Go N.Y. Go N.Y. Go | More TK #5

The Knicks never gave me a lot to root for. Sure, there were moments of light—there's nothing quite like being in high school during Linsanity and the peak of the Melo years—but for most of my child- and young-adulthood, the Knicks were at best were a sad afterthought, and at worst a lazily wafted stench carried upriver and scattered over the entire tri-state area, polluting the waters of Long Island Sound and the Hudson and New York harbor equally.

Something changed in the last few years. Maybe it was the almost-there RJ Barrett/Julius Randle rosters, the notion that after the historically terrible 17-and-65 stinker of a 2018-19 season things couldn't get that much worse. Maybe it was the fact that, after trading for Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart and picking up KAT along the way, things started to look good. Really good. Perennial-Eastern-Conference-challenger, what-if-this-was-our-year good, even.

Or maybe it was a me thing! I spent a lot of my teens and early twenties thumbing my nose up at most sporting events outside of the occasional New York-based championship-contending teams, and I only really got into the habit of being a sports fan during the pandemic lockdowns, under extremely embarrassing circumstances—I got into Formula E in the era when races were being livestreamed for free on YouTube, and that bled into Formula 1 and then MLS and then every other sport, pretty much. I learned to love the vagaries of these athletes, putting their bodies on the line, and to curse the refs, and the commissioners, and the unfettered capital expenditure by sovereign wealth funds (except when those funds benefitted my teams) and to give myself over to the prophetic wisdom of "sometimes ball go in, sometimes no."

I won't claim to be a real dyed-in-the-wool Knicks fan, not in the way that some people have, suffering out loud and in public since the last championship in 1973, not in the way that Timothée Chalamet is, running down to the Garden to scalp tickets as a teenager, not in the way that the people seen from my office window at the parade were, all decades of anger and jubilation bundled into one scaffold-climbing display of public joy. But this team means something important to me, because it meant something important to everyone around me. We were all in it, like a wave, or a song, or a movie whose credits you want to go on forever, just to keep a bit of the magic alive for a few moments longer.

This week, for the Talk of the Town (in ✨the magazine✨), I sat down with @isabel.kim to talk about her debut novel, "Sublimation," board games, and what happens when the world changes dramatically between writing and publication.

"Sublimation" is a fun, quick, and thought-provoking read, and I'd encourage you to pick it up, especially if you liked her previous big hit "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole". Something touched on briefly in the piece that I wish I had more space to get into with Iz was the utter strangeness of our narratives about immigration and citizenship rapidly outpacing her novel. As mentioned in the piece, her characters are effectively "white-glove evil"—tech-industry functionaries who have some power (but not too much) and plenty of freedom of movement—but how would those white-glove ills compare to the black-hat world we live in? How would those characters respond to the current moment? Would they, to begin with?

The Watchlist

Disclosure Day (2026)

You could make a case for me that Disclosure Day is a basically perfect exercise, and I'd have a hard time disagreeing with you—one friend basically made that case and I can't fault him for it. I cannot make that case myself, because I feel like the whole thing is basically one shove away from clattering into a million pieces—it's too pedestrian except when it isn't, it's explain-y and then withholding, and it's not a particularly sumptuous visual feast, outside of a few moments of pure Spielbergian majesty, where the camera almost flutters like it's alive itself. It is, in effect, built out of the contradictions it's trying to explicate, which is interesting to say the least, but I'm not surprised it's kinda falling apart with a more-reflexively-cynical public.

The Land Before Time (1988)

I promise this is not a bit. It was for movie club. I am a normal adult.

This is one of those movies (and, to be honest, a handful of its terrible sequels) that, as a kid, my brothers and I rented so much from Blockbuster that it eventually was not allowed back in our house. I have a lot of affection for it conceptually. I don't have a lot of literal

You'll also note that both of these movies got three stars on my Letterboxd, so this may be the time to explain that there's no rubric for any of this, and the three stars that late-career Spielberg gets is not the same three stars that a barely-feature length animated children's film about dinosaurs from 1988 gets, which seems obvious to me but probably not to some people.

More tk,

Luis

Writing soundtrack:

Other than that song, I've been ass-deep in the @themountaingoats.bsky.social back catalog while I try to update my Very Big Mountain Goats playlist. There's spreadsheets involved. It's a whole thing.