it, you can find a reason to be jazzed about the German guy discovering joy in every little corner of the country. This is what Walmart, the publicists for the nation’s hottest rising country act, and many politicians have noticed too. There is currency right now in reminding Americans of something that I thought was pretty obvious to even the most doomerist segments of the U.S.: Not everything is bad. Like almost anywhere in the world, a tourist can have a fun time on vacation here.
Jeremy Lin celebrating
Odell Beckham Browns jersey, orange 13
Patrick Ruffini posts a UFC White House pic saying the old Republican Party didn't have this level of cultural currency
Two piles of fries. They are big
I don’t think this is just a vibe. Some of the ubiquity is quantifiable. The ratings for these NBA Finals, which the Knicks lead 2-1, are unusually huge. The ticket prices for Game 3, which the Knicks lost, might have made you puke. Current U.S. Google search interest for “knicks” is well more than double what it was for “yankees” at any point in the past five years, including during the 2024 World Series. This is a blunt-object measurement, but Knicks search interest is 20 percent higher than “super bowl” was at game time each of the past four years. The Knicks are even beating up on the World Cup domestically and mounting a pretty good charge at soccer’s flagship event globally. This is a disorienting amount of Knicks.
It will take a lot of digging out for people who were taken in by internet hype to understand Pratt’s loss. They have fallen into a classic Los Angeles trap, one that existed even before the world’s wealthiest person bought Twitter and turned it into a Republican echo chamber awash in slop. Los Angeles is mind-bendingly big. There is no such thing as a universal experience in this country-sized city. There isn’t one Los Angeles, but hundreds of little Los Angeli. In some of those pockets, homelessness and street crime are the most salient issues facing the city, and Pratt’s apocalyptic talk about them landed as a tonic. And when this is combined with Musk’s ideological project on X, it can lead to some of the stupidest commentary in the world, like this guy’s: “I try not to get political. But LA is where I live, and I am here to tell you: There is 0.0 percent chance these results are legit.” Classic mistake, brother. Been there! Even knowing what was happening as the campaign went on, I found it difficult not to get sucked into the vortex. Only long walks outside could counter my phone telling me for hours each day that L.A. was cooked.
How this will affect returns for index-fund investors is uncertain; it depends on SpaceX’s performance relative to the S&P. But for those of us who are devoted to the idea of index-fund investing and want it to continue to work well for decades to come, this is good and critical news. Index funds do not promise a specific return, other than that holders will do exactly as well as the index, minus an infinitesimal annual fee. The index, of course, has done well for many decades. The S&P’s overlords cannot guarantee that this will continue, but they can treat as sacred the rules that give the index credibility. This does not mean that companies doing seedy, speculative things won’t be included in the S&P 500. You need only look at the index’s crypto treasury companies, now affecting all of our retirements, to realize that that isn’t the case. But those companies had to follow a procedure to get into the mix and benefit from our money. That requirement has weeded out a lot of bad candidates for our investments.
A "boosted" Cody Campbell tweet praising Notre Dame's AD for critiquing the transfer portal
Two things are true of Los Angeles’ homelessness. One is that the area has an extraordinary number of homeless people: some 72,000 in L.A. County as of last summer. The other is that unsheltered homelessness (people in streets, in cars, or squatting in buildings) has fallen in the most recent measurements, which cover about the first two years of Bass’ term. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s survey pegs the decline at about 17.5 percent within city limits during that period. The situation is awful, impossible to miss, and improving. Pratt’s campaign is premised on the “improving” part not being real. His argument is not just that L.A. is the country’s biggest hub for homelessness, but that it’s being swallowed whole by it. He says Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom “make up stats” and that the widely reported homeless counts “are not real numbers.” He says “anybody with eyeballs” can see that the official story is false. “Actually, there’s been an increase of naked, drug-addict zombies in front of every playground, every kid’s school, every coffee shop,” he says. (Two blocks from the site of this party, a coffee shop sits across the street from an elementary school. The next naked person or encampment I spot in front of either will be my first.) Pratt says Newsom and Bass should be in jail together. But the homeless estimates Pratt decries aren’t something those two have cooked up in a boardroom. That statistic comes from the LAHSA, a city-county joint agency that sends trained volunteers into the streets each February to count the people living there. The survey methodology comes from professionals at the University of Southern California, a private institution, and the count requires approval from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. (The feds trimmed the most recent number by about 100, out of 72,000.) Researchers from the RAND Corporation believe that local authorities undercounted the previous time around but still found declines in the a…
In a way, I could feel it all working on me. I walked 15,000 steps around two neighborhoods on Monday, saw a scattered handful of homeless people, said "How's it goin'?" to one who said "hey" back, and picked up a chicken burrito that was mediocre by L.A. standards but would have been an 85th-percentile Mexican food item in most cities. The Dodgers and the weather are still the nation's best. This city, which rules, will soon host the World Cup, which will go well. I almost forgot what an irredeemable hellscape it had become before I opened X and was reminded that all people with common sense could see the disaster.
spouse listing showing she divorced the same guy twice
chicken parm on a baked potato and a salad that might or might not get eaten
me and richard johnson smiling as we talk
ohtani
Paul Skenes ERA by season: 1.96, 1.97, 1.98
four bags of rancho gordo beans
Strikezone plot showing a ball in the middle of the zone, called a ball
Steven saying "maybe abandon extremism"
he gets touched in the face with a stick and falls very dramatically
PNC Park panoramic
Owen Pierce from Veep
Top Exit Velocity MPH Konnor Griffin 113.2 Konnor Griffin 106.0 Bryan Reynolds 105.8 Xander Bogaerts 105.3 Nick Yorke 104.9
Bowls of vermicelli noodles and pork in a fish sauce broth: bun cha
An extremely high cave opening with jungle outside of it, shot from above
Baseball Reference Hall of Fame stats for Ronald Acuña Jr., available in full here: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/a/acunaro01.shtml#all_hof_other
Gonzaga Could Become The Greatest Men's Team Ever 2021
Mar 3, 2026; Phoenix, AZ, USA; Great Britain fans watch game action against the Milwaukee Brewers in the third inning at the American Family Fields. Mandatory Credit: Rick Scuteri-Imagn Images GB player stands in front of "All Aboard America" sign with British flag-draped fans behind.
Brockman is not an outlier. If you’ve worked in or around big tech for any length of time, you’ve met the type, probably several dozen of them. They’re everywhere in AI. They care enormously about Humanity. They’d do anything for Humanity. They just can’t be bothered with actual people.
“Yeah, we should have reacted differently. We know that,” said Swayman. “We are so excited for the women’s team, we have so much respect for the women’s team and to share that gold medal is something we’re forever grateful for. Now that we’re home, we get to share that together forever and see the incredible support that we have from the USA in sharing this incredible gold medal.”
The full Apes box set
message: Im glad you're triggered. Good for Kash and that team for laughing at the girls. Hockey is for men. Also nobody cares about your dumb GLBT or whatever alphabet crap math_answer: -1
vince from entourage Haven't been posting cause I've been too present, distracted by the moment. Sorry but thank you.
Barney's Beanery 5-8 PT Homefield House UCLA pop up 1037 Braxton Ave, Los Angeles CA
a woman in a blue pantsuit singing inside an incomprehensibly shaped blue and purple spotlight
the expanse of parking lots around the abandoned basketball arena and baseball/football stadium in oakland CA
One official signals "good." The other signals "no good."
a young man drinks some fish sauce after discussing how bad his tight ends were on his fantasy team
A guy playing golf and saying "if you voted for a realist and felon, I have very little interest in your opinion on the law"
The Fed issue aside, isn’t this just Trump continuing his recent tradition of using the Justice Department to go after his enemies? Yeah. Shouldn’t that be a bigger part of reporting this story? Either thing would be a presidency-scandal event in any other administration in history. In this one, it’s another day of the week ending in the letter y.