by John Walters

Tweet Du Jour

If someone has a monogrammed shirt cuff I get up and walk out of the meeting. No exceptions. In the business world, it’s the equivalent of a tear drop tattoo – that dude has def killed people.

— Downtown Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) February 22, 2018

Starting Five

America First! (in women’s hockey) (and curling?)

In the gold-medal game in Pyeongchang, the U.S.A. defeats its dastardly (and nefarious?) neighbors to the North, Canada, in overtime, 3-2. The American women tied it up with 6:21 remaining in the third period during a Canadian shift change (shifty move, Yanks!) on a breakaway goal by Monique Lamoureux-Morando.

The two sides then played a scoreless overtime and were squared up two goals apiece after the shootout’s five shots. Then Lamoureux’s twin sis, Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson, scored the gold-medal winner on the first round of sudden death shots. American goalie Maddie Rooney stopped Canada’s Meghan Acosta’s shot at equalizing the score, and then the sticks flew.

Lamoureux ladies

Team U.S.A. won the first women’s gold medal in hockey when the sport was introduced into the Olympics in 1998 in Nagano. In the four intervening Olympics, the Canadian women had struck gold all four times with the U.S. ladies losing in the gold-medal game three of those times. The two nations have played for the gold medal five of the six times it’s been staged and Canada’s lead is now 3-2. Maybe Canada could’ve won if their prime minister wasn’t busy photobombing the Taj Mahal.

As for the Lamoureux twins, age 28, they are the pride of Grand Forks, North Dakota.

2. Thank You For Firing

Sam Fies, a Douglas High student who lost his best friend, Joaquin Oliver, in the massacre

Yesterday’s listening session with the president in the White House and CNN town hall with Senator Marco Rubio in Florida were both televised live, and that at least is a sign of hope. The pols were willing to face the wrath of angry citizens.

On the other hand, if you’ve seen the movie Thank You For Smoking, a satire about a tobacco company lobbyist, you couldn’t help but feel a little bit cynical about all of it. Donald Trump mostly did a good job, adhering to the LISTENING part of the “Listening Session” (not to be confused with the “Ask Jeff Session”). Then there was the needle scratch of his suggesting “concealed carry” for certain well-trained members of faculty or even custodians.

Is the “45” on his sleeve there to donate his placement among presidents or his preferred caliber?

The idea of placing at least one extra gun in every high school in America may be well-intentioned, or it may be a way of helping the NRA lobby sell more guns. Either way, it’s madness. The best speaker at the White House was Mark Barden, the father of a slain Sandy Hook student and the husband of a teacher who made the valid point that teachers have enough to do without having to add John Rambo to their duties.

After the White House session, MSNBC had on as a guest Jay Fant, a Florida House Republican who is running for the state’s Attorney General position. Fant had the audacity to tell Chuck Todd that he wouldn’t support any type of gun ban “because we have seen that gun bans don’t prevent these types of crimes.”

….If a potential “sicko shooter” knows that a school has a large number of very weapons talented teachers (and others) who will be instantly shooting, the sicko will NEVER attack that school. Cowards won’t go there…problem solved. Must be offensive, defense alone won’t work!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018

It only took about 15 hours for President Trump to stop listening and tell us how he really feels. Alas….

Nearly 3 dozen people were killed in Port Arthur, Tasmania, and then Australia woke up

First of all, that IS false. In Australia, where strict gun control legislation was passed after the Port Arthur Massacre of 1996 claimed 35 lives, there was a dramatic drop in mass shootings (five or more people killed). How dramatic? In the 18 years before Port Arthur, there were 13 mass shootings. In the 21-plus years after Port Arthur? ZERO.

Second, let’s be clear here about how Mr. Fant is lying. It’s hard to demonstrate the ABSENCE of something with statistics. Saying “gun bans don’t prevent these types of crimes” is not the same as saying “gun bans don’t lessen the frequency” and thus, any one mass shooting would show that a gun ban did not prevent such crimes. On the other hand, go back and read that Port Arthur stat.

Fant also said on live TV, “If Cruz hadn’t bought [his AR-15] legally, he would’ve bought it illegally. That’s what criminals do.” Such logic should be great news to high school kids and other teens who are wondering why it is still illegal for them to buy beer and other types of alcohol. By Fant’s logic, why have a drinking age when kids are going to find a way to obtain beer (which they do) anyway?

Jay Fant, whore for the NRA

The most hopeful aspect of all of this: The teens nationwide are angry, they’re motivated and they are still uncorrupted by money. As others have said or written, The kids are alright. They are our best hope to combat the NRA and its war chest.

3. Alpine and Supine

Shiffrin seizes silver

The Yanks captured three medals on the slopes and half-pipes of Pyeongchang yesterday (today? tomorrow? We’re as confused as you are). In the women’s Super Combined (we thought that was a Virtue & Moir maneuver), Mikaela Shiffrin earned a silver while Lindsey Vonn, in what was most likely her final Olympic race, went from being in the lead after the downhill portion to failing to finish the slalom portion when her ski crossed over a gate.

Shiffrin finishes the Olympics with a gold and silver, Vonn with a bronze, and somehow as remarkable as that is, it seems a little disappointing.

When your halfpipe dreams are extinguished

In sports that didn’t exist when we wer kids, Jamie Anderson took silver in Snowboarding Big Air and a pair of male Yanks, David Wise and Alex Ferreira, finished gold-silver in the skiing half pipe. But it was the crashes that caught everyone’s attention.

On second thought, maybe I’ll just walk down….

I still think there should be Team Snowball Fights as a Winter Olympic sport. Who wouldn’t watch that?

4. (When) Should Amazon Split?

“Alexa, should we buy more shares?”

Yesterday, for the first time, shares of Amazon (AMZN) eclipsed the $1,500 mark. A year ago on this date AMZN was trading at $848, which is to say that the online retail monolith is up more than 75% this year.

Often when a popular company’s stock price jumps into the four-figure range, that company does a stock split in order to make purchase of shares more accessible to the at-home investor. That’s why companies such as Microsoft and Apple, which have a larger overall market cap than Amazon, have smaller stock prices. Not only may they have initially offered more shares to the public, but they’ve also split their stock on occasion. Apple did a 7 for 1 split a few years back.

Another badass Amazon

One share of AMZN seems too expensive, but 10 shares of AMZN at $150 per share appears to be more within your price range. Obviously, it’s the same pie cut in different ways, but appearance is everything.

Of the major companies that you may know of, only two have stock prices higher than AMZN: One is Berkshire Hathaway Class A stock (BRK.A), which is at an insane and iconoclastic $305,000. The other is Priceline (PCLN), which just changed its name to Booking Holdings, at about $1900.

Bezos and Buffett

Amazon is far more often discussed than either of those two companies. Would Jeff Bezos entertain the notion of doing a 10-for-1 or 20-for-1 stock split? Such a split would likely lead to Amazon replacing a company in the Dow Jones 30, since only two companies in the Dow (Apple and Microsoft) have larger overall market caps, i.e., have more monetary value, than Amazon does. The Dow just won’t list a company whose stock price is in the four figures, at least not at the start.

Or is Bezos vainly proud of the price of the stock, not unlike Berkshire’s Warren Buffett? We’ll see what happens. Either way, Amazon is only headed, as Buzz Lightyear would say, “To infinity and beyond!”

5. Noah’s Story Arc

The book jacket blurbs say it all concerning The Daily Show host’s Trevor Noah‘s childhood memoir, Born A Crime. “This isn’t your average comic-writes-a-memoir,” says one. Another: “Noah has a real tale to tell, and he tells it well.” And, “[This] is a love letter to his mother.”

All true. It’s also somewhat of a miraculous tale of survival and dignity.

MH staffers plowed through the South African native’s memoir and we give it our highest recommendation. The title refers to the fact that at the time Noah was conceived, apartheid still was in place in South Africa and that the Immorality Act of 1927, forbidding sexual intercourse between blacks and whites (men could do as much as five years in prison), was still in place.

Not only is Noah’s story powerful, but it it funny and kind. Its heroes, both Noah and his mother, are resourceful and strong, and if you get to the final, moving chapter, you will fully understand from where Noah gets his sense of humor.

This is an unforgettable story, told with wisdom. Read it.

Music 101

True Colors

We’re dedicating this 1986 Cyndi Lauper classic to all the pols who are still arguing that guns are not the problem.

Remote Patrol

True Romance

2:30 p.m. Ovation

This 1993 pre-Pulp Fiction Tarantino effort should be seen if for no other reason than the cast list. Check it out: Christopher Walken, Samuel L. Jackson, Val Kilmer, Brad Pitt, Gary Oldman, Dennis Hopper, James Gandolfini, Tom Sizemore, Michael Rapport—and none of them are even in the lead roles; Christian Slater is.

by John Walters

Starting Five

Empty Chamber *

*The judges will also accept “Florida Men”

As students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School looked on in horror from the gallery, the Florida legislature, by a 71-36 margin, voted down a motion to even consider a bill to ban assault rifles. In the same session the Republican-majority House approved a resolution declaring pornography as a public health risk , in effect stating, “Better to shoot your AR-15 than your wad.”

this literally happened on the same day in florida: lawmakers declared pornography is dangerous but not assault weapons pic.twitter.com/slFenXt7Vu

— David Mack (@davidmackau) February 20, 2018

Meanwhile, a Florida Senate committee endorsed a proposal to put law enforcement officers in every school in the state. More guns in schools. Hooray! (And guess who’ll be the first person taken out when a gunman decides to attack a school with his legally purchased assault rifles?).

Finally, Benjamin Kelly, a secretary for Florida state legislator Shawn Harrison was fired for accusing some of the Stoneman High students for being “actors that travel to various crisis when they happen.” What IS WRONG with people?

2. Lindsey Vonnze

In what almost certainly was her final Olympic (UPDATE: downhill) race, Lindsey Vonn. 33. finishes third in the women’s downhill (maybe she’ll compete for Hungary in 2022?). Italy’s Sophia Goggia, 25, who is the current World Cup standings leader, took gold in 1:39.22, which was .47 seconds faster.

Mowinckel: Female Viking

The silver medalist was Norway’s Ragnhild Mowinckel, who has the looks to become a household name but not the proper alignment of vowels and consonants for anyone to pronounce it.

Pure adrenaline for @jessdiggs & @kikkanimal after winning @TeamUSA‘s first cross-country skiing #gold medal! https://t.co/ijxwbhtcCo pic.twitter.com/alnMNQOOvI

— NBC Olympics (@NBCOlympics) February 21, 2018

 Meanwhile, the U.S. DID win its first-ever (is that redundant?) Olympic gold in cross-country skiing.

3. Change Of Address

After 99 years on this planet, the Rev. Billy Graham is moving on. You don’t need Elon Musk to visit the heavens. You may read about his extraordinary life here if you want.

4. Que Sarah, Sarah?

With White House pressers such as yesterday’s, Sarah Huckabee Sanders is going to keep Aidy Bryant very busy. First, Sanders acknowledged, at last, that Russian “meddling” took place during the 2016 election but that “it didn’t have an impact” on the outcome of the election (Don’t you love when The Worst Wing parrots the New England Patriots?).

Then Sanders actually said that her boss, “has been tougher on Russia in the first year than Obama was in eight years combined.” You have to wonder why Sanders doesn’t at least do a courtesy flush between statements such as the two above.

5. Trump Dumps Bumps

Over the weekend our friend Barry, who is a rock-star lawyer (and a budding rock star on the guitar), had a shrewd idea: “If I were advising Donald Trump right now,” Barry said, “I”d tell him to go all in on gun-control.”

Think about it. With your approval rating hovering in the mid-30s and Robert Mueller breathing down your neck, why should Donald Trump care about alienating his base? At this point, to quote a certain presidential candidate, “What the hell do you have to lose?”

Go after the guns. More than 3 out of 4 Americans would support you on this issue and we’ve already seen what a craven body the GOP is, anyway. Maybe if Donald and the American people were advocating more sensible gun laws, they’d take their mouths off the NRA nipple long enough to consider it. And if Trump could eliminate bump stocks, get rid of assault rifles, make background checks mandatory on all guns and make ownership of rifles more like that of handguns (you must be 21), he’d go down in history as more of a, “Yeah, he may have been the worst president and assisted the Russians, but at least he turned the tide on the gun issue.”

It’s a smart idea. Trump should do it. With yesterday’s bump stock announcement, he definitely dipped a tiny toe in the water.

Reserves

Today in awful clickbait journalism….

Those ice dancers: Fucking or no? https://t.co/HecFk3NeGj

— Barry Petchesky (@barry) February 20, 2018

Music 101

Mercenary

Maybe “I’m The Only One” who is “Head Over Heels” about The Go-Go’s 1984 album Talk Show. But if we were both sitting “Beneath The Blue Sky” and I were to “Turn To You” and ask what “You Thought,” do you like it, “Yes Or No,” would you say, “I’m With You?” This is the album’s closer. Love the simplicity of the strum.

Remote Patrol

Sports Day

UEFA Champions League: Manchester United v. Sevilla

2:30 p.m. FS1

Winter Olympics

3 p.m. NBC

1:30 p.m. NBCSN

5 p.m. CNBC

Romelu Lukaku is the man at Manchester United

Soccer, curling, hockey, bobsled. Everything but Mel Kiper’s mock draft and LeBron.

by John Walters

A teenager speaks more eloquently, forcefully and honestly than any craven, gutless politician https://t.co/rR1BmXT3cE

— Anthony Bourdain (@Bourdain) February 18, 2018

“To every politician who is taking money from the NRA, shame on you.”

Starting Five

No Guns, No Gory

In his latest comedy special, “Tamborine,” Chris Rock espouses gun control by noting that rarely does one come across a wholesale knife massacre. “If someone stabbed 100 people to death in one incident, what you’d have is three victims and 97 people who deserved to die.

Rock makes an excellent point. Gun control won’t eliminate murder or even the occasional mass murder in our society, but then drug laws don’t eliminate drugs, either. The entire point is to make them less accessible.

The father who took the killer in says he knew he had “five or six guns” and that he was “depressed,” and knew he owned an “AR-15” rifle but that looking back on it all, he still feels the same about the killer’s right to own all those guns. The father made the killer put the guns in “a gun safe” but was too stupid to realize the killer had a second key.

America won’t change until Americans respect lives more than guns. Alas, not enough Americans do. We’ll never ever understand that.

Here is a list of Senators (all Republican) who receive more than $1 million from the NRA. Let’s vote them out.

2. Epidermis Universe Pageant

No one at the ice rinks shows off more skin than Canadian ice dancer Tessa Virtue, who doesn’t believe that modesty is a….Virtue and her partner, Scott Moir, won gold last night to add to their gold from Vancouver and silver in Sochi. They also performed a few moves that may have violated a few blue laws in certain provinces. They also posted a world-record score of 206.07, for those of you who keep track of ice dancing records.

3. Fox Faux Pax

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uc23GbGyhk

500 miles at Daytona was not enough. An overtime lap was needed after a crash with less than 10 laps to go, but then Fox blew it. Four or more hours into the race, the pivotal moment came when Austin Dillon pulled a Dale Earnhardt, Sr., move (Dillon was riding the No. 3 car after all) and tapped the rear bumper of the race leader, Eric Almirola.

Alas, as the video above shows, Fox had decided to go with a rearview camera from Almirola’s vehicle (:50), which robbed viewers of a wider angle view of the skulduggery taking place. The critical moment of a 201-lap race, and Fox failed to capture it live. Even on the replay video below, they don’t show a wide shot. Weird.

Is this what Rudy Martzke would refer to as a “dreaded glitch?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kijI4OCvMx4

You have to listen to the flawed logic Kevin Harvick and the other dude in the middle provide here (it’ll help you understand why we still have bump stocks legalized). Harvick basically defends Dillon banging Almirola’s back bumper via the “Because it’s Daytona and you do whatever it takes” while the other guy (sorry I don’t recognize him) says that if Denny Hamlin or Kyle Busch had done it it would have been “dirty pool,” but a guy driving the same-numbered car as The Intimidator once drove, it’s okay.

4. Oliver!

After a few months hiatus, John Oliver returned Sunday night on HBO and, granted, he doesn’t have to put out a show on a nightly basis, but once again the Brit expat demonstrated why he does the smartest Trump commentary on TV. You may watch here.

Oliver: “Is anything about Trump funny any more?” Less and less every day.

5. Fifth Century, Yeah!

Attila We Meet Again

We had this thought last night. How many historical figures can you name between the death of Jesus ( 33 A.D.) and, say, the Battle of Hastings (1066 A.D.)? Charlemagne, Hannibal, a few Roman emperors, a pope or two. Who else?

Well, we don’t know, either, but as MH eternally seeks to enlighten, we thought we’d introduce a segment in which we provide five figures of importance from each century anno domini. Let’s begin with five fifth century (401-500) figures:

—1. St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo: Wrote City of God.

—2. Attila the Hun: Feared leader of the Huns for two decades who was unsuccessful in sacking Constantinople and Rome. Not a good sacker. Had no swim move.

—3. King Arthur: Though his existence is disputed, British legend has it that he defeated the invading Saxons in approximately 490 A.D.

—4. St. Patrick: Yes, the Irish missionary who gave us a beer holiday.

—5. Romulus Augustus: The last Roman emperor, as Rome fell in 476. This marks the beginning of the Middle Ages.

Music 101

Games People Play

Mid-Seventies Philly soul. Nothing quite as smooth. This 1975 tune from The Spinners went to No. 5 on the Billboard charts.

Remote Patrol

Olympics

8 p.m. NBC

The women’s downhill, but Mikaela Shiffrin has pulled out. Shiffrin will concentrate on the Super Combined, which was moved up a day due to weather. Weather has totally screwed with Mikaela’s quest to be queen of PyeongChang, but she still has one gold thus far (it’s a slippery slope between ski queen and Olympic letdown). Also, we still get Lindsey Vonn.

All The President’s Men

12:15 a.m. TCM

For the night owls. Now more than ever…

by John Walters

Starting Five

Nip/Tuck*

*The judges will not accept “Breast In Show”

Gabriella Papadakis experiences a costume malfunction with her dress for the second time this week, according to @KurtBrowning

The clasp at the back of her halter snapped.

Bad luck and a distraction for the experienced French pair. pic.twitter.com/F6quTbadWu

— CBC Olympics (@CBCOlympics) February 19, 2018

Ice dancing became the most popular sport at the PyeongChang Olympics Sunday evening as French skater Gabriella Papadakis went Janet Jackson on the arena.

The Frenchies finished second in the short program with the free skate still to come tomorrow. Expect more safety pins between now and then.

2. Post Up And Dribble

In Los Angeles, LeBron James silenced Laura Ingraham and a slew of doubters (while still not solving the mystery of who vandalized his front gate) to lead the LeBronians to a 148-145 All-Star Game win over the Steph-ONs. We only read one account of the contest, but though 293 points were scored, it’s being described as a game in which defense reared its head. LeBron even played center in the fourth quarter to counter Joel Embiid. 

Our favorite (only? final?) moment of All-Star Weekend was when the dude here on the left (from Migos) blatantly traveled and the commentator praised his “EuroStep” as a girl (a GIRL knew!) on the opposing side pantomimed a traveling call to no avail. At that moment we became the roadside Native American (who wasn’t even a true Native American!) in that early Seventies anti-littering campaign commercial.

Us, watching the travesty that NBA hoops has become what with the traveling and the palming and the arm bars. GOML!

3. May The Fourth Be With You!

Vonn was not a Super-G whiz

Lindsey Jacobellis in the SnowCross final? 4th place. Mikaela Schiffrin in the final of the Giant Slalom, her premier event? 4th place. Lindsey Vonn in the women’s Super-G? Sixth place. Nathan Chen in the men’s figure skating final? Fifth place.

Has it been a disastrous Olympics for the USA thus far, or is it simply that no one wants to visit the White House? After  a little more than one week, Team USA is in sixth place in the medals standings with 10 overall (5 gold). Ahead of them are Norway, Germany, Canada, Netherlands, and Olympics Athletes from Russia, a country that is not technically here.

Chen Diagram: Nathan’s unprecedented six quad toe loops were not enough to overcome his disastrous short program

There are still a few days to go, and the women’s hockey team is assured of a medal, but the last time the U.S. finished outside the top five in the Winter Olympics medals count was 1988 in Calgary.

4. Black By Popular Demand

In its opening weekend, Black Panther earns $192 million, almost doubling the record for the highest box-office ever for an opening weekend for a film by a black director (Ryan Cooler).

Girls gone wild: Prince (left) and Viniate

Meanwhile, unrelated, if you have yet to see The Florida Project, while it’s somewhat depressing, there’s no better lead and supporting actress performances you’ll see this year than the one by total unknowns Bria Vinaite, 24, and Brooklynn Prince, 7. Vinaite was a total unknown who was discovered via her Instagram posts. She had never appeared in anything and took three weeks of acting classes before filming began. She’s a natural.

5. The Kids Are Alright

Victims? No. Survivors? Maybe. Heroes? Definitely. The teens from Parkland’s Stoneman High are giving the adults in Washington a lesson in public mandate. The students are speaking up, telling lawmakers that “thoughts and prayers” are “pathetic.” Good for them. It would be nice to to think that their 17 classmates did not die in vain.

Music 101 

Draw The Line

An Aerosmith hard-rocker from 1977 that failed to gain steady air play. We received the eponymous album as a Christmas present as an 11 year-old and played the grooves off it.

Remote Patrol

Oklahoma at Kansas

9 p.m. ESPN

Trae Young is the most watchable player in college hoops—if not the best—and Allen Fieldhouse its most appealing venue. And they’re both ranked. Young still leads the nation in scoring and assists.

by John Walters

On Tuesday Ryan Glasspiegel of The Big Lead wrote a piece titled “Journalism and Clickbait Can Both Live In The Same Place,” the inspiration of which was a Twit-a-tete I had (I instigated it) with his boss, the site’s founder, Jason McIntyre. Before you read on here, I encourage you to read Ryan’s story if you have not yet (see, Jason, I’m pimping for you!).

Before I discuss the merits of Ryan’s story, of which there are many, here’s a demerit: he never contacted me. A tenet of good journalism is that you allow the principles of a story an opportunity to express their views, particularly if there is a sense of polarized positions. I’m right here. It would have been easy to simply DM me.

Now, we live in an internet bully age where TBL loyalists will shout me down because they know their site and don’t know me, but that’s just a J-School 101 courtesy. Perhaps Ryan and the TBL mouth-breathers would respond that my tweets were already out there, what else is needed (besides, we all know how much millennials loathe actually having to talk to people)?

But if Ryan had contacted me, he’d have known that I was not chastising Jason about Bobby Burack’s story, as Ryan implies. I did not read Bobby’s story. I would never read Bobby’s story, which is no slight to Bobby as a writer; it’s simply that long ago I tired of reading anything about LeBron, LaVar Ball, the Cavaliers or the Lakers.

If Ryan had only reached out to me, he would have known this.

Anyway, the reason I chided my frenemy Jason on Twitter (“There’s an Olympics going on, but the guess here is you’ve calibrated that that’s not where one goes to find the clicks”) is because he had just tweeted out another breathless tweet about LeBron, or was it LaVar, or perhaps it was about what the Lakers are going to do in the summer of 2018. Or is it the summer of 2019.

Lakers fans better realize that Magic can get 2 max guys in a few months. LaVar Ball saying junk like this will drive Paul George/LeBron elsewhere. Lonzo needs to step up and fix this ASAPhttps://t.co/qNYNhghryX pic.twitter.com/q1brErmo5L

— Jason McIntyre (@jasonrmcintyre) February 13, 2018

No one’s forcing you to follow Jason on Twitter, you might say. And you are correct. But for now, at least, I am. As I was preparing to write this, I did a quick sample of Jason’s last 50 tweets: 28 of them, or 56%, were concerned with LaVar or LeBron or the Cavaliers or the Lakers. One of them, or 2%, mentioned the Olympics.

Only yesterday Jason tweeted something to the effect that he runs a sports site with some pop culture thrown in. And he does. And TBL is an independent site that he founded, so he is under no obligation to be comprehensive or even egalitarian in his sports coverage. His Twitter feed, though, is a window to his soul: he’s out for clicks.

Before launching TBL on his down time, something I greatly admire and respect Jason for doing, he cut his teeth working at US Weekly. And what he likely learned there is that you sell the soap opera. There’s a reason (back then) Jennifer Aniston garnered more covers than both better actresses and even hotter ones: because she was famous and because her personal life was a hot mess. And that’s what sold.

Back to Ryan’s theme: That clickbait and real journalism can not only coexist, but must. In a corporate world, he’s correct. In fact, the story that ran with Ryan’s byline directly after his clickbait story concerned itself with Aly Raisman and Paige Sparanac posing nude for SI, and my humble guess is that it drew ten times the readership that his clickbait piece did. After all, there’s navel-gazing and then there’s navel-gazing.

Before the internet existed, before clickbait, there was the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, which hits newsstands right about now (what’s a newsstand?). In my 15 years as an SI staffer, I constantly heard gripes by fellow staffers about how we were producing soft-core porn (which we were) that had no connection to sports (which it did not). My female boss for most of that time, Jane “Bambi” Wulf, had no problem with it. “That single issue pays for half the salaries on the 18th floor,” Bambi, who passed away last year and whom we all loved, would say.

When one of my colleagues at SI, a fellow reporter under Bambi named Chad Millman, left, he played a huge role in ESPN the Magazine launching its “Body” issue, where Olympic and pro athletes pose nude, strategically placing items from their sport in front of their genitals or simply using their hips or arms to hide their naughty bits. It was a terrific idea.

Am I running this photo to illustrate a point or to get more clicks? Does it even matter?

All that said, you the individual (or writer, or editor, or site founder) are not compelled to do anything. Are not compelled to compromise. Let’s be clear here: this is a choice you make. Or that your publication makes, and you choose to adhere to.

At my final Newsweek staff meeting (and you’re about to learn why it was my final one), I broached this topic to our managing editor (who may or may not have been having an affair with a 24 year-old editor of our sister publication in London and who may or may not have been attempting to install her as the No. 2 person here until she foolishly wrote an email about this to him and CC’ed the wrong folks), Matt McAllester. During the staff meeting in mid-May, McAllester informed us that each one of us writers would be responsible for 15,000 clicks daily by June 30. That prompted one of our twenty something reporters, a bright young man, to diplomatically inquire, “What happens after we achieve that goal?”

A second younger reporter asked the question we were all thinking: “What happens if we don’t?”

McAllester simply told us that we would. Then I (foolishly) brought up an old David Halberstam quote. Halberstam used to say that he wrote best-selling sports books because they gave him the latitude to write the books that he really cared about, such as The Best And The Brightest. I asked McAllester if that’s what we were doing. And he bristled, “Don’t you want anyone to read your stories?”

Nearly 50 years ago, Halberstam knew what’s up

Immediately after that meeting, we writers were shuttled into an hour-long meeting in which we were tutored on one thing and one thing only: the tricks of SEO headline writing. For those of you unfamiliar with it, “SEO” stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” It’s about writing headlines that Google puts near the top of its search list, because those stories are clicked more frequently, which leads to higher ad rates, which leads to financial solvency.

A month later, Matt called me in to fire me ( I was later told that when Matt was informed he had only been firing female staffers, it was strongly suggested he needed a male pelt to put on the wall to even the score some; for the record, after Matt was fired I immediately began writing for Newsweek again). Ironically, the firing was delayed four hours because one of our senior writers was dealing with a “tentacle porn” controversy on his Twitter feed, which even more ironically was driving traffic through the roof. If only I had known! That could have saved my gig had I thought of it first. When Matt cut me from the team, I refused the severance and told him, “You’re chasing sites that have been doing this for a decade and do it better. And it’s nothing but fast food calories. Basically, you are turning Newsweek into Hardees.”

I didn’t use profanity. Didn’t curse. I just told him bluntly what I thought of him, and then went down to my bartending shift where I ordinarily earn more in a day than what Newsweek was paying me, anyway. Matt was fired two months later for general incompetence and, unofficially, for being a major douche. It didn’t help that a female co-worker at Time, his former place of employ, was suing him for sexual discrimination.

I digress. Back to Ryan’s point. We all make a choice. To me, the danger of conforming to the clickbait beast is that if a little is good, more is better. And suddenly you’re running story upon story about a wrestling heel (LaVar Ball) while virtually ignoring an event that is the living vestige of the origin of sport itself: the Olympics. Not only that, but one of the four major networks is airing it in prime time every night for a fortnight and it is blowing away every other network in the ratings.

When Jason tweets that he has no interest in the Olympics and when Ryan doubles down that no one on TBL’s staff does, I don’t measure that as a failure of the Olympics. I measure it as a failure of myopic scope. Of hiring practices. Maybe if the TBL’s staff were not all about the same age and all but one the same sex and same skin pigmentation, the site would be more versatile. And before you hit me with a GOML, here’s a response to that.

The more worrisome danger, to reiterate, is more is better. If a little clickbait is good, the irresistible temptation from above is to produce more. And suddenly as a website you become the Chicken McNuggets parents. You could expose little Lucas to something he’s never tried, but he may wail and who has the patience for that? Just buy him the Chicken McNuggets again because you know it works.

In sports journalism, this is what leads to more NFL and NBA stories and to smaller and smaller concentric circles. And this isn’t just the internet’s fault. It’s the fault of every managing editor who was working to please the publisher as opposed to following the tenets of journalism. I was a staff writer at Sports Illustrated in 1998 when France won the World Cup—in Paris, in a MAJOR upset—and even though our M.E. attended, he had us put Mike Ditka on the cover—in July. This wasn’t even Chicago Bears Mike Ditka, it was New Orleans Saints Mike Ditka. Didn’t matter. It was the NFL.

The SI I grew up reading in the Seventies understood that it was the journal of record. It put the most important story on the cover (a miler setting a world record; an amateur hockey team winning a game in Lake Placid), not the best-seller.

Eight years after that infamous Ditka cover, Roger Federer won three men’s tennis grand slams (and was runner-up in the fourth) and had a 92-5 record on the year. The overwhelming consensus in the offices was that he should be named Sportsman of the Year. The boys on the publishing side advocated for Dwyane Wade, who’d led the Miami Heat to the NBA championship (never mind that Wade had finished sixth in MVP voting). Wade got the nod.

These days are over

There is, or used to be in journalism, a thing called “separation of church and state.” Church (editorial) and State (publishing) did not interfere in one another’s business, so as to avoid conflict of interest. If you saw The Post, you witnessed a real-life and historic incident involving such a conflict, and the greater point that was made here is that when newspapers follow their journalistic instincts, they actually DO SELL MORE. You can be fit AND eat what you love!

Does that only happen in the movies—or at The Washington Post? Not necessarily, but it is harder to report stories than to simply parrot the latest LaVar tweet. It does take more effort to find something that no one else has yet reported as opposed to doing a slide show of NFL cheerleaders. I get it.

You can’t be a virgin 90% of the time. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition. And as someone who writes a blog for free but has no mortgage and no kids to raise, it’s a little easier for me to be idealistic. I can survive on baloney sandwiches for quite some time (besides, I own like, lots of AMZN shares). But at the end of the day, or of your career in journalism, you are what YOU DO, not what you say you are. And if you claim to be a journalist while promoting LeBron and LaVar with more than half your tweets, I’d argue that you’re more of a huckster.

Moreover, I’d prefer not to marinate in my own ignorance, or not to spread ignorance like a virus. One of my closest friends in this business, Tim Crothers, has been a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina for more than a decade. When we were both reporters at SI and they cut our travel budget to ZIP, Tim hatched the idea of doing a bonus (you’d now call it longform) piece on Red Klotz, the coach of the long-suffering Washington Generals. He didn’t ask permission, because he knew our editors would either turn him down or hand the story to someone senior.

Tim got on the subway to cover a Globetrotters-Generals game, then talked his way onto Klotz’s bus and into Klotz’s life, and then without prompting he filed one of the best bonus pieces of the decade. Nobody knew they wanted to know about Red Klotz, but when they did read about him, it was marvelous.

A girl, and a story, that nobody wanted. Now a major motion picture.

More than 15 year later Tim heard about a young girl who was virtually homeless, living in the slums of Kampala, (Kampala is a city that is not Cleveland or Los Angeles), Uganda, but who was a chess prodigy. Tim pitched the story to SI, which had fired him (and me and William Nack on the same day in 2001 as part of staff layoffs), who did not bite. So he pitched it to ESPN, who did. Tim’s story, The Queen of Katye, became a National Magazine Award Feature Story finalist, and then a book, and then a major motion picture from Disney that you can actually watch on Netflix right now.

Tim followed his journalistic instincts, and not only did he produce fantastic work but it was also lucrative.

One more anecdote, for those still reading. One day when I was at SI, I saw the hard copy of a piece by a then-unknown writer named Jeff MacGregor on the printer outside my office. This was a LONG story, but I started reading and within two grafs I was enthralled. MacGregor’s piece was all about a rattlesnake roundup and it was so well-written (“You can taste the mean”) but then again, as a few muggles-ian editors argued, “What did it have to do with sports?”

MacGregor’s editor, Bob Roe, championed the piece. The coterie shunned it. Then suddenly, the M.E. agreed with Roe and everyone else’s tune changed. The piece ran. It was phenomenal and readers responded to it like few stories we’d run in years. Loser coaches. Ugandan chess prodigies. Rattlesnakes. It’s the story that matters, not the brand.

A day after Newsweek laid me off last June, I received an email inviting me to join the staff meeting via conference call. Obviously, this was done in error, but screw them. I phoned the number, punched in the secret code, and listened in. McAllester was now informing the staff that they’d need to be up to 30,000 clicks per day by the end of October and that, unfortunately, no salary increases were in sight. Also, travel was limited and there wasn’t the money to keep open a Washington, D.C., bureau as an office. Those staffers would have to work from home.

One writer had the temerity to raise an objection, and here I paraphrase. “If I’m hearing you right, you want us to do more work, churn at a higher rate, while there is no incentive from a salary or workplace environment perspective,” the writer said.

McAllester noted that he might have some money at the end of the year that he’d be allowed to distribute to some staffers at his own discretion. “That sounds futile,” said the writer, whom I will not name here but who did resign last week from Newsweek.

When I told that writer that I’d listened in and recounted the dialogue to him, he laughed. But then he corrected me. “I didn’t say, ‘That sounds futile,’ ” he said. “I said, ‘That sounds feudal.'”

We all make choices. You go ahead and surf the internet. As a writer, I’ve more than made my peace with not wanting to serf the internet.

What is the future of journalism, and sports journalism? Is there a way to obviate clickbait for those of us who don’t want to make outlandish and grossly inaccurate analogies such as “Baker Mayfield Is Like Bitcoin” simply to generate clicks? The best way out I see is for philanthropic billionaires such as Jeff Bezos to become modern-day Medicis: to promote the art of journalism for its own sake. Bezos owns The Washington Post because of its vestigial hold on him, and because he appreciates how it shaped his youth. He’s not the only billionaire out there (apparently, they’re growing in number) and here’s hoping there are more Bezos types out there and fewer outright assholes such as Sam Zell, a man who once told his female Tronc underling, “F**k you” when she dared to question him about editorial integrity.

Let’s close with an analogy that may or may not be fair. In the 1990s NBC had two sitcoms that ran on the same night: Friends and Seinfeld. The former scored higher ratings but was open to anything to promote such ratings (remember the stunt-casting episode with ER dreamboats George Clooney and Noah Wylie playing their alter-egos from that show?). The latter was fiercely iconoclastic, going so far as to devote one episode to the idea that they would not stoop to those levels (“I’m not gonna dumb it down, Jerry” was Larry David’s not-so-subtle message to his Peacock overlords that he would not compromise his standards).

Two different show, both comedies. Both ran on the same network. It’s possible to do solid journalism and run clickbait on the same site. Then again, most of us writers don’t have the pull that Larry David did.