I remember being a teenager going to baseball games with my dad. He was a physician, and sometimes the tickets came from pharmaceutical reps — and those were the games you didn’t want to miss. We’d sit in great seats, close enough to hear the crack of Jason Giambi’s bat, or tucked into a luxury box. There was food, drinks, and a kind of polished hospitality that made you feel important. I still remember the elation of being handed a beer by an attractive woman before I was le

Money, power, respect, psychology. The NFL didn’t need Bad Bunny on the halftime stage. That’s what power looks like when it matures. Lev Mandel explores what money, power, and respect actually sound like when they don’t need to raise their voice.

How calling something an emergency changes the rules — and how it feels Somehow, we’re being told there’s an emergency trade deficit. Not a crash. Not a sudden rupture. Just the same thing it’s been for years, now renamed an emergency  without any stated reason why today is different from 2017, or 2006.  The claim is being made under federal emergency authorities that allow tariffs to be imposed without new legislation, and the Supreme Court is now being asked to decide how m

I think this is about being seen. That’s what I keep coming back to when I think about basketball, money, jerseys, brands—all of it. The rules didn’t change because of fairness. They changed because visibility and money identity became impossible to ignore. Players were already being watched, followed, clipped, shared, and sold. Making them more visible, more marketable, more legible just made economic sense. We’ve seen versions of this before—teams and players whose style an