Essex County, Breakfast and Basketball, and The Don Draper Suit…

1. Breakfast and Basketball - Well it’s not everyday that you get to eat breakfast, drink coffee, and watch the NBA Finals in a sports bar in Cambodia. Seeing the Mavs win was just the icing on the cake.

2. King James? – Wasn’t it amazing how quiet LeBron was? You almost forgot that one of the best players ever play the game was out there on the floor. This stat really says it all: In the Finals the Heat were outscored by 36 with LeBron on the floor. They outscored the Mavs by 22 with him on the bench.

3. The Don Draper Suit – If there’s one man in this world that I would kill to look like it’s Don Draper — Jon Hamm’s character on Mad Men. So obviously when I went to get a new suit made today, I brought in a bunch of pictures like the one above and told the tailor to do whatever he could to copy that look. Who knows how it will turn out, but the tailor seemed pretty confident he could make it happen. I’ll post a picture in a week or two when the suits finished and you can be the judge.

4. The Healthiest Man in the Peace Corps – I had my end of service physical this morning and according to the Peace Corps doctor yours truly has been the healthiest volunteer over the last two years. Quite an honor.

5. The Imperfectionists - You gotta read this book. Yesterday I picked up a copy at a used book store in Phnom Penh and almost have it finished today. Not since Freedom have I enjoyed a piece of fiction this much.

6. Is College Worth it? - I feel like there’s been a lot of talk in the news recently about the value of college. I’ve read at least three different articles about the topic, yet as far as I’m concerned the only one worth reading is Louis Menand’s piece in last week’s New Yorker: Live and Learn: Why We Have College. Definitely give it a read. You can get it for free online.

7. The Game of Twitter - Virginia Heffernan has an interesting blog post on the New York Times website about Anthony Weiner and Twitter: The Game of Twitter. As a recent Twitter user (@CooperKnowlton) I can attest to the odd game like quality of acquiring followers and planning out your tweets. It’s very strange and very addicting…

Heavy users of Twitter, as Weiner used to be (he hasn’t posted since June 1), play a complicated strategy game. Like World of Warcraft and Halo, Twitter is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, but with higher real-world stakes. It is grounded in the first principles of game theory, including variations on the Prisoner’s Dilemma. You have to give to get; you have to get to give. Managing these ratios — deciding how much of your attention to expend to win attention to yourself, say — is the lion’s share of the Twitter action.

Players of Twitter risk their reputations, their careers and their relationships. But incentives to keep playing Twitter abound, too, as Weiner discovered. Twitter can burnish reputations, as it did for Weiner when he broke news; gave fast, fresh takes; and used links inventively. It can build careers, as it also has done for Weiner, whom Newsday praised as the architect of a “new political paradigm.” And it can develop alliances, as it did by connecting Weiner to another sophisticated Twitterer, Meghan McCain, over their mutual support of gay marriage.

That’s why Twitter is more usefully thought of as a game than a service. Like all other immersive games — including tennis, fantasy football and chess — Twitter is spellbinding when you’re in it, and seems nuts and like a sicko waste of time when you’re not.

8. Last Night – I just watched the movie Last Night starting my girlfriend Keira Knightly. It’s not a great movie, but it’s interesting and last night it led to a very long dinner table conversation about whether it’s worse to have an emotional or physical affair. For that I would say it was worth the 80 minutes.

9. Home Sweet Home - From this weeks New York Magazine : “In New Jersey, nothing beats Essex County, 130 square miles of urban melodrama stretching from the now sudden-death ghetto streets of Philip Roth’s old ­Weequahic Newark neighborhood to the big-as-the-Ritz engagement rings at the Short Hills Mall. Famous crooks who have plied their trade this side of the Pulaski Skyway include Lucky Luciano, Longy Zwillman, and Richie “the Boot” Boiardo, who, legend has it, burned his enemies’ remains in the furnace of his castlelike Livingston home. Equally greedy, if less folkloric, has been Essex’s epic succession of corrupt politicians, voted in and not. Good luck to Cory Booker, everyone’s favorite walking infomercial for well-tailored municipal uplift, but the smart money is against him. The last three Newark mayors were convicted of one charge or another.” (New York Magazine: The Baddest Lawyer in the History of New Jersey)

Interesting side note: I went to middle school with Richie “the boot” Boiardo’s grandson and have been inside the house (pictured above) with the alleged furnace.

10. Conan at Dartmouth - “Work hard, be kind, and amazing things will happen…”