This fall, Chris Paul announced that he would spend his final season with the Los Angeles Clippers. So far, his second tenure with the team has been a disappointment, even if it was never supposed to be like the first. From 2011 to 2017, Paul helmed a Clippers team best known as Lob City, one of the most thrilling basketball teams in my lifetime. It was a squad that played at a breakneck pace, with the ball thrust into orbit by Paul, and hanging suspended in the arena for a moment, only for one of his hyper-athletic teammates (most likely from the duo of élite rim runners DeAndre Jordan and Blake Griffin) to snatch it out of the air and ram it through the rim. Lob City revived Clippers basketball, which had historically been an afterthought compared to the team they shared a city and arena with, the Los Angeles Lakers. The Lob City-era Clippers were not without controversy (last year, I wrote about the show “Clipped,” which narrativizes the fallout from the racism of the then owner Donald Sterling), but on the court, the Clippers were, for a time, the greatest show in California. Still, despite their dominance, they were never good enough to win a championship. This, too, will be a part of Paul’s legacy: throughout his career, he always made teams better. That was his M.O. He would go to a team that was either not very good, or good but not yet great, and he would instantly improve their odds, often while acting as a mentor to a younger star who needed his veteran wisdom. After his time on the Clippers, he defected to the conference rival Houston Rockets, then did stints in Oklahoma City, Phoenix, San Francisco, and San Antonio. At every stop, he improved the team’s win percentage, sometimes dramatically, and turned two of the teams into bona-fide contenders. But, for all of this success improving underperforming teams, Chris Paul has never actually won a championship. This isn’t uncommon. Countless Hall of Famers from the nineties either retired ringless, or spent the early two-thousands hanging on the coattails of contenders in an attempt to get a ring, because Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls so thoroughly dominated the decade. The Lob City Clippers couldn’t get past the dynastic Golden State Warriors. Neither could the Houston Rockets, though in 2018 they did come close, taking Kevin Durant and Steph Curry to seven games in the Western Conference Finals. Paul got closest to a ring in 2021, in Phoenix, when he won the first two games of the Finals before losing four straight to Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks.

We live in an age of basketball in which rings are, increasingly, treated as the bottom line, despite them being a flawed heuristic for individual dominance. This means that Chris Paul’s legacy, to some, has an asterisk attached, a fact that is compounded by the his ability to make deep playoff runs so often. He just couldn’t drag a team past that point. He’ll make your team good, maybe even great, but never the greatest.

And so, this past off-season, he returned to the Clippers, not necessarily to chase a ring but to return to the franchise that raised him. “If I’m really honest, I wanted to get back and play here by any means necessary,” Paul said. “I didn’t even care what the team looked like. I just wanted to be home, be here with the Clippers.” It was clear that it would be his final season, and everyone assumed that he’d get a proper farewell tour featuring standing ovations and tribute videos—the things that future Hall of Famers sometimes get when they announce their final season. He would be a bench player, logging ten to twelve minutes a game while providing veteran leadership. It would be a feel-good season, and he’d be seen off generously.

That plan came to an end last week, when the Clippers abruptly sent Chris Paul home from a road game in Atlanta and put out a statement explaining that Paul would not be with the team for the rest of the season. The next day, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported on the reason for his departure: “Chris Paul and his leadership style clashed with the Clippers, sources tell ESPN. Paul has been vocal in holding management, coaches and players accountable, which the team felt became disruptive.” Charania also reported that Paul and the Clippers’ head coach, Ty Lue, had not been on speaking terms for “several weeks,” an alarming fact considering that the N.B.A. season itself is less than two months old. (Lue later told reporters this was not true.)

These days, all I talk about and think about is the cognitive dissonance required to move through the world. Increasingly, I struggle to disentangle my many selves, to get on with the day. All my selves weep often. I try to have grace. I tell my friends that I’m no longer sure how anyone just drifts through the days, the months, without acknowledging the horrors. I imagine what it must be like to be able to turn off the parts of the world that unsettle you. It must feel like existing in an animated universe that adheres to cartoon physics: you fall from an inconceivable height and, landing, a cloud of dust billows up from the ground, but then you shake yourself off and keep moving.

I convince myself that I still laugh enough. Everyone I love would like to see an end to wars, would like to stop people from being snatched off the streets and deported, but some days we can’t march, because it’s so hot outside where I am that it is dangerous. It is dangerously hot outside, in part because of the climate consequences of the wars; they don’t stop and haven’t stopped for as long as we’ve been alive. The masjid on my block received threats last year, so community members put our money together to hire security. One of the elders joked that as long as the masjid was empty someone should feel free to burn it down—it would give us a good excuse to finally remodel. We laughed. I feel most Muslim when others might think that the joke is on my people, but my people are surviving, and so the joke is actually not on us at all.

At the end of Youssef’s show, he paced the stage in the near-silent aftermath of rousing applause. Then he began talking about two things that had left him hopeful that week. I clocked a couple in the row ahead of me mouthing “Zohran?” Then there he was, onstage, waving, taking in a standing ovation. He talked briefly about his vision for a different New York, one where people could advocate for Palestinian rights without the threat of persecution. And then Youssef introduced Khalil, who got an even bigger, more raucous ovation. He smiled wide and threw up a fist, a gesture that many in the audience returned.

Toward the end of Khalil’s short remarks, he looked at Mamdani as if it were just the two of them in the room, and he said, “I am excited about the possibility of raising my son in a city where you are mayor.” It was a stunning moment, one of those times when you could, if you were listening, hear a collective catching of breath before a fresh wave of applause. People made their way to the exits, some wiping away tears. I saw a friend, and we hugged. She said, “I didn’t realize I was crying, but now I can’t stop.”

As beautiful as that memory was, what lingered in my mind was the final joke of the night, when Khalil said that he was honored to be standing with Mamdani, “a man so principled that ICE hasn’t arrested him yet.” He paused and then, with perfect timing, added, “You can tell they are thinking about it.” Mamdani laughed. Youssef laughed. I laughed in my seat. It was a classically funny joke, made by someone who had been snatched from the lobby of his building by ICE agents, a joke lovingly directed at a mayoral candidate who has been threatened with deportation by the President and other political leaders. The joke was funny because of what some of us in the room knew and because of what the person telling it had lived through. The joke was funny because, though some of us in the room wept often, our laughter outpaced what we know of the world, for a few seconds at a time. ♦

In May of 1971, Marvin Gaye released what many consider to be his masterwork, “What’s Going On?” A song cycle told from the point of view of a Vietnam veteran returning to the United States after serving abroad, having witnessed all manner of suffering, violence, and injustice, it is not an entirely idyllic album. Yet the inquisitive nature of its title, and the question that foregrounds the work, suggests a faith in America held, if not by Gaye himself, then certainly by the speaker he invents to guide listeners through the forest of concerns the album conjures. We are to understand that the soldier in question left one place to go fight in another, and, upon returning home, found no improvement from the conditions he’d left.

By November of the same year, Sly Stone seemed to pose an answer: “There’s a Riot Goin’ On.” At the time that album was released, Stone, who died this week, at the age of eighty-two, was facing a make-or-break career inflection point. He and his band, Sly and the Family Stone, the multiracial, late-sixties-utopian-fever-dream ensemble, had ended the previous decade on a high, with the album “Stand!” garnering overwhelming acclaim. An accompanying performance at Woodstock left their label, Epic Records, eager for a next release. Yet, by 1971, all that had been put out were a couple of singles and a greatest-hits album. Stone missed recording deadlines. His relationship with the band had begun to fray amid creative disagreements, drug use, and Sly’s erratic behavior. Amid all of this, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” landed as a jolt, as if he’d just shaken himself out of a long slumber, looked upon the country, and realized that he couldn’t stand carrying on in it the same way.

“There’s a Riot Goin’ On” acted almost as an inverse to some of the more upbeat, chart-friendly pursuits of Sly and the Family Stone’s earlier career. “Stand!” had been recorded at Pacific High Studios, in San Francisco. Just days after its release came Bloody Thursday, when police cracked down on antiwar protests at Berkeley, killing one and injuring at least a hundred and twenty-eight. Yet “Stand!” evinced a kind of relentless optimism, with exhilarating instrumentation ornamenting lyrics that were sometimes vague and gauzy. It closed with the song “You Can Make It If You Try,” which emanated a confidence that fortunes might change for us all. In the time between “Stand!” and “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” Stone had faced increasing pressure from the Black Panthers, whose leaders wanted him to be more politically direct, and to de-integrate his band. The idealism of the sixties was dead, and with its death came the harsh realities of the new moment: political assassinations, expanded police violence, a shifting civil-rights movement, and a sense of disillusionment that seemed to haunt Stone as he searched for a purpose beyond hippie-culture stardom.

The grooves on “Riot” were deeper and darker, with collisions of vocals that in some moments barely resembled language at all. There was a kind of performance of apathy on the album which felt like both a reflection of Sly’s lived reality—a kind of rage that led itself to confusion, and then exhaustion—and a mimicry of the hippie movement, interrogating where it had left people and who it had left behind. On the first track, “Luv N’ Haight,” Sly’s voice is a distorted mumble as he sings the opening lyrics: “Feel so good inside myself / don’t wanna move.” As the song progresses, it becomes a polyphonic collision of sentiments: feel so good feel so good wanna move wanna move coming up against feel so good inside myself, don’t wanna move. It is hard to tell where one phrase peels off from the other, or whether the two statements are even at odds with each other. They exist within the same addled mind: We have to do something; we don’t know what it is. There was a sense of both resolve and resignation on the album, a heartbreak that seems almost in conversation with the hopeful ending of “Stand!” Now, over stark and downbeat instrumentals, Stone implied that you, like he, may have been dreaming.