Respectability Would Ruin It No. 0003

Nobody asked a retired backup center to save the WNBA from a problem that does not exist.

Enes Kanter, shut the fuck up.

I would ordinarily work my way toward that conclusion. Establish the facts. Consider opposing arguments. Maybe offer the man a little grace before arriving at the part where I ask him to please stop talking.

But Kanter has already received more consideration than he has ever given the WNBA, so let’s not waste anybody’s time.

For the past few weeks, Kanter has been pretending that he intends to enter the 2027 WNBA Draft. He even submitted a letter and recruited Royce White. One unemployed former NBA player making an ass of himself was not enough. Kanter claims he has spoken with several other former professional players about doing the same thing. Good for the ones that bang that call. 

This is all supposed to expose some grand loophole in the WNBA’s eligibility rules. Kanter says that if the league believes transgender women are women, it must allow a 6-foot-10, 250-pound retired NBA center to check a box and start posting up A’ja Wilson.

That is not how any of this works. Kanter knows that. Royce White knows that. Every television host giving them airtime knows that.

The stupidity is the point.

You Do Not Give a Fuck About the WNBA. The quickest way to tell that somebody does not care about women’s sports is when the only time they mention women’s sports is to talk about transgender people.

They cannot tell you who won the championship. They do not know who is leading the league in scoring. They were not around when the women were flying commercial, sharing practice facilities, and fighting for basic investment. They did not buy tickets when the league needed attendance. They did not buy jerseys when the players needed visibility.

But let the word transgender enter the conversation, and suddenly these niggas are Pat Summitt.

Kanter is not advocating for better pay, better travel, expanded rosters or improved facilities. He is not using his platform to celebrate the women actually playing basketball. He has made the league the backdrop for his latest conservative-media audition.

The WNBA is not the cause. It is the set.

And the women are props.

Kanter showed up courtside for the Chicago Sky and Indiana Fever wearing a shirt displaying the dictionary definition of a woman. During the game, he got into an exchange with Natasha Cloud, stepped toward the court, and was removed by security as the arena booed him. He immediately ran to social media and claimed that he had been kicked out for “supporting women.”

No, Enes. You were kicked out after bringing your traveling culture-war circus into somebody else’s workplace.

Supporting women would have required you to watch the women play basketball. You came to make sure everybody watched you.

Here is the part that makes this entire performance especially pathetic: there is no transgender player attempting to enter the WNBA.

Not one.

There is no former NBA center demanding a roster spot. There is no 6-foot-10 woman destroying the league. There is no championship being overturned, no player being pushed out, and no locker room under siege. The WNBA has said there is no current eligibility dispute and described the campaign surrounding this issue as a bad-faith effort to create division.

Kanter had to invent the threat before he could volunteer to protect women from it.

That is how this machine works. Find a scenario that is not happening. Describe the most absurd possible version of it. Become furious about the version you invented. Then demand that everybody else abandon reality and argue with you inside your imagination.

It is less like political commentary and more like watching a dog bark at itself in a mirror, except the dog eventually gets tired.

Kanter has declared himself eligible for a draft that has not asked for him, in a league he cannot play in, to protest a player who does not exist.

Sir, go home.

He gives interviews. He appears on national television. His social-media posts reach millions of people. He can write letters, hold press conferences, attend rallies and purchase courtside tickets. Nobody has taken away his ability to speak.

The problem is that he believes freedom of speech means freedom from anybody telling him that what he said was stupid.

It does not.

You are allowed to talk. Natasha Cloud is allowed to respond. Fans are allowed to boo. An arena is allowed to remove you when your performance spills toward the court. And the rest of us are allowed to notice that the man screaming about being silenced somehow never shuts the fuck up.

Kanter has legitimate reasons to understand political repression. His criticism of the Turkish government came with actual personal consequences. He has also spoken publicly about human-rights abuses in China when many people connected to the NBA would have preferred silence. Those positions required something real from him.

That history makes this version of Kanter more disappointing, not less.

He knows the difference between state repression and getting booed at a basketball game. He knows the difference between risking your safety and risking a bad night on social media. He has simply discovered that treating them as the same thing is profitable.

Enes Kanter’s NBA career ended years ago, but he has finally found a system willing to guarantee him minutes.

The conservative grievance circuit does not require defense, foot speed or a dependable jumper. It only asks that you identify a group its audience already dislikes, call yourself brave for antagonizing it and return after every backlash to announce that you have been canceled.

In that league, Kanter is an All-Star.

But none of this is about protecting women. Protecting women requires listening to them even when they do not say what you want to hear. It requires investing in their work when there is no controversy attached. It requires seeing them as complete people rather than fragile scenery in a man’s political performance.

Kanter is not defending the WNBA. He is using it.

He is using its players, its growing audience and the attention surrounding women’s basketball to keep himself in a conversation that had largely moved on without him. He manufactured a crisis, appointed himself its hero and showed up courtside hoping someone would give him the confrontation he needed.

Then someone did.

Now he gets to tour the internet telling everybody how dangerous it is to stand up for women while the actual women return to work.

So, yes, Enes Kanter: you can speak. You can write another letter. You can declare for every women’s league on Earth. You can put another definition on a shirt in case the dictionary has been feeling underrepresented.

You are free to do all of that.

And we are free to give you the response this performance deserves:

Shut the fuck up.

I knew The Drama existed.

I saw Zendaya. I saw Robert Pattinson. I saw the wedding photos. I saw A24 doing that thing A24 does where the marketing looks expensive, tasteful, and intentionally vague.

And somehow, I still let this shit pass me by, probably because of the vagueness of it all. 

Alright, you keep your secrets. 

I blame A24, but with this movie making 132.5 million, they didn't miss my 15(x2) dollars. 

I assumed it was going to be a stylish little relationship movie about two beautiful people discovering they might not be ready for marriage. Maybe somebody cheated. Maybe one of them secretly hated the other one’s family. Something uncomfortable enough to threaten the wedding but safe enough to be resolved after an emotional speech in formalwear.

I was not prepared for what this movie actually was.

The Drama starts like a romantic comedy. Not even a dark romantic comedy yet. Just a genuinely sweet movie about two people who seem to make sense together.

Emma, played by Zendaya, works at a bookstore. Charlie, played by Robert Pattinson, is a museum director. They meet cute. They dress like they share the same closet. They live in one of those movie apartments where every room suggests that the people inside have excellent credit and have never purchased furniture from Rooms To Go.

They are getting married in a week.

Everything appears fine.

Then one conversation takes the entire movie, places it on a table, and slowly begins pulling its legs off.

Terrible behavior, certainly.

But still within the range of stories people can tell years later and receive some mixture of laughter, judgment and disbelief.

Then Emma shares hers.

As a teenager, she planned a school shooting.

She didn’t actually carry it out, but that barely matters to Charlie. The woman he planned to marry has suddenly become somebody else—or, more accurately, she has become somebody he realizes he never fully knew.

That is where The Drama becomes a much more interesting movie than I expected.

The question is not simply whether Emma deserves forgiveness. The movie is asking whether Charlie can continue loving her now that he knows something about her he cannot make fit inside the version of her he created.

That is a very different question.

Everybody wants honesty in a relationship until honesty brings something ugly through the front door. We say we want to know everything about the person we love, but what we usually mean is that we want more information that confirms our existing opinion of them.

We want their embarrassing childhood stories. Their old heartbreaks. Their fears. Maybe a regrettable tattoo.

We do not want information that forces us to rebuild the entire person in our heads.

Charlie does not know what to do with Emma’s confession because there is no emotionally clean response available to him. If he immediately forgives her, does that make him dangerously naïve? If he leaves, is he judging the adult woman he loves entirely by the worst thoughts of a troubled teenager? If he stays but never looks at her the same way again, what kind of marriage would that become?

Robert Pattinson is incredible here because Charlie does not process any of this with dignity.

He spirals.

He becomes frightened, cruel, self-righteous and increasingly ridiculous. Pattinson has gotten extremely good at playing men whose emotions appear to be attacking them from inside their own bodies. Charlie looks like he is trying to maintain control while every private alarm in his head is going off at once.

Zendaya has the harder performance because Emma cannot be played as an obvious monster or a helpless victim. Either choice would make the movie easier, and The Drama has no interest in making this easy.

Emma understands the severity of what she planned. She also understands that she did not do it. She has spent years living beyond that moment, only to watch her entire identity collapse back into it the second Charlie learns the truth.

Zendaya plays that contradiction beautifully. Emma is ashamed, defensive, wounded and sometimes strangely calm. She wants Charlie to understand the person she was without allowing him to erase the person she became.

The movie also understands how quickly private pain becomes public entertainment.

Once the secret leaves the relationship, everybody gets to build an opinion around it. Friends take sides. People search for the correct moral position. Emma stops being a person and becomes a question everyone else gets to answer.

Would you marry her?

Could you forgive her?

Should something somebody planned—but never completed—as a teenager define the rest of their life?

The movie does not provide a comfortable answer because there probably isn’t one.

That refusal is part of why the film became controversial. The revelation involving a planned school shooting angered critics and gun-violence advocates, some of whom felt the subject was mishandled or hidden beneath misleading romantic-comedy marketing. That criticism is understandable. This is not abstract material. There are survivors and families for whom this can never function as a clever moral thought experiment.

But I also do not think the movie treats Emma’s past like a cheap twist and then forgets about it.

The confession changes the temperature of every scene that follows. It forces the audience into the same impossible position as Charlie: trying to reconcile the person standing in front of us with something that feels irreconcilable.

What I loved most is that The Drama never stops being funny while everything is falling apart.

Not joke funny.

Human funny.

The kind of funny that comes from watching people attempt to behave normally during a situation where normal behavior is no longer available. The wedding is still approaching. Guests are still coming. Arrangements have already been made. Love may be collapsing, but deposits are nonrefundable.

That tension makes the final stretch feel like a nightmare wearing formal clothes.

Kristoffer Borgli directs the movie like he knows discomfort lasts longer when nobody is allowed to escape it. Scenes continue past the moment when another filmmaker might cut away. Characters say the wrong thing, realize they have said the wrong thing and then somehow make it worse.

By the time the wedding arrives, the title finally feels like a threat.

The ending works because it does not pretend love has solved the problem. Emma and Charlie do not arrive at some magical place where the past no longer matters. They are left with something messier: the possibility that knowing a person completely might be impossible, and loving them may require accepting that impossibility.

That does not mean ignoring what they have done.

It means deciding whether their worst moment is the only true thing about them.

I finished The Drama thinking about how much of a relationship is built on the stories we tell each other—and how much depends on the stories we quietly leave out. Everybody enters love with an edited biography. Some edits are harmless. Some could destroy the entire production if restored.

This movie finds the worst possible deleted scene and presses play a week before the wedding.

I cannot believe I was sleeping on it.

Then again, maybe that was the best way to watch it. I missed the arguments, avoided the think pieces and went in expecting a beautiful little A24 relationship movie.

What I got was a moral crisis with a seating chart.

That shit was great.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., is about to come back outside in a major way.

On October 31, 2026, the museum will officially reopen its 1.3-acre outdoor sculpture garden following a four-year, $68 million transformation. The redesign was led by Japanese artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto, who also previously reworked the museum’s lobby.

This is the most extensive renovation the Hirshhorn campus has received since opening in 1974. Sugimoto kept the bones of Gordon Bunshaft’s original modernist vision intact while making the garden more accessible and better connected to the rest of the museum. That includes reopening an underground tunnel connecting the building, central plaza, and garden that had been closed for 50 years.

The new garden will hold 60 sculptures—nearly twice as many as before—mixing legendary pieces from Joseph Hirshhorn’s original collection with newer contemporary work. Sculptures by Auguste Rodin, Alberto Giacometti, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore will share the space with acquisitions from KAWS, Izumi Kato, Lauren Halsey and Raven Halfmoon.

One of the coolest additions is an enlarged reflecting pool that can be drained and transformed into a performance amphitheater. The garden will also feature dedicated spaces for rotating exhibitions, beginning with Yoshitomo Nara: Sentinels of Stillness.

Basically, the Hirshhorn spent $68 million making sure the outside of the museum hits just as hard as the inside.

Hirshhorn Museum
Independence Ave SW & 7th St SW
Washington, DC 20560

Not an Avenger-in-training. Not Tony Stark’s gifted intern. Not a teenager trying to keep his class trip from being destroyed by a supervillain.

A man.

A broke, lonely, emotionally exhausted man who still has rent to pay and people to save, even though nobody remembers his name.

That distinction is what makes Spider-Man: Brand New Day work. The movie finally removes the training wheels from Holland’s version of the character and trusts him to carry the full weight of being Peter Parker. No billionaire mentor watching from above. No Avengers membership waiting at the end. No Ned in the chair providing tech support.

Just Peter, New York City, and the consequences of every decision that brought him here.

And somehow, this might be one of the best films in the entire Spider-Man series.

Peter Parker Has Finally Arrived

Tom Holland has always been a great Spider-Man.

He has the nervous energy, the physicality and the ability to deliver a joke while being thrown through the side of a building. But until now, his Peter Parker has always felt protected by the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Even when things went wrong, there was usually somebody nearby with money, technology or a portal.

Brand New Day takes all of that away.

Following the ending of No Way Home, Peter lives in a world where MJ, Ned and everyone else have forgotten him. He watches the people he loves continue their lives from a distance, knowing that approaching them could place them back in the danger from which he sacrificed everything to protect them.

The painful part is that Peter’s sacrifice worked.

MJ and Ned are alive. They are moving forward. The world did not end.

Peter simply no longer gets to be part of it.

That gives Holland material he has never had in these movies. His Peter is quieter now. More guarded. There are moments when he appears more comfortable inside the Spider-Man mask than he does walking around as himself.

Spider-Man has become the only identity he has left.

That sounds dramatic because it is. Peter Parker has been through some shit.

The Most Mature Spider-Man in the Series

There is an understandable temptation to call this the “darkest” Tom Holland Spider-Man movie, but that does not completely describe it.

Darkness is easy. Put Peter in the rain, kill somebody he loves, and turn the color saturation down.

What Brand New Day gives us is maturity.

Peter still misses MJ. He still wants his best friend back. He could tell them the truth and possibly restore some version of what they had, but doing so would make his sacrifice about what he wanted instead of what was safest for them.

That is the difference between the Peter Parker we met in Homecoming and the one standing in front of us now.

The younger Peter wanted desperately to prove that he deserved to be an Avenger. This Peter already knows what he is capable of. His struggle is deciding what kind of person he will become when nobody is around to validate the sacrifice.

There is no ceremony for doing the right thing.

Sometimes you save everybody and still go home alone.

That is Spider-Man.

One of the smartest decisions director Destin Daniel Cretton makes is bringing Spider-Man back down to street level.

Yes, the movie contains the large action sequences expected from something that cost enough money to purchase a small nation. But the best moments are the ones that make Spider-Man feel like an actual person moving through New York rather than a computer-generated character being launched across a digital background.

The swinging has weight. The collisions hurt. Peter gets bruised, exhausted, and frustrated.

More importantly, New York feels like a place where people live.

Spider-Man is not simply protecting “the city” as an abstract collection of skyscrapers available for destruction. He is protecting pedestrians, apartment buildings, corner stores and people who will never know what it cost him to show up.

The action is also easy to follow. Cretton allows certain shots to breathe, occasionally freezing the movement just long enough to create images that feel pulled from a comic-book splash page.

The movie understands that Spider-Man looking cool is not a shallow concern.

He is supposed to look cool.

Jon Bernthal’s Punisher could have easily become another piece of MCU fan service: walk into the frame, say something violent and wait for the audience to clap.

Instead, Frank Castle serves a purpose.

Frank represents what Peter could become if isolation completely hardens him. Both men are angry. Both have lost people. Both believe they are personally responsible for stopping the next terrible thing from happening.

The difference is that Peter still believes the person causing harm might be worth saving.

Their relationship gives the movie some of its best tension and some much-needed humor. Frank treats Peter like an irritating younger brother who refuses to understand that bullets would solve the situation faster. Peter treats Frank like a heavily armed moral emergency.

It works because Bernthal never softens Frank into a lovable guest star, and Holland never allows Peter to become intimidated into abandoning what separates Spider-Man from the Punisher.

Peter may be angry, but he is not Frank Castle.

At least not yet.

Like nearly every modern Marvel production, Brand New Day occasionally remembers that it has several future movies to advertise.

The story becomes crowded, particularly as it approaches the third act. Certain characters feel less like natural parts of Peter’s life and more like expensive reminders that the MCU has other franchises under construction.

The central mystery is effective, but its eventual explanation requires more unpacking than the movie comfortably has room to provide. There are moments when Peter’s smaller, more personal story has to fight for space inside a much larger Marvel machine.

That is frustrating because the Peter Parker movie is the better movie.

Every time Brand New Day focuses on loneliness, anger and the temptation to disappear inside the mask, it becomes something special. Every time it pauses to arrange pieces for the next crossover, you can almost hear the shareholders entering the room.

Thankfully, those obligations never completely overwhelm the story.

Tom Holland’s Best Performance as Spider-Man

This is Tom Holland’s best work as Peter Parker.

He has always been charming in the role, but charm is no longer enough for this version of the character. Holland has to show us someone who is still capable of joking with criminals while carrying a level of grief that could quietly destroy him.

He does.

The jokes remain, but they now feel like Peter’s defense mechanism rather than a requirement written into the Marvel formula. When he stops talking, Holland lets us see how tired Peter has become.

Not tired of saving people.

Tired of having nobody to come home to afterward.

Zendaya and Jacob Batalon are used carefully. Their presence matters precisely because the movie does not immediately undo the ending of No Way Home. Peter cannot simply explain what happened and rebuild the old trilogy by lunchtime.

The distance remains.

That restraint allows the previous movie’s ending to mean something.

This Is the Spider-Man I Have Been Waiting For

Spider-Man: Brand New Day understands that Peter Parker’s greatest power has never been his strength, intelligence, or ability to stick to walls.

It is his refusal to stop caring.

Even when caring costs him his friendships. Even when nobody remembers what he sacrificed. Even when anger offers him a much easier way to move through the world.

He still shows up.

That is why this movie belongs in the conversation with the best Spider-Man films. It may not have the structural perfection of Spider-Man 2 or the once-in-a-generation theater experience of No Way Home, but it gives Tom Holland’s Peter something his previous movies occasionally struggled to provide:

A complete identity of his own.

He is no longer Iron Man’s successor.

He is no longer the kid who accidentally wandered into an Avengers movie.

He is Spider-Man.

And for the first time, that feels like more than enough.