Bob Skolnik

Journalist.

[Bob Skolnik @bobskolnik]

Committee urges changes in OPRF spending, staffing  https://t.co/0n9LIxdxSp

[Bob Skolnik @bobskolnik]

Why U.S. Test Scores Are in a ‘Generation-Long Decline’ https://t.co/rQLyjl5Fg0 via @NYTimes

[Bob Skolnik @bobskolnik]

All too common: https://t.co/ShFchE29Ch

[Bob Skolnik @bobskolnik]

Illinois does the same thing. Not a single congressional district in Illinois is wholly within the boundaries of the city of Chicago but 9 districts include parts of Chicago.Explore this gift article from The New York Times. https://t.co/Cnse3Z6BBH

[NCAA March Madness @MarchMadnessMBB]

ONE SHINING MOMENT 🙌

#MarchMadness

[Bob Skolnik @bobskolnik]

@michaelsobrien He played great tonight.

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

This is what I'm talkin' about! This was UCLA John Wooden-style basketball. It makes perfect sense, because John Wooden was UCLA coach Cori Close's mentor. Every other Tuesday for 15 years, Close met with John Wooden.

[Steve Magness @stevemagness]

If you’ve never cried after giving everything you had to something that mattered, you’ve probably never given everything you had to something that mattered.

The UCONN women’s basketball team was undefeated, 38-0 for the season. But with a little over a minute left in their final four matchup against South Carolina, Kayleigh Heckel went up for a lay-up to cut the score to 9 and keep alive a tiny bit of hope. She missed. The camera zooms in on Heckel as she drops her head and tears began to flow. It was a harsh moment of realizing that the dream was over.

In 2024, Keisei Tominaga was captured crying on the sidelines with a minute left when his Nebraska team lost to Texas A&M in the tournament. Back in 2006, Adam Morrison had a similar reaction with a few seconds left, after Gonzaga had blown a 17 point lead in the sweet sixteen.

Will all due respect to Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, there is crying in sport. A lot of it. And contrary to some of the talk on social media, it’s the opposite of weakness. It’s a clear signal of a genuine competitor.

We cry because we care. Tears are proof of our investment.

Psychologist Ad Vingerhoets at Tilburg University has spend decades studying crying. He found that humans are the only species that cries emotionally. And the primary reason we do it is it acts s a kind of communicative device. Tears signal to others that something matters deeply to us and we need support. It’s as if the tears are saying, “this thing matters to me more than I can say.”

As a coach, I’ve seen the toughest of competitors, athletes who are among the best in the country or even the world, break down from time to time. It’s one of the beautiful things about sport. For many reasons, it’s one of the few areas where we let the guard down, show what we really feel, and express genuine emotion. Sometimes, that means tears of joy, other times a crushing bitter disappointment that we can’t quite process. This is especially true for men, who often try to be stoic, thanks to a combination of culture and biology.

Yet, in the days before memes Morrison might as well have become one, as he “got murdered for it” and was “kind of shocked by how much negative feedback” he received. Heckel’s been met with a mixture of support and the sadly expected condemnation.

Those people are clueless.

From the sidelines, it may look like a weakness because you’ve never been in those moments. You’ve never given your all to something, risked greatness, and saw that dream get ripped away. When you step into the arena, you put it all on the line. And in sport, music, and performance arts, one of the few places that are the last bastions of reality. You can’t fake it, it’s all there to see, and there’s a clearly defined success or failure.

You have to care deeply to even be in that spot in the first place. No one made it anywhere close to fulfilling their potential, let alone the pinnacle of their endeavor by not caring. That kind of nonchalance is reserved for the sideline. It’s the cool kid in high school who tries to convince others not trying is the cool thing to do. All so they can protect their ego and say, “I would have gotten an A, made the team, won the tournament, if I had tried…”

Caring is cool. It’s also the only way you see how good you can be. Our brain has a kind of internal safety mechanism that prevents us from ever truly pushing to our limit. And for good reason. If a marathoner really ran out of glycogen or let their core body temperature keep rising, then serious illness or death awaits. Instead, we run a kind of inner calculation that says: is the juice worth the squeeze? Caring deeply is what allows us to push just a bit harder. It tells that safety mechanism, “Ya, we’re in a lot of discomfort right now, but this means a lot, so give us a little bit longer of a leash.”

So if I ever saw someone crying after a tough race, I knew that was an athlete I wanted on my team. It meant they cared. It meant the moment meant so much to them, that they could no longer put on a face, or hold things back. It meant more to them than they could verbally communicate.

We need more people with passion, who are willing to risk it all, to be have the emotions of the moment overwhelm them. It’s only by stepping into the arena and taking that risk that we find out how good we can be, and more importantly, who we are. The potential for tears is the price of admission.

Morrison got murdered for crying in 2006. Tominaga said it should be celebrated in 2024. He was right.

-Steve

[Bob Skolnik @bobskolnik]

@MelvinLTate Intense and poor sportsmanship, but did you see Geno’s interview after the third quarter?

[SLOCHE @sloche_o]

MARIST STUNS NATIONALLY-RANKED BENET IN THE 4A STATE CHAMPIONSHIP. 🤯🚨

The RedHawks DOMINATED defensively, holding Benet SCORELESS in the 2nd QTR. 🥶

Marist lost to Benet by 9 points just three weeks ago.. Now they get their get back on the biggest stage 🏆

[Bob Skolnik @bobskolnik]

https://t.co/nfHPOhBaDp

[Bob Skolnik @bobskolnik]

Worth reading or listening to.

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

I spoke with @LaulPatricia about Marxism:

One is: What’s remarkable is that Marxism has been tried. Now, of course, defenders of Marxism say it hasn’t really been tried anywhere, but certainly the people who implemented it claimed they were implementing Marxism.

And this is a massive experiment—a global experiment—with a very clear outcome. Namely, the Soviet Union was a disaster. The imposition of communism on Eastern Europe was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Venezuela was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Maoist China was a disaster. Disaster in terms of both poverty and oppression and genocide and stupid wars. So the world has told us what happens under communism, and it’s a sign of how out of touch intellectuals can be that there are still people who defend it despite the entire world giving a very clear-cut answer.

One more is: would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea? Would you rather live in the old East Germany or West Germany? We have an experimental group and a matched control group in terms of culture, language, and geography, and the answer is crystal clear. So this is a sign of, I think, the pathology of intellectual life—that Marxism can persist.

The other is, you did call attention to one of the appeals of Marxism, though, and more generally of heavy, strong influence of government guided by intellectuals, which is that there are certain kinds of reforms that you can state as principles. You can articulate them verbally as propositions—like equality, human rights, democracy—but there’s other kinds of progress that take place in massive distributed networks of millions of people, none of whom implements some policy. But collectively, there is an order, an organization that’s beneficial.

So that can happen organically through, for example, the development of a language. No one designed the English language. It’s just hundreds of millions of English speakers. They coin new words. They forget old words. They try to make themselves clear. And we get the English language and the other 5,000 languages spoken on earth.

Likewise, a market economy is something where knowledge is distributed. You don’t have a central planner deciding how many shoes of size 8 will be needed in a particular city, but rather information is conveyed by prices, which are adjusted according to supply and demand. And you’ve got a distributed network of exchange of information that can result in an emergent benefit.

Now, intellectuals tend to hate that. They like rules of language—of correct grammar. They like top-down economic planning. They like cultural change that satisfies particular ideals described by intellectuals. And so rival sources of organization, like commerce, like culture—traditional culture—tend to be downplayed by intellectuals.

And this can be magnified by the fact that many dictatorships give a privileged role to intellectuals, which may be why, over the course of the 20th century, and probably continuing to the present, there has not been a dictator that has not had fans among intellectuals—including the mullahs and ayatollahs of Iran, but also the communist dictators: Mao and Castro, even Stalin in his day. And every other dictator has had, actually, often fawning praise from Western intellectuals.

[Bob Skolnik @bobskolnik]

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. https://t.co/bHKMHAnR5S

[Bob Skolnik @bobskolnik]

As Youth Sports Professionalize, Kids Are Burning Out Fast https://t.co/ZJCqIdJJx7 via @NYTimes

[Bob Skolnik @bobskolnik]

Check this out: https://t.co/vLPl0WTUqm

[Bob Skolnik @bobskolnik]

I pledged a paid subscription to Chicago Media Journal https://t.co/iyEeKYBHfG

[Bob Skolnik @bobskolnik]

How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration https://t.co/zQjfqxgPzy via @NYTimes

[Bob Skolnik @bobskolnik]

You never know what you might stumble upon: https://t.co/NQvNDYaJu0

[Bob Skolnik @bobskolnik]

One of the stranger stories I've reported.

[Wednesday Journal @OakPark]

LaTonya Applewhite, the director of equity and student success at Oak Park and River Forest High School, has resigned her job
https://t.co/XnqTo67mCn

[Chris Baldwin @ChrisYBaldwin]

Houston coach Kelvin Sampson on state of the game: "We're still in an educational institution, but there is nothing educational about college basketball right now. It's all transactional. And we all put our heads in the sand." Sampson, Tom Izzo + John Calipari are speaking out."