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Donald Trump really knows how to sell someone on working for him. “I told Linda, ‘Linda, I hope you do a great job at putting yourself out of a job,” he said Tuesday in the Oval Office. That’s Linda McMahon, whom he’s nominated to lead the Department of Education. The president promised that he would abolish the department during the campaign, though doing so would require an act of Congress. But he’s been vague about what that would mean—and one reason might be that many people are a little vague on what the department actually does.

Republicans have been calling for an end to the Department of Education basically since it was established, in 1979. The specific arguments have varied, but they’ve usually boiled down to some version of the idea that education decisions should be made at the local level, rather than by the federal government. As President Ronald Reagan discovered when he tried to axe the department, this is more popular as a talking point than as policy.

Contrary to what some attacks on the department say or imply, it doesn’t determine curricula. Those are set at the state and local levels, though the federal government does sometimes set guidelines or attach strings to funding in exchange for meeting metrics. During the Obama administration, Tea Party activists railed against “Common Core” standards, which they said were federal overreach. In fact, Common Core was neither created nor mandated by the federal government. The Obama years actually saw the federal government step back from control by ending No Child Left Behind, a controversial George W. Bush initiative.

One of the Education Department’s biggest footprints nationally is as a distributor of federal funds. Drawing from its roughly $80 billion budget, it sends billions to state and local school systems every year, especially to poorer districts, via the Title I program, which aims to provide equal education through teacher training, instructional material, and enrichment programs. The department also provides billions in financial aid—both through programs like Pell Grants and, since 2010, by making student loans directly to borrowers—and it runs FAFSA, the widely used mechanism for student financial-aid requests. (Less than 5 percent of the federal budget goes to education.)

The Education Department also enforces rules around civil rights—most notably through Title IX, which prevents discrimination in federally funded education on the basis of sex and has been interpreted to govern issues including equality in athletics programs and how schools handle sexual harassment and sexual violence. President Joe Biden also expanded protections for transgender students by issuing rules through the department banning discrimination “based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics in federally funded education programs.” These powers have made the department a major target for conservatives. (The Trump administration promptly withdrew Biden’s rules.)

Trump’s platform called for the end of the Education Department, but in an interview with Time last year, Trump suggested a “virtual closure.” He was vague about what that would mean. “You’re going to need some people just to make sure they’re teaching English in the schools. Okay, you know English and mathematics, let’s say,” he said. “But we want to move education back to the states.” This doesn’t make clear how he’d manage this enforcement, nor what would happen to federal education spending. Federal funds accounted for about 14 percent of state and local education funding in the 2022 fiscal year, the most recent data available—a lifeline for many districts, and especially crucial in some red states that have supported Trump.

Some of the president’s allies have been more specific about their plans. Project 2025, for example, wants to dismantle the Education Department as well. The document suggests that the government could simply distribute education funding to states to use as they see fit, with no conditions. In practice, that would likely mean red states funneling more money into charter schools, religious education, and other alternatives to public schools. (Project 2025 is skeptical of what it calls “the woke-dominated system of public schools.”) The plan would return student lending to the private sector. But even Project 2025 foresees many of the Education Department’s functions, such as Title IX matters and the Office of Postsecondary Education, being dispersed to other parts of the federal government.

While Trump talks about getting rid of the Education Department, his actions say otherwise. “Trump says he will give power back to the states. But he has also said he is prepared to use executive power to crack down on schools with policies that don’t align with his culture-war agenda,” my colleague Lora Kelley reported in November. Yesterday, Trump issued an executive order banning transgender athletes in women’s sports. To do so, he’s using—you guessed it—the power of the Education Department.

Other conservative priorities, such as shutting down diversity programs, probing and punishing anti-Semitism on campuses, and attacking affirmative action in admissions, are being run through the Education Department. These functions could be shifted elsewhere, including to the Justice Department, but Trump is still actively pursuing them.

And there’s the rub. A president could, in theory, get rid of the Education Department, but most presidents, including Trump, can’t and don’t want to get rid of the things it does. The situation is reminiscent of the federal grant freeze last month. Trump campaigned on cutting spending, and many people cheered. But once his administration tried to do it, swift backlash—including from Republicans in Congress—forced him to retreat. Slashing government spending is a popular idea in the abstract. The problem is that at some point you have to start cutting off the specific programs that people actually like and need.

Related:

Trump wants to have it both ways on education. George Packer: When the culture war comes for the kids

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The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play, Russell Berman writes. Gazans don’t need a riviera. They need water. The spies are shown the door.

Today’s News

A federal judge temporarily paused the Trump administration’s deadline for federal workers to accept a deferred resignation buyout. The Justice Department agreed to temporarily restrict Department of Government Efficiency staffers from having access to the Treasury Department’s highly sensitive payment system. In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote that his plan for Gaza would involve Israel turning Gaza over to the United States after the fighting ceases. He added that no U.S. soldiers would be needed.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Parenting in America keeps getting more intensive, Kate Cray writes. The philosophy is hard on parents and children alike. The Weekly Planet: Trump is inheriting an environmental disaster, Zoë Schlanger writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Don’t Make Small Talk. Think Big Talk.

By Arthur C. Brooks

As a rule, I avoid social and professional dinners. Not because I’m anti-social or don’t like food; quite the opposite. It’s because the conversations are usually lengthy, superficial, and tedious. Recently, however, my wife and I attended a dinner with several other long-married couples that turned out to be the most fascinating get-together we’ve experienced in a long time. The hostess, whom we had met only once before, opened the evening with a few niceties, but then almost immediately posed this question to the couples present: “Have you ever had a major crisis in your marriage?”

Read the full article.

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When he was first hired as an intern for the New Jersey Nets in 1996, Bobby Marks was tasked with ferrying new head coach John Calipari around the team’s home base of East Rutherford. After proving his mettle with such menial jobs, Marks told me, he was eventually given a different but no less innocuous assignment: spend time brushing up on the NBA’s collective-bargaining agreement.

Commonly referred to as the CBA, the multi-hundred-page document is the bible that governs all aspects of the league, legislating major topics such as how the owners and players divide the league’s revenue, and continuing down to outlining punishment for minor infractions. When Marks entered the league, NBA franchises were lean organizations by modern standards, and keeping abreast of every clause and bylaw within the CBA wasn’t necessarily an in-house responsibility. Before giving the job to Marks, the Nets had simply outsourced this work to a law firm, he told me.

This scholarship would prove fortuitous when Marks, who eventually rose to the position of assistant general manager, left the Nets in 2015. He began posting regularly about basketball on X (then Twitter), leveraging his insider expertise to amass a small following, and worked his way up to a job discussing the NBA for ESPN, the largest sports-media organization in the world. Today, Marks’s face and voice are ubiquitous across the company’s coverage of the NBA. Where he once translated the financial intricacies of the NBA for executives inside the league, he now does so for those outside it. Marks is something of a pioneer, but he is far from alone—mainstream NBA analysis is now awash in breakdowns of how teams are handling their finances while maneuvering around the CBA’s gargantuan number of legal technicalities.

Why, exactly, does the basketball-adoring public need to hear from analysts whose specialty could reasonably be described as a form of code breaking? The easiest answer is that over the course of the past decade, NBA fandom has become strangely complicated. Closely following the sport now requires fans to have a passing knowledge of a 676-page labor agreement, an expansive vocabulary of business jargon, and a deep memory bank of contractual concepts. You can still enjoy the league passively, happily tuning in to big games and catching up on highlights through social media. But to love the NBA these days is to be drawn into a world where such simplicities, upon which sports fandom was founded, have begun to disappear.

To explain why a labor document has a stranglehold on the NBA, you would need to travel back to July 4, 2016, when Kevin Durant, one of the biggest names in the sport, announced that he was leaving the Oklahoma City Thunder and signing with the Golden State Warriors. This type of high-profile defection had happened before, in 2010, when LeBron James infamously left the Cleveland Cavaliers for “South Beach” (in actuality, the Miami Heat). But Durant’s switch went a step further. Unlike LeBron’s team in Cleveland, Durant’s Oklahoma City teammates were a group of young stars on the rise—and the Warriors were a loaded unit that, the season before Durant joined them, had won a record-breaking 73 games. Suddenly, the deck had been stacked in favor of one franchise, leaving fans across the country feeling like something was existentially wrong with pro basketball.

Whereas scorned supporters could protest Durant’s decision only by lighting his jersey on fire, the league’s owners were able to fight back as they and the players’ union renegotiated the CBA later in 2016. (Like many collective-bargaining agreements, the NBA’s is ratified for multiyear periods, and must be renegotiated before the current contract’s expiration.) The owners’ main goal was to ensure that if a team like the Thunder did end up drafting a player like Durant, they would have a built-in advantage when trying to keep him. In order to do this, they instituted a clause colloquially referred to as the “supermax,” which allows teams to offer a select number of their own players more money than their competitors. Because these deals can be signed years before a player’s current contract expires, this meant that nearly all of the NBA’s best players were taken off the open market.

[Read: The science behind basketball’s biggest debate]

Instead, when attempting to acquire a household name, teams now must typically resort to trading for one. This can become a problem because the NBA employs a draconian set of rules surrounding trades, often turning the process of swapping a few players into the equivalent of sorting out a 1,000-piece puzzle set strewn across a table. The league does not allow a team to trade its first-round draft pick—which provides access to the most talented amateur players in a given year—in consecutive seasons. Modern-day franchises have figured out how to get around this stipulation by resorting to something called “pick swaps,” which allow a team to exchange its own pick with that of a team that ends up having a better one on draft night. Over time, teams have graduated to the practice of swapping swaps, essentially passing around the potential rights to possible future picks among one another. Chains of custody—simply knowing which teams control which draft picks—have become nearly impossible to follow.

In July, for instance, the Brooklyn Nets completed a trade with the rival New York Knicks that was nominally about sending the star forward Mikal Bridges across town. But the trade had a secondary function for the Nets, in that it also allowed them to reacquire draft picks and draft swaps they had previously traded to the Houston Rockets. At The Athletic, the veteran writer John Hollinger, who previously worked as the vice president of basketball operations for the Memphis Grizzlies, could go only so far when dissecting the trade; his breakdown brought to mind crisscrossed threads connecting photos and Post-its plastered all over a police evidence board. “The Rockets exchanged a 2025 pick swap with the Nets for a more complicated (and less alluring, I should say) pick swap that likely will let them swap Oklahoma City’s 2025 first (which they already own) for Phoenix’s,” he wrote. After noting this “swap of swaps,” Hollinger asked his readers, in a parenthetical, “You following this?”—a rhetorical question, one assumes, because the one possible answer is “Well, not really.”

Such analysis, if you do want to know the context of why important moves in the NBA are being made, is vital. But it also carries a distinct air of absurdity, trapping the reader inside a hall of mirrors.

At ESPN, it is Marks’s job to play navigator not just for the network’s audience, but also for its journalists. One of his duties includes maintaining a spreadsheet with crucial information on each NBA franchise, such as an  accounting of player salaries spanning current and future years, and which draft picks are owned by—and owed to—each team. Marks compiles the document by talking to his contacts across the league; his sourcing is so strong, he told me, that he regularly publicizes information on contracts and trades before some teams become aware of what their competitors are up to.

“I’m able to have access to information that maybe other people don’t have,” he told me. “There’s some teams that say, I have somebody who works in our front office, who basically collects all of your tweets and your information, and we have a meeting about it.” He compared his position to an election analyst, someone like NBC’s Steve Kornacki. During hectic times of the NBA schedule—such as the beginning of the offseason, when players are first changing teams—Marks often appears on ESPN in front of a large touch screen, drilling down on a team’s balance sheet in the same way Kornacki might with a Wisconsin swing district.

Some on this beat, such as the ESPN reporter Tim Bontemps, believe that the broader landscape may be different in the new few years. In an interview, Bontemps stressed to me the degree to which the coronavirus pandemic affected team finances. Nearly all NBA contracts are based on built-in, year-to-year raises for players. This structure is meant to mirror the upward movement of the salary cap, which determines how much teams can spend before incurring financial penalties. The league’s revenue typically rises every year—and the salary cap, by design, increases along with it. But the pandemic halted this gravy train: ESPN has cited sources saying that the league lost more than $1 billion in the 2019–20 season, which depressed the salary cap in the following years. This meant that teams were paying their players more than they had been, while also having less money available to improve their rosters.

This untimely convergence of the pandemic with the latent desire, on the behalf of team owners, to crimp the flow of player movement around the league has “created a world where there hasn’t been a lot of free agency,” Bontemps told me. The question of whether cash flowing back into team coffers will act as a league-wide decongestant will “be one of the bigger long-term questions to watch” over the next few years. If free agency again becomes a viable method for players to move around the league, teams would be able to improve their rosters without resorting to the elaborate, and often desperate, machinations we’ve seen in recent headline trades.

In the short term, though, the NBA may only get more mystifying for fans, who are now watching star players be shuffled around the league because owners are afraid of their hefty longterm salaries. The latest CBA, ratified last April, features even tighter trade restrictions and its harshest-ever penalties for the biggest-spending teams, including the dreaded “second aprons” that have already started distorting the motivations of the NBA’s best teams. The Minnesota Timberwolves, coming off their best season in decades, traded Karl-Anthony Towns—a homegrown star they’d signed to a supermax in 2022—because his contract was suddenly going to become onerously expensive. The Dallas Mavericks recently shocked the sporting world by trading Luka Dončić, widely agreed to be one of the best young players the NBA has ever seen, in large part because of a belief that his poor conditioning made an impending $345 million contract extension untenable for the franchise. Bontemps was one of several commentators who pointed out that trading a player of Dončić’s caliber, in his mid-20s, mostly because of future financial concerns, had never happened in league history.

The NBA is far from the only sports league where owners are pressing their teams to do more with less. The concept of Moneyball—cribbed from Michael Lewis’s best seller about the cash-strapped and efficiency-obsessed Oakland A’s—has long since permeated pro sports. Still, the problem may be most acute when it comes to the modern NBA, which is nearing the end of a golden age fueled by megawatt personalities such as James, Durant, and Steph Curry. Winning teams with marketable stars are what captures the public’s imagination, yet the league is unintentionally kneecapping successful, and thus expensive, teams. It is doing so while engaged in an unprecedented fight for attention among not just competitor sports, but also emergent entertainment across various streaming platforms: not just TV shows and movies, but live sporting events like the Jake Paul and Mike Tyson fight. As the NBA fights this battle, it’s hard to stomach the notion that a player such as the Timberwolves guard Anthony Edwards, one of basketball’s brightest young players, must stand by and watch his team be made worse purely for preemptive financial reasons.

Some journalists appear to be concerned, at least on behalf of the sport’s fans. Last summer, at a press conference in Las Vegas, league commissioner Adam Silver was asked whether the new CBA, with all its attendant jargon, was making the league too difficult for the layman to follow. “Life is complicated, and the systems become inherently more complicated,” he said. “But we’re paying a lot of attention to it, and we’ll see.”

Sports fans seeking fewer complications in their life may choose to seek more easily digestible fun elsewhere. On a November episode of The Bill Simmons Podcast, Kirk Goldsberry, an NBA analyst at The Ringer who also spent years working for the San Antonio Spurs, lamented the CBA’s role in the Wolves’ trading of Towns, referring to the labor agreement as “the boring character” we’re stuck with in the ongoing “saga” that is the NBA. This character has always affected the league, but it is now hogging the spotlight, nudging established stars to the side of the stage. The question now is how long fans must wait until it’s put back in its rightful place: behind the curtain, unseen and unheard.

When I was in my early 20s, commuting to work over the freeways of Los Angeles, I listened to Brian Wilson’s 2004 album, Smile, several hundred times. I like the Beach Boys just fine, but I’m not a superfan, and the decades-long backstory of Smile never really hooked me. But the album itself was sonic mesmerism: each hyper-produced number slicking into the next, with Wilson’s baroque, sometimes cartoonish tinkering laid over a thousand stars of sunshine. If I tried to listen again and my weathered Mazda mutely regurgitated the disc, as it often did, I could still hear the whole thing in my head.

Around this time, a friend invited me to see Wilson perform at the Hollywood Bowl, which is a 17,000-seat outdoor amphitheater tucked into the hills between L.A. and the San Fernando Valley. Elsewhere, this could only be a scene of sensory overload, but its eye-of-the-storm geography made the Bowl a kind of redoubt, cool and dark and almost hushed under the purple sky. My friend and I opened our wine bottle, and Wilson and his band took the stage.

From the first note of the a capella opening, they … well, they wobbled. The instruments, Wilson’s voice, all of it stretched and wavered through each beat of the album (which constituted their set list) as if they were playing not in a bandshell but far down a desert highway on a hot day, right against the horizon. Wilson’s voice, in particular, verged on frail—so far from the immaculate silk of the recording as to seem like a reinvention. Polished and rhythmic, the album had been all machine. But the performance was human—humans, by the thousand, making and hearing the music—and for me it was like watching consciousness flicker on for the first time in the head of a beloved robot.

Music is different now. Finicky CD players are a rarity, for one thing. We hold the divine power instead to summon any song we can think of almost anywhere. In some respects, our investment in how we listen has kept pace: People wear $500 headphones on the subway; they fork out the GDP of East Timor to see Taylor Swift across an arena. But the engine of this musical era is access. Forever, music was tethered to the human scale, performers and audience in a space small enough to carry an organic or mechanical sound. People alive today knew people who might have heard the first transmitted concert, a fragile experiment over telephone lines at the Paris Opera in 1881. Now a library of music too big for a person to hear in seven lifetimes has surfed the smartphone to most corners of the Earth.

In another important way, though, how we listen has shrunk. Not in every instance, but often enough to be worthy of attention. The culprit is the single speaker—as opposed to a pair of them, like your ears—and once you start looking for it, you might see it everywhere, an invasive species of flower fringing the highway. Every recorded sound we encounter is made up of layers of artifice, of distance from the originating disturbance of air. So this isn’t an argument about some standard of acoustic integrity; rather, it’s about the space we make with music, and what (and who) will fit inside.

From the early years of recorded music, the people selling it have relied on a dubious language of fidelity—challenging the listener to tell a recording apart from the so-called real thing. This is silly, even before you hear some of those tinny old records. We do listen to sound waves, of course, but we also absorb them with the rest of our body, and beyond the sound of the concert are all the physical details of its production—staging, lighting, amplification, decor. We hear some of that happening, too, and we see it, just as we see and sense the rising and falling of the people in the seats around us, as we feel the air whipping off their applauding hands or settling into the subtly different stillnesses of enrapturement or boredom. People will keep trying to reproduce all of that artificially, no doubt, because the asymptote of fidelity is a moneymaker. But each time you get one new piece of the experience right, you’ve climbed just high enough to crave the next rung on the ladder. Go back down, instead, to the floor of the most mundane auditorium, and you’ll feel before you can name all the varieties of sensation that make it real.

For a long time, the fidelity sell was a success. When American men got home from World War II, as the cultural historian Tony Grajeda has noted, they presented a new consumer class. Marketing phrases such as “concert-hall realism” got them buying audio equipment. And the advent of stereo sound, with separated left and right channels—which became practical for home use in the late ’50s—was an economic engine for makers of both recordings and equipment. All of that needed to be replaced in order to enjoy the new technology. The New York Times dedicated whole sections to the stereo transition: “Record dealers, including a considerable number who do not think that stereo is as yet an improvement over monophonic disks, are hopeful that, with sufficient advertising and other forms of publicity, the consumer will be converted,” a 1958 article observed.

Acoustic musicians were integral to the development of recorded sound, and these pioneers understood that the mixing panel was now as important as any instrument. When Bell Laboratories demonstrated its new stereophonic technology in a spectacle at Carnegie Hall, in 1940, the conductor Leopold Stokowski ran the audio levels himself, essentially remixing live the sounds he’d recorded with his Philadelphia Orchestra. Stokowski had worked, for years, with his pal Walt Disney to create a prototype of surround sound for Fantasia. The result was a system too elaborate to replicate widely, which had to be abandoned (and its parts donated to the war effort) before the movie went to national distribution.

Innovators like Stokowski recognized a different emerging power in multichannel sound, more persuasive and maybe more self-justifying than the mere simulation of a live experience: to make, and then remake in living rooms and dens across the country, an aural stage without a physical correlate—an acoustic space custom-built in the recording studio, with a soundtrack pieced together from each isolated instrument and voice. The musical space had always been monolithic, with players and listeners sharing it for the fleeting moment of performance. The recording process divided that space into three: one for recording the original sound, one for listening, and an abstract, theoretical “sound stage” created by the mixing process in between. That notional space could have a size and shape of its own, its own warmth and coolness and reverberance, and it could reposition each element of the performance in three dimensions, at the inclination of the engineer—who might also be the performer.

Glenn Gould won permanent fame with his recordings of Bach’s keyboard works in the 1950s. Although he was as formidable and flawless a live performer as you’ll get, his first recording innovation—and that it was, at the time—was to splice together many different takes of his performances to yield an exaggerated, daring perfection in each phrase of every piece, as if LeBron James only ever showed up on TV in highlight reels. (“Listen, we’ve got lots of endings,” Gould tells his producer in one recording session, a scene recalled in Paul Elie’s terrific Reinventing Bach.) By the ’70s, the editors of the anthology Living Stereo note, Gould had hacked the conventional use of multi-mic recording, “but instead of using it to render the conventional image of the concert hall ‘stage,’ he used the various microphone positions to create the effect of a highly mobile acoustic space—what he sometimes referred to as an ‘acoustic orchestration’ or ‘choreography.’” It was akin to shooting a studio film with a handheld camera, reworking the whole relationship of perceiver to perceived.

Pop music was surprisingly slow to match the classicalists’ creativity; many of the commercial successes of the ’60s were mastered in mono, which became an object of nostalgic fascination after the record companies later reengineered them—in “simulated stereo”—to goose sales. (Had it been released by the Beach Boys back then, Smile would have been a single-channel record, and, in fact, Brian Wilson himself is deaf in one ear.) It wasn’t really until the late ’60s, when Pink Floyd championed experiments in quadraphonic sound—four speakers—that pop music became a more reliable scene of fresh approaches in both recording and production.

Nowadays, even the most rudimentary pop song is a product of engineering you couldn’t begin to grasp without a few master’s degrees. But the technologization of music producing, distribution, and consumption is full of paradoxes. For the first 100 years, from that Paris Opera telephone experiment to the release of the compact disc in the early 1980s, recording was an uneven but inexorable march toward higher quality—as both a selling point and an artistic aim. Then came file sharing, in the late ’90s, and the iPod and its descendant, the iPhone, all of which compromised the quality of the music in favor of smaller files that could flourish on a low-bandwidth internet—convenience and scale at the expense of quality. Bluetooth, another powerful warrior in the forces of convenience, made similar trade-offs in order to spare us a cord. Alexa and Siri gave us new reasons to put a multifunctional speaker in our kitchens and bathrooms and garages. And the ubiquity of streaming services brought the whole chain together, one suboptimal link after another, landing us in a pre-Stokowski era of audio quality grafted onto a barely fathomable utopia of access: all music, everywhere, in mediocre form.

People still listen to music in their car or on headphones, of course, and many others have multichannel audio setups of one kind or another. Solitary speakers tend to be additive, showing up in places you wouldn’t think to rig for the best sound: in the dining room, on the deck, at the beach. They’re digital successors to the boombox and the radio, more about the presence of sound than its shape.

Yet what many of these places have in common is that they’re where people actually congregate. The landmark concerts and the music we listen to by ourselves keep getting richer, their real and figurative stages more complex. (I don't think I've ever felt a greater sense of space than at Beyoncé’s show in the Superdome two Septembers ago.) But our everyday communal experience of music has suffered. A speaker designed to get you to order more toilet paper, piping out its lonely strain from the corner of your kitchen—it’s the first time since the arrival of hi-fi almost a century ago that we’ve so widely acceded to making the music in our lives smaller.

For Christmas, I ordered a pair of $60 Bluetooth speakers. (This kind of thing has been a running joke with my boyfriend since a more ambitious Sonos setup showed up in his empty new house a few days after closing, the only thing I needed to make the place livable. “I got you some more speakers, babe!”) We followed the instructions to pair them in stereo, then took them out to the fire pit where we’d been scraping by with a single unit. I hung them from opposite trees, opened up Spotify, and let the algorithmic playlist roll. In the flickering darkness, you could hear the silence of the stage open up, like the moments when the conductor mounts the podium in Fantasia. As the music began, it seemed to come not from a single point on the ground, like we were used to, but from somewhere out in the woods or up in the sky—or maybe from a time before all this, when the musician would have been one of us, seated in the glow and wrapping us in another layer of warmth. This wasn’t high-fidelity sound. There wasn’t a stereo “sweet spot,” and the bass left something to be desired. But the sound made a space, and we were in it together.

LA Lakers star LeBron James reacts to Luka Doncic's shock trade from the Dallas Mavericks.