The Blue Devils Made Me Do It

I went four years of college at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, without ever attending a basketball game. Before last weekend, I’d gone more than three and a half years on the faculty at Duke without watching its fabled team zip up and down the court. I figured I’m a football person and a movie buff and why cultivate an interest I don’t have time for? Besides, everyone around me zigged so far in the direction of obsession with the Blue Devils that I enjoyed zagging toward indifference. I’m ornery that way.

But on Saturday night, I relented. I found myself with a precious ticket for a prime midcourt seat at Duke’s home game against my alma mater, which is of course its archrival. Curiosity got the better of me.

I rooted for neither team. My solution to divided loyalties was to indulge none at all. Besides, I had so many impressions to process. Among them:

Nothing you’ve heard about the decibel level in Cameron Indoor Stadium prepares you for it. I felt it in my toenails. In my eyelashes. It’s pure aural adrenaline — so much so that if they raced garden slugs in a terrarium at center court, you’d be as enraptured as if watching Secretariat in his prime.

Cameron Indoor Stadium is a ridiculous name. There’s no outdoor Cameron, and it’s an arena. I tell my students to write precisely, and that’s the kind of counterexample the university sets?

Cameron is not the place to order white wine.

The most important people in the arena — at least in terms of keeping the players’ endoskeletons intact and the game from turning into some admixture of basketball and surfing — are the students who rush onto the court seemingly every five seconds and, on their hands and knees, towel up the players’ sweat. There are oceans of it, approximately half from the Duke wunderkind Cooper Flagg.

Flagg is the moistest athlete I’ve ever seen.

And he’s breathtaking. At one point early in the game, he raced the length of the court and, barely stopping to plant his feet, shot a perfect three-pointer. I tell people I favor football because there’s no athleticism like that of a wide receiver making a spectacular catch. I am wrong.

Height matters. Smarts matter more. What always strikes me when I watch a great quarterback struck me as I watched these young giants: Physical skills are useless without mental acuity — without being able to think ahead, anticipate other players’ movements, plot your own. Brawn and brain don’t compete. They cooperate.

It’s not just Duke students who wear little glowing blue devil horns on their heads; it’s very young children, presumably dressed that way by their Duke alum parents. I believe this is called indoctrination.

For more than two hours, I lost all awareness of who was president. Phrases like executive order and words like tariff were scrubbed from my vocabulary. My world shrank to this exhibition of extraordinary agility, this one charged space, this impossible fervor. Duke won, 87 to 70. I won bigger.

For the Love of Sentences

In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Gay celebrated the former New York Giants running back Saquon Barkley, now with the Philadelphia Eagles and about to cap an extraordinary season by playing in the Super Bowl: “For Giants fans, it’s been like watching a beloved friend go on vacation with your worst enemy, and then pretending not to see the photos on Instagram of them hanging out at beaches and fancy hotels.” (Thanks to Thomas Paciello of Yonkers, N.Y., for spotting this.)

In The Washington Post, Ron Charles observed that the scolds who ban books have taken issue with, for example, “Maurice Sendak’s ‘In the Night Kitchen,’ which has been proven in the state of Florida to turn straight white Christian boys into polygender Marxists who eat only quinoa.” (Jill Gaither, St. Louis, and John Jacoby, North Andover, Mass.)

In The Times, Andi Zeisler appraised the stage persona of the pop star Sabrina Carpenter: “Admittedly, you can look at her career and see a retrograde sensibility. At five feet tall, she presents as a half-pint pinup doll whose doe eyes, big Bardot hair and frothy, lingerie-inspired costumes evoke two iconic Hollywoods (Old, and Frederick’s of).” (David Baer, Concord, Calif., and Ilene V. Smith, Manhattan)

Also in The Times, Elisabeth Egan preferred the writer Jennifer Finney Boylan’s latest, fifth autobiography to several of those before it: “Her second, third and fourth memoirs lack the oomph of her inaugural clarion call. They’re eloquent and clever but, like siblings born close together, they suffer for lack of elbow room.” (Kate Kavanagh, Concord, Mass.)

In The New Yorker, Ian Parker remarked on the unceremonious end to an interview with the architect Norman Foster: “I was still talking with Foster a few minutes after my understood departure time, and a partner walked into the room with my coat held open in front of him, like a bouncer ready to discuss the difference between the easy way to do this and the hard way.” (Steve Gump, Charlottesville, Va.)

OK, I delayed politics, which these days can be delayed only so long.

In the Closer to the Edge newsletter, a post without a byline described the vice president in his familiarly unctuous Donald Trump-touting mode: “Watching JD Vance speak is like watching a man try to sell you a used couch at a garage sale — one that’s visibly stained, smells faintly of wet dog and has a sagging middle cushion that’s clearly seen too much. He’s standing there with a straight face, calling it ‘a timeless classic’ while you’re trying to figure out if the smell is mold or regret.” (Rebecca Ditmore, Bainbridge Island, Wash.)

In his weekly surfing newsletter, Matt Warshaw rewrote a wishful maxim in light of Elon Musk’s meddling, which has only intensified since his pre-inauguration days bunking with Trump at Mar-a-Lago: “The arc of the moral universe is not bending toward justice, it is tied to a Cybertruck and getting dragged through Palm Beach County, Florida.” (Christopher Baker, San Francisco)

In Slate, Frank Bowman cast his gaze upon Capitol Hill: “The predominant emotion among G.O.P. politicians in Congress seems to be terror that the least expression of dissent, even in defense of their own constitutional prerogatives, will draw a frown or, worse, a Truth Social post from the Great Man. So they either scramble over one another to find a camera before which they can perform stomach-turning genuflections to the Dear Leader’s infinite wisdom or scurry into their office burrows and sit, quivering, like rabbits paralyzed by the passing shadow of a bird of prey.” (Estelle Vickery, Waynesville, N.C.)

In The Globe and Mail or Toronto, Shannon Proudfoot reviewed Karoline Leavitt’s debut performance as the White House press secretary: “As she extolled the ‘extraordinary actions’ of Mr. Trump after a week in office, her tone of rapturous pride sounded like the Book of Genesis chronicling God’s creation of the world in six business days.” (Ruth Robinson, Vancouver, and Peter Ditchburn, Calgary, among others)

In The Toronto Star, Vinay Menon questioned a currently debated role for military planes: “The operating cost of a C-130E can exceed $70,000 per hour. Using such an aircraft to ‘repatriate’ migrants is about as fiscally sound as taking your child to school in a hot-air balloon.” (Selina Abetkoff, Toronto)

In The Times, Lydia Polgreen lamented how many countries have turned away from asylum and instead promote “technocratic solutions like skilled migration, arguing that the rich world will be able to sluice through the rivers of humanity, discarding the pebbles and selecting the nubs of gold.” (Kay Windsor, Winston-Salem, N.C., and Peter J. Comerford, Providence, R.I.)

Also in The Times, David Brooks gasped at the let’s-tame-federal-spending edict that instantly froze trillions of dollars of grants: “This Trump policy was like trying to cure acne with decapitation.” (Anita Boss, Alexandria, Va., and Kent Rhodes, Charlotte, N.C., among many, many others)

To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.

What I’m Reading and Watching

I’m finding it almost impossible to compile, categorize and distill all the executive orders, execrable directives and egregious sycophancy (you too can be confirmed by Republican senators!) in Washington these days, so I appreciated the Tuesday edition (“Help! My Zone Is Flooded”) of Joe Klein’s newsletter, Sanity Clause, even more than other installments. It deftly compressed the ordeal.
If what you want, however, isn’t help processing that trauma but a reprieve from it, maybe sex parties are the answer? In The Atlantic, Xochitl Gonzalez surveyed the orgies among us.
Much of the attention to the strenuously titillating, largely preposterous and ultimately unsatisfying movie “Babygirl” — about a corporate chief executive whose perfect career, perfect composure and seemingly perfect life veil an unfed hunger to be sexually dominated and crawl around on all fours — has focused on Nicole Kidman’s daring performance in that role. She’s fearless all right. But Harris Dickinson more than holds his own in a less showy part as her much younger paramour. He manages the feat of being impossibly seductive without so much as a trace of straining for that effect, and the movie’s flaws are almost redeemed in full by the scene in which he dances to the George Michael song “Father Figure.”
What I’ll soon watch? The Super Bowl. On Sunday. That’s largely because — as I mentioned earlier — I love football. But I also appreciate how football’s biggest game defies the trend toward less common ground and fewer common interests in America these days. Most of us are fluent in who’s performing at halftime (Kendrick Lamar). And most of us will know, come Monday morning, which team prevailed.