America has long obsessed over celebrity and the quest for fame. Thirty years ago, millions of moviegoers got to see that desire up close thanks to the groundbreaking documentary Hoop Dreams, which focused on two teenage basketball players, Arthur Agee and William Gates. The pair never fulfilled their dream of making the NBA, but Agee and Gates ended up making more of an impact than many who did.

… “[Hoop Dreams] shared with the world the reality of when you don’t make it,” says Gates. “There’s a lot more [people like that] on our side than the ones that make it … And what you got to do when the new dream [forms after]. Maybe it’s coaching or something else in the sport. But I had to channel what the new dream looks like at that point.”

The two remain as inseparable from each other as they are from the story of basketball itself. At first then exposure from the documentary was fun and glitzy. The two made money (though not necessarily millions) thanks to the movie’s success. They were invited to speak to schools and teams, to present at awards shows. They met political figures and rubbed elbows with celebrities at parties. Gates met Michael Jordan and later even worked out with him and was offered a workout with the Washington Wizards. But his body couldn’t hold up with his ambitions and injuries forced him to retire from the sport. Agee chased his dream of playing as far as it could take him, from college to semi-pro. He also dabbled in acting. Now, he runs a Hoop Dreams clothing line and continues to do speaking events. He and Gates, who is a preacher in San Antonio and recently published a memoir and has his own clothing line, host a Hoop Dreams podcast. And they are planning a sequel to the movie, too. But despite their fame not every door flew open.

“When I was doing the NBA thing [trying to work out for a team], it was like ‘Arthur who?’ When my agent made those phone calls, it was ‘Arthur Agee who?’” Agee says. “That’s how GMs and scouts would be. I had to go the semi-pro route. Really, the actual NBA players – those are the guys who give me and William our respect because they understood.”

More at https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/mar/07/hoop-dreams-anniversary-arthur-agee-william-gates-today?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Urgency. It was never treated with sufficient urgency. For the first time in American history, a President lost an election and then tried to overthrow the election. And NOBODY treated it with the urgency it required. Because what Trump did was so unprecedented, our entire political and justice systems froze, and they ALL simply waited too damn long to deal with it.

The 93-year-old widow of a Wall Street financier has donated $1 billion to a Bronx medical school, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, with instructions that the gift be used to cover tuition for all students going forward.

The donor, Dr. Ruth Gottesman, is a former professor at Einstein, where she studied learning disabilities, developed a screening test and ran literacy programs. It is one of the largest charitable donations to an educational institution in the United States and most likely the largest to a medical school.

The fortune came from her late husband, David Gottesman, known as Sandy, who was a protégé of Warren Buffett and had made an early investment in Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate Mr. Buffett built.

The donation is notable not only for its staggering size, but also because it is going to a medical institution in the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough. The Bronx has a high rate of premature deaths and ranks as the unhealthiest county in New York. Over the past generation, a number of billionaires have given hundreds of millions of dollars to better-known medical schools and hospitals in Manhattan, the city’s wealthiest borough.

Gift link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/nyregion/albert-einstein-college-medicine-bronx-donation.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare