Culture
Butler Closes Out Sixers, Reminding Them of What They Lost
As quickly as their playoff recreation ended Thursday night time, Jimmy Butler of the Miami Warmth discovered Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers to embrace him and say goodbye. The 2 stars had been teammates in Philadelphia through the 2018-19 season, and there was a time when Butler thought he may stay within the metropolis longer. The 76ers had different plans, although, and that slight has stayed with Butler.
Moments after he embraced Embiid, Butler was requested what he had stated.
“That I like him; I’m pleased with him,” Butler stated in a tv interview. “Sure, sure, sure, I nonetheless want I used to be on his group. I positively love the Miami Warmth, although, man. I’m glad that I’m right here.”
The Miami Warmth are glad, too.
Within the three seasons since he moved south from Philadelphia, Butler has led the Warmth to the Jap Convention finals twice. The 76ers, who had been on the cusp of a convention finals berth with Butler and Embiid, are nonetheless attempting to determine the way to get previous the second spherical.
On Thursday, Butler scored 32 factors to assist his Warmth remove the 76ers with a 99-90 victory in Sport 6 of their second-round playoff sequence.
“He will get extremely determined in shut video games or when he sees the sunshine on the finish of the tunnel to shut out a group,” Warmth Coach Erik Spoelstra stated. “He’s not going to depart it to likelihood. He noticed the chance — ‘Hey, we’ve got a possibility to finish this tonight’ — and he wasn’t going to let this go to seven.”
It was a recreation that felt extra lopsided than its remaining rating indicated. With 1 minute 8 seconds left, and Miami main by 14 factors, the 76ers pulled their starters, leaving Embiid and James Harden to observe their season finish from the bench.
The sport closed a disappointing spring for the 76ers, who had hoped to compete for a championship this yr after they traded for Harden in February.
Harden regarded disinterested at instances as he dedicated 4 turnovers whereas additionally contributing 11 factors, 9 assists and 4 rebounds. After Philadelphia had tied the sequence at 2-2, Harden stated his teammates had been solely then beginning to jell in a approach that would propel them to a championship. Two video games later, they had been out.
Embiid, who had missed the primary two video games of the sequence with a concussion and an orbital fracture, performed with that fracture nonetheless therapeutic and a thumb harm beginning in Sport 3. He scored 20 factors and had 12 rebounds on Thursday, however his accidents cleared the best way for Butler to be the very best participant within the sequence.
“Jimmy’s all the time been this for us within the playoffs,” Spoelstra informed reporters earlier than the sport as he was prodded about Butler’s function. “No matter’s wanted. And it is perhaps totally different recreation to recreation.”
Butler is thought for lots of issues, not all of them flattering. On his finest days he supplies stifling protection and potent offense, however he additionally has a status for irritating his teammates and coaches, and forcing his approach out of groups. He can work himself to the purpose of exhaustion within the service of successful a recreation, or launch into a screaming fight in a sideline huddle.
That happened in March, when he and Spoelstra needed to be separated by different gamers and coaches a number of instances. Spoelstra laughed it off after that recreation, attributing the second to tempers flaring throughout a loss.
Within the playoffs, Butler has proven his finest facet.
“Jimmy is a superb competitor,” Spoelstra stated Thursday. “I feel he’s one of many final opponents on this occupation. I feel loads of issues get misplaced in translation.”
Sport 6 occurred on the third anniversary of a painful day in Philadelphia sports activities historical past. On Could 12, 2019, the 76ers had been tied with the Toronto Raptors in Sport 7 of an Jap Convention semifinal sequence when Kawhi Leonard, then with the Raptors, launched a remaining shot from in entrance of the Raptors bench as time expired. The ball hit the rim in three totally different locations earlier than lastly falling by way of the web, ending the 76ers’ season.
Butler was on the courtroom that day, watching helplessly from the lane as Leonard’s shot danced across the rim after which dropped, however he by no means acquired an opportunity to reply it the next season. The 76ers weren’t prepared to decide to Butler over the long run, and he left that summer time and joined the Warmth in a sign-and-trade deal.
He carried Miami to the N.B.A. finals within the bubble in his first playoff run a yr later, and now, after a first-round exit final yr, he’s headed again to the convention finals after serving to the Warmth submit the very best file within the Jap Convention this season.
He’s additionally holding rating. After ending off his previous group, Butler was caught on the digital camera by a Miami tv station exclaiming, “Tobias Harris over me?”
Like Butler, Harris, who nonetheless performs for the 76ers, was acquired by Philadelphia through the 2018-19 season. However the 76ers signed Harris to a five-year deal value $180 million the identical summer time the group despatched Butler to Miami.
Later, Butler spoke like a person at peace.
“Now I’m the place I belong,” he informed reporters. “I assume, the place I ought to have been a very long time in the past. A spot the place I’m welcome.”
Culture
Book Review: ‘Death Is Our Business,’ by John Lechner; ‘Putin’s Sledgehammer,’ by Candace Rondeaux
Western complacency, meanwhile, stoked Russian imperial ambition. Though rich in resources, Rondeaux notes, Russia still relies on the rest of the world to fuel its war machine. Wagner’s operations in Africa burgeoned around the same time as their Syrian operation. In 2016, the French president François Hollande “semi-jokingly” suggested that the Central African Republic’s president go to the Russians for help putting down rebel groups. “We actually used Hollande’s statement,” Dmitri Syty, one of the brains behind Wagner’s operation there, tells Lechner.
“Death Is Our Business” provides powerful descriptions of the lives that were upended by the mercenary deployments. Wagner is accused of massacring hundreds of civilians in Mali in 2022, and of carrying out mass killings alongside local militias in the Central African Republic. “Their behavior mirrored the armed groups they ousted,” Lechner writes. As a Central African civil society activist whispers to Lechner, “Russia is no different” from the sub-Saharan country’s former colonial power, France.
Both books are particularly interesting when they turn their focus toward Europe and the United States. In Rondeaux’s words, the trans-Atlantic alliance does not “have a game plan for countering Russia’s growing influence across Africa.” Lechner, who was detained while reporting his book by officials from Mali’s pro-Russian government, is even more critical. He notes that, whatever Wagner produced profit-wise, the sum would have “paled in comparison to the $1 billion the E.U. paid Russia each month for oil and gas.”
And, while Wagner was an effective boogeyman, mercenaries of all stripes have proliferated across the map of this century’s conflicts, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Yemen. “The West was happy to leverage Wagner as shorthand for all the evils of a war economy,” Lechner writes. “But the reality is that the world is filled with Prigozhins.”
Lechner is right. When Wagner fell, others rose in its stead, although they were kept on a tighter leash by Russian military intelligence. In Ukraine, prisoners are still being used in combat and Russia maintains a tight lid on its casualty figures. Even if the war in Ukraine ends soon, as President Trump has promised, Moscow’s mercenaries will still be at work dividing their African cake. Prigozhin may be dead, but his hammer is still a tool: It doesn’t matter if he’s around to swing it or not.
DEATH IS OUR BUSINESS: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare | By John Lechner | Bloomsbury | 261 pp. | $29.99
PUTIN’S SLEDGEHAMMER: The Wagner Group and Russia’s Collapse Into Mercenary Chaos | By Candace Rondeaux | PublicAffairs | 442 pp. | $32
Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that challenges you to match a book’s memorable lines with its title. This week’s installment is focused on popular 20th-century novels. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books themselves if you want to get a copy and see that quotation in context.
HOW TO BE WELL: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time, by Amy Larocca
Oh, the irony of cracking open “How to Be Well” while on vacation in Italy. There, on an island off the coast of Naples, a breakfast buffet included three varieties of tiramisu. Wine was poured not to a stingy fingertip’s depth but from a bottomless carafe — at lunchtime, no less. And when stores closed in observance of an afternoon siesta, the only people on the streets were American tourists, jogging. (I was on the prowl for a postage stamp because, yes, I still send postcards.)
It was from this place of abundance and balance that I followed Amy Larocca, a veteran journalist, into the hellscape of stringent food plans, cultish exercise routines and medical quackery that have, over the past decade or so, constituted healthy living in some of the wealthiest enclaves of the United States. Blame social media, political turmoil or the pandemic — no matter how you slice it, the view is dispiriting. But Larocca’s tour is a lively one, full of information and humor.
The book begins with a colonic, “the flossing of the wellness world,” Larocca writes. We find the author herself on an exam table, “white-knuckled and curled up like a baby shrimp, naked from the waist down.” She recalls her doctor’s disapproval of the procedure — a sort of power washing of the colon — and its risks, including rectal perforation, juxtaposed with one woman’s claim that a colonic made her feel like she could fly, like it was “rinsing out the corners of her psyche.”
Where did we get the idea that the body — specifically a woman’s body — is unclean inside? A problem to be solved? And how did the concept of wellness bloom “like a rash,” Larocca writes, into a $5.6 trillion global industry?
These are the questions she seeks to answer, using data, history, medicine, pop culture and her own experience. She parses fads and trends, clean beauty and athleisure wear, the gospel of SoulCycle and the world according to Goop. She weighs the advantages and disadvantages of micro-dosing and biohacking. She too goes to Italy, where she attends a Global Wellness Summit featuring a spandex and sneaker fashion show and a presentation on ending preventable chronic disease the world over.
At times, Larocca seems to approach her own subject with the same sweep. The second half of “How to Be Well” reads like a survey course, cramming the industry’s relationship to politics, men and the environment into single chapters when each could fill a whole semester. As for why meditation merits more real estate than vaccines, I can only assume that the book was already at the printer when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as health secretary.
But when Larocca goes deep, as she does on self-care, body confidence and sex positivity, she’s at her best — authoritative and witty, personal without being chummy.
She debunks the cockamamie but persistent notion that “feeling old is not an inevitable byproduct of aging but something easily avoided by paying attention.” (And by forking over gobs of cash; more on this shortly.) After attending an Oprah-sponsored conference on menopause, a subject Larocca has covered for The New York Times, she realizes that “aging is different from disease” and “isn’t necessarily something to be cured,” let alone through “neat, tidy, attainable solutions.”
Then there’s the sneaky rebranding of old-school dieting for “detoxification,” another wolf in sheep’s clothing. Think fasting, juicing, abstaining from all manner of verboten foods. Even if the professed endgame is “glow,” Larocca makes clear, “part of the promise is still, always, to rid us of a bit of ourselves.”
And finally, refreshingly, she’s honest about the money at stake for the wellness-industrial complex — not just for stylists turned wellness coaches or models turned nutritionists, but for massive corporations cashing in on an age of worry.
“None of these institutions is nonprofit; none of these institutions is altruistic at its core,” Larocca writes, in a passage reminiscent of Carol Channing’s monologue from “Free to Be You and Me,” in which she reminded us that happy people doing housework on TV tend to be paid actors.
“It is their job to persuade me to come back,” Larocca continues, “to spend more money on what they’ve got to give, to serve their investors, to serve themselves.”
And that, as “How to Be Well” wisely shows us, is the bottom line.
HOW TO BE WELL: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time | By Amy Larocca | Knopf | 291 pp. | $28
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