Culture
U.S. men's basketball thwarts Puerto Rico to secure No. 1 seed
VILLENEUVE-D’ASCQ, France — The “Lille Olympics” are over for Team USA and went mostly according to plan.
A few defensive hiccups here, a minor injury there, oh, and a bus ride or two because someone lit the train track on fire last weekend, disrupting team plans for trains between Paris and Lille, which is on the Belgian border.
But otherwise, the American team of stars is exactly where it planned to be as the tournament shifts to Paris for the knockout rounds, with full steam ahead toward a fifth consecutive gold medal.
Team USA beat Puerto Rico 104-83 behind 26 points from Anthony Edwards on Saturday to finish 3-0 in pool play and as the No. 1 overall seed for the Olympic quarterfinals.
The U.S. emerged from pool play No. 1 overall due to a 64-plus point differential over the three games and will play Brazil in an Olympic quarterfinal Tuesday at Accor Arena — where the NBA typically plays when it has games in Paris.
“I mean, number one, it’s been really fun to be in Lille — it’s a beautiful place,” Team USA coach Steve Kerr said. “I think we got done what we wanted to accomplish, winning all three games and securing the top seed. We know we have to play better. Part of this tournament is it gets harder as you go, of course. And our goal is just to try to get better each game and we’ll have tomorrow off and then a one-week sprint, three games. So we’ll see how we do.”
Brazil went 1-2, losing by double digits to both France and Germany but connecting on 17 3s in an 18-point win over Japan to advance to the quarterfinals. The Germans and Canadians also went 3-0 in pool play and Germany is ranked second behind the U.S.
“We’ve seen almost everybody. We haven’t seen Brazil though,” Kerr said. “Brazil is our focus.”
The first portion of the men’s and women’s tournaments were moved to an outdoor soccer stadium with a retractable roof, just outside of Lille, primarily so gymnastics could take place in Accor Arena. The U.S. stayed and practiced in Paris but traveled to Lille the night before each of the three games, which also included comfortable wins over Serbia and South Sudan.
Edwards, Team USA’s youngest player at age 22, came off the bench to shoot 11 of 15 with three rebounds, three assists and two steals. The leading scorer for the Americans last summer at the World Cup, Edwards dazzled with an array of drives to the rim, mid-range jumpers and three 3s. His coolest play was a tap-away steal and windmill slam with about nine minutes left and the Americans up by 25.
Anthony Edwards breaks out the WINDMILL in Paris! 🔥 #ParisOlympics
📺 NBC and Peacock pic.twitter.com/FdFYNz5eXr
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 3, 2024
“I wanted to go between the legs (in the air for a dunk), but I ain’t tried it in a minute so I didn’t want to embarrass myself,” Edwards said. “I want to dunk on somebody, but I ain’t got a lane yet. I’m glad I got that one.”
LeBron James, as usual for this tournament, handed in a complete performance with 10 points, eight assists and six rebounds in just 18 minutes. Kevin Durant scored 11 points and still needs four more to become USA Basketball’s all-time leading scorer at the Olympics for both the men’s and women’s programs, ahead of Lisa Leslie (488 career points).
Edwards’ domination in the second half (he scored 14 points from late in the third to the middle of the fourth quarter, with Durant on the court) had something to do with Durant falling just short of passing Leslie.
Joel Embiid returned to the U.S. starting lineup after sitting out against South Sudan. He scored 15 points with three boards in nearly 23 minutes. In a confounding twist, the French crowd continued to boo him each time he touched the ball, but the crowd at large erupted in applause when he scored or blocked a shot. There were American fans in the building, sure, but the applause was so loud, that at least some of the people booing him for picking Team USA over France for the Olympics also had to be cheering when he scored.
“I think that’s all you can do is laugh about it and he’s done a good job just making light of it,” Kerr said. “And his teammates, obviously, have his back, but it’s all part of it. I’m sure he knew this was coming and what I liked is that after the French fans would boo, you could hear the American fans cheer and so everybody seems to be having some fun with it.”
With the U.S. ahead by an insurmountable number and the clock winding down, Embiid held the ball to run out the clock and was hit with another chorus of boos. He stuck his hand to his ear, as though he wanted the boos to grow louder. Over the last two games, Embiid’s U.S. teammates have joined him in taunting the crowd in response to the boos.
“I love it,” Edwards said. “I don’t get what’s going on, so I’m all for it.”
Jrue Holiday did not play due to an ankle injury suffered in Wednesday’s win; Kerr said Holiday will play against Brazil and could have participated Saturday. Jayson Tatum started for Holiday and finished with 10 points.
Jose Alvarado of the New Orleans Pelicans, the only NBA player on the Puerto Rican roster, led his team with 18 points. The Puerto Ricans outrebounded Team USA, 51-48, despite a distinct size and skill disadvantage in the post. By American standards, the 11 turnovers the U.S. committed weren’t bad, but giving up 18 offensive rebounds to Puerto Rico is something to clean up before Tuesday.
Nearly 20 years ago to the day (12 days shy of the anniversary, if we’re counting), Puerto Rico opened the 2004 Olympics by pulling one of the largest international upsets in history, defeating the Americans by 19 points. It was the first loss by a Team USA squad with NBA players.
And for about 17 minutes in the first half, a hint of possibility that another huge upset wafted in the air. Alvarado scored nine points in the first quarter and the Puerto Ricans led by as many as eight. It was a 46-43 game with 3:15 left before halftime when James threw a dazzling behind-the-back pass to Embiid for a layup. That play sparked an 18-2 run to close the half for the Americans, who carried a 64-45 lead into the break.
James, 39, had six points and three assists during the run.
It was ALL Team USA in the first half against Puerto Rico. 💪 #ParisOlympics
📺 NBC and Peacock pic.twitter.com/E2IOR4x55x
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 3, 2024
“I think we’re in a good place,” James said. “We can always get off to a better start to start games, but teams are very excited to go against us and it’s not a feel-out, but we could do a better job starting the games. Giving up (29) in the first quarter today, we didn’t like that and we got better from that moment on though.”
While Durant is looking for what would be an Olympic record four gold medals in men’s basketball, James can get his third gold with three more wins. He was on the team that lost to Puerto Rico 20 years ago, co-captained the Redeem Team four years later with Kobe Bryant and was part of the 2012 team that dominated in London.
This summer, counting five exhibition games and three Olympic contests, James leads the team in scoring and assists.
“Maybe one of the best things about this trip for me has been to see LeBron behind the scenes, see the preparation, see the focus and getting a picture for why he is who he is,” Kerr said. “It’s just amazing to watch him. He loves the game so much. He loves the work, he loves his teammates. There’s an energy and a joy to LeBron that just, it sort of spreads through the locker room.”
Required reading
(Photo: Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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