Karan Kuja

American born, Indian raised, Public Defender in NYC. All opinions are mine (he/him)

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The NBA just did something leagues almost never do: side against one of its own owners, in his own market, during the Finals.

Live broadcast rights are the most protected asset in sports. Disney and friends paid $76B in the latest media deal partly for moments exactly like this. Bars need licenses just to show games. Yet within hours of James Dolan pulling the plug on the watch party outside his own arena, the league cleared New York City to stream Game 4 free on public street furniture.

Dolan's stated reason for canceling: a 999-person cap was an insult when "we're about millions of people."

So the city took him literally. LinkNYC runs roughly 2,000 kiosks across the five boroughs, built on the corpse of the old payphone franchise. Dolan controls the Garden. The city controls every sidewalk around it.

One detail makes the whole thing sting. MSG requested the 999-person permit itself, then canceled when it was approved.

Owners win these standoffs when they own the only screen in town. Dolan just found out the city has two thousand of them.

[Ancient History Hub @AncientHistorry]

Everyone knows about the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.

Almost nothing they know is the full story.

Start with the number. There weren't 300 Greeks at that pass. There were around 7,000. Spartans, Thespians, Thebans, Phocians, Locrians, Arcadians, Corinthians. Citizen-soldiers from across Greece who marched north knowing they'd be facing the largest army the ancient world had ever assembled.

The 300 is just the headline. The ones who stayed to the end.

Now the men themselves. King Leonidas wasn't some chiseled 30-year-old. He was roughly 60 years old when he led that march. And the 300 he picked weren't his strongest warriors. They were specifically men who already had living sons. Spartan law demanded it. Leonidas wasn't choosing an army. He was choosing men whose bloodlines could survive their deaths. Every one of them knew what that meant before they ever saw a Persian.

They marched anyway.

And they didn't march alone in the way movies suggest. Each Spartan citizen-soldier was accompanied by helots, the enslaved underclass that propped up the entire Spartan economy, outnumbering their masters roughly seven to one. Hundreds of helots fought and died at Thermopylae too. They get no statues. No films. No name on the monument.

The pass itself was barely 15 meters wide in 480 BC (it's silted up now and looks nothing like it did then). That bottleneck is the only reason a few thousand men could hold off a Persian force modern historians estimate at 70,000 to 300,000. Herodotus said 1.7 million. He was lying, or possibly counting cooks, slaves, and camp followers, but even the conservative number is staggering.

For two days, they held. Wave after wave broken against bronze and discipline. Xerxes reportedly leapt from his throne three times in fury watching his men die. He sent in the Immortals, his elite personal guard, supposedly invincible. They weren't. Not in that pass.

Then the Greeks were betrayed.

A local man named Ephialtes, whose name still means "nightmare" in modern Greek, sold the Persians a goat path through the mountains that flanked the pass. The Phocians assigned to guard it scattered when the Immortals appeared in the dawn fog. Leonidas knew by morning he was surrounded.

He dismissed most of the allied Greek forces. Saved their lives. But here's what almost nobody talks about: roughly 700 Thespians, led by a man named Demophilus, refused to leave. They were citizen-farmers from a small town that knew Persia was coming for them next no matter what. They chose to die beside the Spartans rather than run. About 400 Thebans stayed too, though their motives were murkier and many surrendered when the end came.

So the "last stand of the 300" was actually closer to 1,500 men. The Thespians died to the last. Their town was burned to the ground by the Persians weeks later anyway. They're a footnote in a story that should bear their name.

The final fight happened on a small hill called Kolonos. Spears shattered. Swords broken. Herodotus says they fought with hands and teeth at the end. Leonidas fell early, and the Spartans fought four times over his body to keep the Persians from taking it.

They lost.

Xerxes had Leonidas decapitated and his body crucified, a violation of Persian custom so extreme it tells you exactly how badly that old man had humiliated the king of kings. Forty years later, Sparta sent a delegation to recover his bones and bring him home.

Two Spartans survived the battle. One, Aristodemus, had been sent away with an eye infection. He returned to Sparta and was treated as a coward, shunned, refused fire, refused conversation, until he threw himself into the front line at Plataea a year later and died seeking redemption. The other survivor, Pantites, was sent on a diplomatic errand and missed the fight. He hanged himself from the shame.

That's the world they lived in.

The epitaph carved at the site doesn't brag. It doesn't even mention victory, because there wasn't one. Roughly translated, it just asks the traveler to tell Sparta that her sons died here, obedient to her laws.

A small group of farmers, an old king, an enslaved underclass written out of history, and a town that vanished from the map. Together, for three days in August of 480 BC, they did the math on freedom and decided the price was worth it.

We remember 300 of them.

There were always more.

[Books Behind Borders @MHTruthUltra]

If a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what was wrong with it.

When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes.

[Nithya Shri @Nithya_Shrii]

Police DO NOT REDUCE CRIME.
Housing, employment, food, REDUCE CRIME.

[Rania Khalek @RaniaKhalek]

They want to turn Venezuela into another Libya so they can steal their oil and weaken the Latin American left.

No one is buying their lies about drugs and democracy.

No one wants this.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Mamdani on Trump calling him a communist: "I've already had to start get used to the fact that the president will talk about how I look, how I sound, where I'm from, who I am, ultimately because he wants to distract from what I'm fighting for. I'm fighting for the the very working people that he ran a campaign to empower that he has since betrayed."

[another knicks blogger @morelikemensa]

Picking Kevin Knox cost the Knicks 6 1st round draft picks.

[Matt @LegendEskimoBoy]

27 games to go.

81 points available.

Being 8 points clear means nothing.

One game at a time.

[Vivian @suchnerve]

y’all ever think about how the Democrats haven’t won a majority of the white vote since 1964, and what the Democrats did in 1965

[Jason Reid @JasonReidx]

Amsterdam has a right to defend herself.

[Ben Rosen @ben_rosen]

if you’re IN line to vote, STAY IN LINE, and if you’re ON line to vote you’re from New York City baby best city in the world

[just matt @questionableway]

while haiti is in the news so much this week maybe we should all take a moment to discuss the fact that their economic destitution is entirely due to being forced to spend ~80% of their federal budget every year for 150 years on reparations to france for freeing the slaves

[kasey @kaseyklimes]

my favorite new york social code is when a lone person needs to get a stroller up the subway stairs.

nearly instantly, a stranger picks up the other end of the stroller,
helps carry it up, then departs as quickly as they appeared.
no words are exchanged. eye contact is minimal.

[chriscjackson on Bluesky @ChrisCJackson]

The greatest democracy the world has ever seen ended in the name of a reality TV game show host because one political party went insane from a black guy being elected President.

[Ralph Nader @RalphNader]

The hate group @AIPAC—with pro-Netanyahu money—has dollarized the cowardly nest of the Democratic establishment to endorse a corporate challenger to a leading progressive House Democrat, @JamaalBowmanNY in the June 25 primary. This includes cowards on @TheBlackCaucus. Bowman’s sterling record for the people against corporate predators is sabotaged for Netanyahu’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians, including tens of thousands of children and women. -R

[Not Jerome Powell @alifarhat79]

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