Alex Kirshner

@alexkirshner

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

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Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· 26d

I hated to write this because there was no honest way to do it without being mean. Will Ferrell's new golf show on Netflix is just terrible. Moratorium time on golf TV shows. No more! @slate.com slate.com/culture/2026...

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.

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· 28d

I covered this pretty explicitly

“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.

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jul 4

The only qualifying hitter patriot to carry exactly a .250 batting average into today's games

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jul 4

This looks like a cool city

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jul 1

Here's Cade Cavalli striking out Willson Contreras and screaming "sit down boy!" at him. Really nice and a great week for it. Does Manfred 1) do the obvious thing or 2) do nothing because he doesn't want a Turning Point spokesman to do a viral tweet about how he won't watch baseball anymore

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jun 30

Nick Saban had a big contract at Alabama, but the most appropriate thing would've just been to give him a percentage cut of tuition for every enrolling student between 2010 and 2023 who had a bio remotely like this www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/s...

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.

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jun 25

I don't think this guy is a psyop but I think for both nefarious political reasons and understandable reasons of despair, people are desperate to make the category error of swapping in "pretty places and good tourism" for whatever else they want their country to be

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.

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jun 22

My grocery store's nectarines this month

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jun 17

American soft power can never be killed no matter how hard our top guys try. This particular OBJ jersey headlining a vintage store in Tokyo is my proof

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jun 15

If Bluesky is an echo chamber (fine!) we need a new word for a platform where comms professionals in the party in power think they've reached new levels of cultural currency thanks to a paywalled streaming event for a sport that is orders of magnitude less popular than golf

Patrick Ruffini posts a UFC White House pic saying the old Republican Party didn't have this level of cultural currency

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jun 12

Ordered fries for the table in Japan. This is the portion size. Such a pleasure to be in one of the world's great nations

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jun 11

There is strong evidence that we are having a national Knicks Moment the likes of which we never see in pro sports. It obviously feels that way on a microblogging site that's 90% New York and Philly people somehow, but I think it's more than that slate.com/culture/2026...

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.

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jun 10

lol I'm gonna have to submit a fix

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jun 9

I want to explain the confluence of factors that lead to people being so confidently wrong about what's happening in LA. Even people who live here

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.

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jun 5

Bogleheads remain strong

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.

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jun 4

Subject matter aside, I have had my fill of the Texas Tech billionaire trying to Citizens United his way to remaking college football according to his personal preferences (note the "promoted" tag)

A "boosted" Cody Campbell tweet praising Notre Dame's AD for critiquing the transfer portal

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jun 3

There is a lot going on with the Pratt campaign but I think this is the crux of why he's gotten attention and is likelier than not to make the runoff as they count. You might recognize the playbook. @slate.com: slate.com/news-and-pol...

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…

Alex Kirshner@alexkirshner· Jun 3

There’s a bar on the Eastside of LA. You may have read about it re: allegations of racism or women believing they were drugged there. Last week, I noticed a Spencer Pratt van outside. It was the start of a disorienting experience. I wrote about the campaign @slate.com slate.com/news-and-pol...