Thank You, Phoenix Suns

For the first time these playoffs, last night I was able to watch a Suns game for an extended amount of time. What freewheeling fun! Their bench was on fire, hitting three pointers left and right, scoring a total of 54 points in the game, and ultimately beating the Lakers to tie the series at two games apiece.

As lame as it is to blog twice in one month about the same team, the Suns deserve it. In the past two weeks, Steve Nash has finished one game with an eye swollen shut and another with a broken nose -- which he set back in place himself mid-game, nauseating his teammates -- and still helped the team win both games! Their style of play is so much more joyful than that of Celtics' methodical professionalism. The Suns confirm that life is about the beauty of now, the importance of riding the moment wherever it may take you, and the carefree brilliance of letting the wind rush through your hair as you fly along the court, through the air or down a grassy hill. They're plucky and dashing, fluid and improvisatory, and charming and wonderful.

Among the exchanges I had with my fiancee last night, in between being mesmerized:

Me: "Can we move to Phoenix?"

Her: (Eye roll) "No."

HBS, Meet Market Basket

Market Basket's business model fascinates me. It's a micro-regional supermarket chain that occupies the market's lower rungs in terms of aesthetics and image and yet, it's always thronged and beloved by customers. I've yet to discover any other company that's so simple and so successful.

All of the company's details create an interesting profile: Founded by Greek immigrants in Lowell, it has 62 stores in greater Boston but none anywhere else. The stores are mainly located in working-class towns, such as Somerville, Dracut, etc. The founders' descendants fiercely sued each other through the 1990s over ownership, becoming one of the decade's best local news stories. The founding families are very wealthy. The stores make little, if any, attempt at branding. There is no company Web site (the above links are to the Wikipedia and Yelp pages), even in 2010! The prices are so cheap that I usually save at least $20 compared to my old weekly shops at Shaw's!

The shopping experience there is trying but wonderful. The parking lot and store are remarkably crowded, no matter the day or time. My fiancee says one needs to be in a patient, forgiving mood to go there or one will leave totally exasperated and defeated. She calls the back aisle, where the meat section intersects with almost all of the dry goods' aisles, the "straits of death" because it's impossible and impossibly frustrating to navigate a cart through there. We park our cart somewhere less crowded and carry individual items back. (It sounds tedious but is actually quicker.) I usually need to buy a candy bar to soothe myself after maneuvering through everyone.

Every item is cheaper, sometimes alarmingly so, than its equivalent at competitors. Despite this, the produce is as good, and often better, than the selection at competitors. There is a whole aisle devoted to Goya products and multiple ones for ethnic products, not only one "Shop the World" aisle. Every time I'm there I see at least one person from the GSD, in addition to Hispanic, Brazilian, Caribbean and Asian immigrants, and white, blue-collar locals, meaning the clientele is hipsters, immigrants and the middle class -- the most unlikely but welcome fusion of customers. Every company in the U.S. chases the immigrant market, but Market Basket, in its seeming indifference to marketing and focus-group testing, has organically captured it and stocks its aisles accordingly. In the absence of a company-created corporate image, the fan base created an enduring one. Is this grassroots capitalism?

The supermarket business is known for its tight operating margins. Considering Market Basket's ridiculously low prices, I always wonder how they make a profit. Their stores are as basic as can be in terms of design, aisle widths, etc, and they don't advertise much, but they must pay very low wages and have discount suppliers. I can't think of anywhere else they can cut costs.

Really, Market Basket is begging to be the Harvard Business School's next case study. It presents all these interesting lessons for retailers: Does price rule all? How can you capture immigrant and lower-class shoppers? How much does advertising matter and is it needed to create a brand? What do customers really care about? Can a company like this expand its model beyond one geographic market or does that dilute the company and/or turn it into Wal-Mart? HBS, call me.

All The GSD Girls Look Like Victoria Legrand

It's not that every woman at my school looks exactly like Legrand, above, Beach House's lead singer, but each one looks a little bit like her. As an amalgamation, the female student body might very well be Legrand. Not that there's anything wrong with this. Legrand is bewitching, cool, magnetic and fashionable. She's probably the biggest female contributor to a band and the best embodiment of its sound these days. Like Steve Nash, most of my female peers could start their own bands without even trying.

The other unexpected lesson from my recently completed first year of graduate school is how gigantic of a tourist destination Harvard University is. Harvard is like Times Square -- internationally renowned and immediately recognizable to everyone, though Times Square's fame comes from its commercialism, spectacle and gaudiness, while Harvard is known as the paragon of American education, success and privilege. (I'll take the latter.) Nonetheless, I've been surprised how many tourists there are. They're in the Yard every day, taking pictures, and are impossible to miss. They even come to the GSD, which doesn't strike me as appealing to anyone but the niche traveler, to photograph the hive-like array of studio desks and gawk.

From this, I've learned how important the Harvard brand is to the university's culture, in a way that was never remotely true at my alma mater. I'm glad I didn't go to college at Harvard because it seems the famous professors, famous guest lecturers, famous alumni, famous buildings and famous endowment are more important than the students. Protecting the first group is a greater priority than advancing the second. This isn't a problem in graduate school when the programs are smaller -- such as mine, with about 30 students per class -- the students are more mature, cognizant of their future careers and know what they want from their education and professors, and the program's reputation partly depends on its ability to place graduates in good jobs. But if I were an intellectually curious but somewhat aimless undergraduate (which I was), I would most certainly have been as lost in Harvard's shuffle as one could be.

I now have a greater appreciation for why liberal arts colleges exist. The small class sizes, the attentive professors, the committed students and the enclosed campuses are all wonderful, if not integral, for 18 to 22 year-olds.

Is Austin Jackson Superhuman?

Austin Jackson, the Detroit Tigers' rookie centerfielder and leadoff hitter, has had an absolutely mind-boggling start to the year. Through 38 games, Jackson, who's 23 years old, is batting .329, ranking him seventh in the American League, an impressive feat for a rookie. More amazingly, he's done this while accumulating 46 strikeouts in 161 at-bats. After subtracting strikeouts, Jackson's batting average is .461, which means that each time he simply makes contact with the ball so that it travels into fair territory, he's had a hit 46 percent of the time!

The law of averages suggest this is an impossible clip to sustain. As good as professional ballplayers are, there's a certain amount of luck regarding where a ball actually goes in the stadium once the hitter makes contact. He can try to hit it to right field, but once it goes there, he can't fully control whether it avoids the rightfielder for a hit or lands in his glove for an out. A 46 percent success rate is well above the average. Jackson is one of the game's luckiest players or superhuman in his ability to control the ball's path. Or more likely, Jackson will continue striking out at this clip and see his average end around .275 for the year or he'll learn plate discipline and be headed for an excellent, perhaps Hall of Fame-worthy career.

Power hitters often have lots of strikeouts because their big swings create feast or famine, but not so traditionally for those who hit for high averages. They're skilled in part because they have a great eye for good pitches. It's unlikely that Jackson will break the mold. However, considering so many of the top prospects these days arrive in the majors with mammoth strikeout rates, maybe anomalies like this won't be so unusual anymore.

What's Wrong With The Sawx?

As the Sawx have struggled to tread above .500 in the baseball season's first month, sportswriters have piled on in their downbeat assessments. Ben Shpigel, the Times' Yankees beat writer, wrote they just "plod along"; Amalie Benjamin, the Globe's beat writer for the Sawx, wrote the clubhouse is "confused and conflicted" with a "distinct lack of joy" and "an unsettled feeling after wins and an unsettled feeling after losses." (How's that for an approximation of a Zagat's review?)

The team's lineup still looks good on paper, especially once outfielders Jacoby Ellsbury and Mike Cameron return from injuries, and the starting rotation seems even better. However, the whole team seems to be afflicted with a case of Mets-itis, where everyone is incapable of playing well at the same time. One week, the infield is playing sharp defense but the outfield stinks and the next week, everyone is hitting great but the pitching stinks, and so on. It's really tough to experience this as a fan, but the Sawx appear to have a good enough of a team to surmount it.

The main issue is a perception one. This year is truly the one where the team leaves behind its persona of the past decade -- fun-loving and personable but sometimes moody or grumpy; rough around the edges yet hard-working. The problem is that personality suits Boston very well, particularly its committed baseball fans, and nothing has emerged to replace or replicate it. So while the remaining veterans from this era reach the end of their careers and struggle or no longer start, the franchise's face is the statistics-loving, attractive but annoyingly overachieving general manager, Theo Epstein, whose party line about "run prevention" has looked very shaky as the defense and pitching have struggled. As good as infielders Kevin Youkilis and Dustin Pedroia are, they alone don't make a team, and closer Jonathan Papelbon is no longer very well liked because it's clear that after the season he'll sign as a free agent with whichever team pays him the most money. (It won't be the Sawx.) Even if the team revives its fortunes, it probably won't be a fan favorite.

The Sawx's struggles and the resulting agonizing also confirms something about Boston's sports fans. Yes, they've always been (in)famously obsessive. But during the past 10 years, when all four major franchises have had at least periods of sustained success and three of them have won championships, they've become quite privileged. The truth that all franchises' fortunes move in cycles is now foreign to fans because almost all four teams have been at the cycle's top simultaneously and for longer than the typical spin. David Margolick put it well in a recent guest column in the Times: "But as the current cyber-stonings on the Red Sox message boards attest, creeping Yankeeosis has spread to Red Sox Nation. There is the same petulance, the same arrogance, the same intolerance for imperfection, the same obnoxious impatience...But modern Red Sox fans, with no sense of the team’s history, have paid the ostensibly hated Yankees the sincerest form of flattery and become an evil, entitled empire themselves."

Maybe there isn't much wrong with the Sawx.

Isn't Greece Different Than Iceland? aka Farewell, Europe?

And here I was thinking it would be immigration that would tear apart the European Union. Three years ago, the EU's existential debate was about whether Turkey, which at the time was angling to join the bloc, was European enough to join. That raised the questions of whether the continent's physical boundaries extended as far east as Iraq and its cultural boundaries could accept a Muslim country with a fledgling democracy. For all its projections of liberalism and acceptance, Europe has struggled with its 21st-century patterns of immigration, whether it's disaffected North Africans in suburban Paris' public housing or Eastern Europeans heading to England for working-class jobs (which most recently popped up in Gordon Brown's campaign gaffe).

Actually, it's the economy. The EU and IMF finally decided over the weekend to address the continent's debt crisis, by creating a mechanism to raise as much as nearly $1 trillion in cumulative debt to bail out whichever country is struggling to pay its sovereign debt this week. (These days one can choose among Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland and, perhaps soon, Italy and England.) But the continent's reluctance, particularly that of Germany, to help Greece over the past few months as it became the sickest sovereign patient has shown the core of the European Union is much smaller than originally thought and the core's members might be willing to drop the peripheral ones so they can hang around.

That Romania and Hungary had to seek the IMF's help to survive the global financial crisis isn't surprising. They're practically supposed to do it, no? But isn't Greece, as the world's oldest democracy (even if its current form is as nascent as Turkey's) and one of its most cherished cultural icons, supposed to be different than Iceland, which, like Romania and Hungary, has been left at the IMF's door to figure out its financial crisis? Maybe Greece and Iceland share more in common these days than they care to admit: Both are tourist-reliant economies and cultural oddities with overly burdensome social compacts that don't interest the rest of Europe. Dismissing them like this requires lots of cynicism, but that's what appears to run through the streets and halls of government these days.

If Greece isn't part of the EU's core, that probably means the only countries who comprise it are England, France and Germany. Sorry, Austria, Holland, Spain, etc, but you're not large enough economically, politically, culturally or demographically to truly matter when push comes to shove. If for some reason you've yet to have any doubts about the state of social contracts in the early 21st century, here's another one for you.

Update: Speaking of social contracts, David Leonhardt wrote in his column this week the U.S. might be the next Greece, at least in terms of having to balance its social expenditures with its taxes. On the other hand, Josef Joffe, in his review of Tony Judt's new book, writes that the need to shrink the state isn't such a bad idea. The state, Joffe writes, "makes its own pitch for power; it creates privileges, franchises and clienteles. This is why it is so hard to rein in, let alone cut back. The modern welfare state creates a new vested interest with each new entitlement. It corrupts as it does good."

And The Side Streets of Provi

One of my final assignments for the semester, about Argentina's housing system, made me think more about Latin America than I have in several years. For my longest bout of procrastination I spent about 30 minutes staring at Google Maps and Earth images of Santiago, where I lived and studied for seven wonderful months in 2004, and reading Craigslist ads for apartments in Buenos Aires. Aside from the general lack of responsibility I had in Santiago and the breezy days that resulted, I think there's something enchanting about the Southern Cone, this removed corner of the world that's cosmopolitan and breathtaking.

As much as I want to go back today, I think I'd prefer to go to those two cities circa 1985. It would be authoritarian in one and inflationary in the other, but they were distinct in a way that probably no longer exists and can't be replicated. That adjective -- "distinct" -- is a strong pull in the early 21st century, when globalization creates generic spaces, experiences and conditions. Today, those few different places are in Africa and parts of the Middle East and South Asia, but they strike me as too chaotic and, in some places, violent, in a way that the Southern Cone wasn't back then. (If anything, the place in those regions I want to visit most is Dubai, to see hyper-generic, plastic capitalism at its most outrageous.) They don't hold the same allure, though I'm sure there are a few cities that are exceptions.

One of the things that bothers me about circa 2010 is how hard it is to find something different. Yes, I realize I'm opening myself to charges of slumming it and romanticizing hard times. I realize how nice we have it here.

Damn Straight, Phoenix

For their playoff victory last night, the Phoenix Suns, long my second-favorite basketball team, wore jerseys with "Los Suns" stitched on the front. If there were any confusion as to why, Robert Sarver, the team's owner, quickly eliminated it by saying the jersey change was a direct rebuke to the Arizona government's approval last month of a bill that allows police officers to detain someone suspected of being in the U.S. illegally and arrest those who aren't carrying their immigration papers. "However intended, the result of passing the law is that our basic principles of equal rights and protection under the law are being called into question," Sarver said.

As ESPN.com columnist J.A. Andade astutely notes, professional sports teams typically exert political muscle only to convince voters to pass a ballot referendum to subsidize the construction of their new stadium -- typically at a significant, long-term loss to the taxpayers and the municipality or county. Here, Sarver and the Suns, who unanimously agreed with his suggestion about the jerseys, seized an opportune moment in the most perfect way possible: A subtle but obvious gesture that thumbs its nose at ill-conceived, reactionary political hysteria and stands in solidarity with multiculturalism, openness and respect.

Not only is Phoenix one of the more diverse metropolitan areas in the U.S. because of its Hispanic population, but the Suns' players and their families are a diverse bunch too, as are the rosters of nearly every team in every sport these days. Steve Nash, the Suns' star point guard, my all-time favorite basketball player for many reasons, and a Canadian, said of the law, "I think that this is a bill that really damages our civil liberties. I think it opens up the potential for racial profiling and racism." Damn straight. Here's the video; you need to go about three minutes in to hear the political part:



Sports unites people from all different backgrounds to root for their team, but, so it seems, this law does too to root against it. Of all the commentary I've read, the only people who seem to support it are cranky, anonymous writers at the bottom of news stories who always sound forever angry and old (if not in age, then in world outlook). Those who give some backing, such as the WSJ's editorial board, do so only on the grounds that Arizona's Legislature only burst because Congress has failed to address illegal immigration policy on a federal level. (Expect Congress to continue to fail.) But on the other side is essentially everyone, who realizes hysteria solves nothing and exacerbates things -- in this case to a discriminatory degree.

Hopefully in 20 years we'll look at this bill (and others) as the folly of a strange era of our lives, when recession and the panic it brings prompted some people to do some very strange, hurtful things, not as the start of new norm.

Update: The Suns have become the team du jour for all sportswriters' columns. Bill Simmons has this to say about the Suns' playoff run, which is notable not for his insight but the writing style. For the first time, Simmons drops the meandering, pop-culture-filled fandom that earned his fame for a legitimate, intimate tone that "profound" columnists adopt. Considering its Simmons' first attempt, it doesn't work well, but he's certainly proved himself to be talented enough to improve.

Another Reason To Like Cambridge

While much of metro Boston had to boil its drinking water the past three days because of a broken pipe in one of the system's small towns, here in Cambridge it was cooking, drinking and cleaning as usual. The city has its own water source, Fresh Pond, that it's managed responsibly and successfully, which is a simple but impressive feat in municipal government.

Ripping the elitist, liberal culture and politics of Cambridge, with its snooty universities, biotech companies and haughty populace, is easy. So is holding it up as an example of a place that's lost touch with the mainstream. But actually, the country could probably use more places like Cambridge if it were interested in creating a lively, relatively urban society. The streets are active, the shopping and restaurants are attractive, the culture is rich, the housing is varied and generally of good quality, the parks are abundant, the tree canopy is plentiful, the schools are good for a (semi-)urban city, the public transit is extensive enough that one doesn't need to own a car to get around. That it's so expensive to own housing is burdensome, but it's not a coincidence that a place defined by these characteristics is expensive.

Shouldn't others catch on or is it better that they prefer not to join?