Johnny M.

[Jeremy Cohen @TheCohencidence]

Knicks fans: Ooh I like the player we drafted!

Leon Rose: He's a draft-and-stash. Also, we just traded him. We acquired another pick and drafted a player. Traded him before you even knew that though. We're on the clock at 31. Might trade that pick too, idk.

[Johnny M. @yatusabeloco]

@fleece_sweater minimo son demonios

[Timeless Sports @timelesssports_]

2016 NCAA Champions.

2026 NBA Champions.

[Moira Donegan @MoiraDonegan]

Jalen Brunson, a gentle and effective practitioner of dialectical behavioral therapy.

[Vital City @VitalCityNYC]

Many New Yorkers agree the city needs more housing. Where to put it? Yonah Freemark says libraries, schools, fire stations and other public facilities are ripe locations for thousands of units. https://t.co/KE1i77jKsL

[Yiatin Chu @ycinnewyork]

Stuyvesant and Bronx Science -- NYC's public high schools that use a single race-blind, name-blind, socio-economic blind test (SHSAT) to admit students, are not where "elite families" send their kids.
Nearly 50% of the students come from low-income families, and speak a langiage other than English at home. These are children of immigrants who rely on these public schools as a pathway for social and economic prosperity. We are proud these are feeder schools to Ivys and some of the students will rise to influential roles in society -- that's a sign that great public education works!

[Ben Springwater @benspringwater]

I think about this Seinfeld interview all the time.

[Jeremy Horpedahl 🥚📉 @jmhorp]

"Independent" for some Boomers means that young workers must continue paying payroll taxes for my pension and healthcare, but I'd rather not pay property taxes so their kids can attend school, which both me and my kids benefitted from

[Johnny M. @yatusabeloco]

@fleece_sweater A+, 10/10 tweet, no notes

[Big Action Bill @BigActionBill]

Knicks should have Mike Francesa mispronounce all the Spurs names

[TNT Sports U.S. @TNTSportsUS]

"Winning changes nothing."

@AndreAgassi knows that the pressure won't let up on Alexander Zverev even if he wins his first Grand Slam today at #RolandGarros

[Skanda Amarnath @IrvingSwisher]

This is some Matrix Neo type transformation

[Skanda Amarnath @IrvingSwisher]

KAT figuring out how to realize his full potential in the postseason of year 11 in the league is inspiring

[Rit Holtzman @BenRitholtzNBA]

You know who I want on my team in an insanely physical and pressurized Game 1 of the NBA Finals?

I want Josh Hart on my team.

[Tommy Beer @TommyBeer]

Last time Jalen Brunson and Mikal Bridges played a championship game in San Antonio:

[six ppl in the room told prez @_prezidente]

the more telling quote from SV isn't that one, it's what he says a minute later:

"they are maybe not on a statistical ORTG basis the best offense i have seen, but they probably have more answers to the tests that great opposing defenses provide for them, since the KD warriors"

[Skanda Amarnath @IrvingSwisher]

I am a very cynical Knicks fan after the past three decades (plenty of us).

A real credit to Breen and Clyde they can still deliver the chills

Best duo on the call for local NBA games. The only thing about the Knicks that’s been a continuous source of excellence

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A British biologist looked at 200,000 years of human history and found that the entire reason humans broke out of poverty was not intelligence, not language, not even agriculture, but one mechanism so simple a 6-year-old could explain it.

His name is Matt Ridley.

He is a zoologist by training, an evolutionary biologist by career, and in 2010 he wrote a book called The Rational Optimist that quietly argued the most important fact about human progress had been hiding in plain sight for the entire history of economics.

Naval Ravikant has been telling people to read everything Ridley has ever written for the last 15 years. The reason is the argument inside this one book.

For 200,000 years, anatomically modern humans walked around with the same brain you have right now. Same skull size. Same neural architecture. Same raw capacity for language, planning, and abstract thought.

For roughly 190,000 of those years, almost nothing happened. Generation after generation lived and died inside the same Stone Age toolkit their great-great-grandparents had used. Then somewhere around 50,000 years ago, the line on the chart of human progress started to tick upward. Then it bent. Then it exploded.

The question Ridley spent years on was the only question that mattered. What changed.

It was not the brain. The brain had been the same for 190,000 years. It was not language, which had existed long before the takeoff. It was not even agriculture, which arrived only 10,000 years ago and was actually preceded by the upward bend, not the cause of it.

What changed was that humans started trading with strangers.

This sounds too small to be the answer. Ridley argues that it is the answer to almost everything. The moment one human exchanged a useful object with another human from a different group, something happened that no other species on earth had ever done.

Two ideas that had developed in isolation came into contact. The flint knapper learned what the spear maker had figured out. The fisherman from the coast learned what the hunter from the forest had figured out. The two pieces of knowledge fused into something neither side could have produced alone.

Ridley calls this ideas having sex. The phrase sounds frivolous and it is meant to. The point is that ideas, like genes, get better when they combine with other ideas from different lineages.

An idea sitting inside one head, no matter how brilliant the head, eventually hits a ceiling. The same idea exposed to ten thousand other ideas does something genes do under sexual reproduction. It mixes. It recombines. It produces offspring nobody planned.

The cleanest proof of this argument is the most uncomfortable case study in the book. Tasmania.

Around 10,000 years ago, rising sea levels cut Tasmania off from mainland Australia. A population of roughly 4,000 humans was now isolated on an island, with no possibility of contact with the rest of humanity. They had the same brains. The same language. The same starting toolkit as their cousins 150 kilometers north. The natural experiment was now running.

What happened next is something no economist or geneticist had ever predicted.

The mainland Australians kept inventing. Boomerangs. Spear-throwers. Fishing nets. Bone needles for sewing fitted clothes. Watercraft with paddles. Their technology compounded slowly across the centuries.

The Tasmanians went the other way. They did not just fail to invent the new tools their cousins were developing. They started losing the tools they already had. Fishing was abandoned within a few thousand years. Bone tools disappeared. Fitted clothing disappeared. They forgot how to make fire from scratch and started carrying lit firebrands from camp to camp instead, relighting their fires from a neighbor's whenever their own went out.

By the time European explorers arrived in the 17th century, the Tasmanians had the simplest toolkit of any human society ever recorded. Their material culture had gone backward for 8,000 years.

The archaeologist Rhys Jones called it a slow strangulation of the mind.

Joseph Henrich at Harvard later proved with formal mathematical models that there was nothing wrong with Tasmanian brains. There was something wrong with their network. A toolkit requires a critical mass of people exchanging skills to maintain itself.

The act of teaching a skill is imperfect. Every generation loses a small percentage of what the last generation knew. If your population is large enough and trading widely enough, those losses get caught and corrected by someone else who still remembers.

If your population shrinks below a certain threshold and stops mixing with outsiders, the small losses compound until entire technologies disappear.

This is the part that should haunt anyone reading this in 2026.

Intelligence is not a property of the individual brain. Intelligence is a property of the network the brain is connected to. A genius in isolation will produce less than a mediocre thinker inside a dense exchange of other mediocre thinkers.

The thing your ancestors needed in order to break out of 190,000 years of stagnation was not better brains. It was better connections between brains they already had.

The implication for any individual is direct and uncomfortable. If you are smart and isolated, you will be outproduced by people half as smart who are connected.

The most successful people in any field are almost never the smartest people in it. They are the ones positioned at the intersection of the most idea flows. They are reading more authors than their competitors. They are talking to more people from more disciplines. They are in the rooms where ideas from different lineages bump into each other.

Ridley ends the book on the line that sounds optimistic but is actually a warning its this "The future will be invented by people who connect ideas, not by people who guard them."

[Jason, @jasonc_nc]

The reason you can tell the entire senior property taxes conversation is bogus and just another reverse wealth transfer scheme is that it would do nothing for the actually poor seniors because they rent.