Dez Reads. AI Brackets & Pound Cake

I still fill out my bracket the old-fashioned way.

Gut picks, a little overconfidence, and just enough conviction to be completely wrong come Friday afternoon. It’s Mark at the helm today, and MaryGrace kicks us off this week pushing back on the idea that we should outsource even that small joy to AI. Because at the end of the day, nobody cares about a perfect bracket if it wasn’t yours.

From there, I bring one of the more creative responses to a bad situation you’ll see this year, as Afroman turns a police raid into a full-blown music video, and somehow walks away with the win. Proof that if you control the narrative, you control the outcome.

Sam Jefferies takes aim at the “messenger class,” questioning whether the people shaping the conversation are actually limiting it, while Natalie Kopco breaks down the Oscars as less of an awards show and more of a live persuasion exercise, where the real impact happens after the cameras stop rolling.

And Phil Bogdan brings us home with a reminder that not everything is systems and strategy. Sometimes it’s just resilience and doing something meaningful with what you have.

Thanks, as always, for reading along with us.

Here we go.

AI at the Buzzer.

USA TODAY. An AI March Madness bracket simulator? Sorry, we can’t be friends

One of the most 2026 things so far in 2026 is anger over sports fans using AI to fill in their NCAA brackets.

USA TODAY’s Blake Toppmeyer hilariously asks, "Have we…surrendered our desire for bragging rights? Lost the urge to shout, ‘Called it!’ and lord our ingenuity over anyone and everyone within earshot, when the 13-seed you picked upsets the No. 4?” (Ironically, USA TODAY’s website included an AI summary at the top of his screed. I digress.)

I do sympathize with Toppmeyer ribbing his pals for asking Skynet to go for nothing but net on their behalf. But I also tend to find anti-AI outrage overblown. And I’m oddly intrigued at what will happen when bots make the picks.

But ultimately, bots aren’t real life. Bots don’t change the fact that American sports are about the excitement of watching together as the best of the best tip off and fight it out. Nobody needs a bot’s bracket to enjoy the hero shots, the upsets, or the memes when it all blows up. Nobody cares if a bot’s bracket gets busted.

We just want to watch some games together IRL.

– MaryGrace Lucas

Lemon Pound Cake.

NPR. Afroman prevails in cops’ music video defamation suit after a brief but viral trial

Never put it past a creative individual to come up with something effective, brilliant, and well exonerating.

Rapper Afroman just pulled off one of the more absurd and impressive responses to a bad situation you’ll see this year. After an Ohio police raid on his home in 2022 that turned up nothing and only left behind property damage, Afroman did what he does best.

He made a banger.

Using his own home security footage, Afroman created Lemon Pound Cake, a track and full-blown music video showing officers breaking down his door, searching his home, and eyeing a cake on his kitchen counter. It plays like a surreal mix of bodycam footage and satire, set to a beat you probably didn’t expect to associate with a police raid.

However, the officers didn’t find the video funny. They sued him for defamation, claiming the video damaged their reputations and seeking millions.

A jury didn’t see it that way.

This week, Afroman won. A clean sweep. The court sided with his argument that the video was protected speech, a creative response to a wrongful raid.

That’s the part that sticks with me. In a world where most people respond to bad press or institutional overreach with statements, lawyers, or silence, Afroman wrote a song, dropped a video, and let it do the talking.

Creativity wins. Love to see it.

– Mark Emerson

Breaking the Echo Chamber.

The Argument. Shoot the messenger

“Shoot the messenger” is a tremendous headline. It bucks millennia of accepted practice, stretching back to Ancient Greece and Sophocles’ declaration that “no one loves the messenger who brings bad news.” Bringers of ill tidings were at risk of death, so frequently targeted that Greeks developed a special system for protecting them.

Editor-in-Chief of The Argument magazine, Jerusalem Demsas, makes the case for going back to the good ol’ days of messenger shooting. Why? Because, to hear her tell it, the obsessive homogeny of the “messenger” class – journalists, think tank scholars, pundits, non-profit leaders, and influencers – is choking off new, critical analysis of real problems America is facing.

Is gentrification a good or bad thing? If we stay too dependent on the messenger class, we’ll never know. But the anti-messenger messengers tell that gentrification isn’t a story of displacement by new white homeowners in traditionally Black neighborhoods; instead, it’s one of growing Hispanic and Asian populations and, in some places, of urban revival by new, young, ethnically diverse families.

Are unions resurgent? In newsrooms, absolutely. Since 2015, 100 media outlets have organized, resulting in 7,300 new members of the NewsGuild. These unionized reporters covered a rising wave of union organizing that never came to be. As Demsas writes, “At the height of the so-called labor revival (2021-2023) the unionization rate actually went down.”

I was halfway through this article when I frantically began texting it around to my friends - the semi-skeptical and the unquestioning ones, and yes, the members of the messenger class, too.

– Sam Jefferies

Stump Speeches in Sequins.

The Hill. Top political moments from the Oscars

If you squint, every Oscars telecast is a focus group on what Hollywood thinks the country should care about. This year, you didn’t have to squint. From war and displacement to immigration and speech rights, the acceptance speeches The Hill rounds up here sounded less like thank‑you notes and more like floor speeches on a campaign stop – with better lighting and nicer tailoring.

There’s always a round of hand‑wringing afterward about whether celebrities should “keep politics out of it” – the predictable cycle of op‑eds, cable hits, and social posts clutching pearls about “politics at the Oscars,” as if there were a politically neutral way to hand out trophies for stories about conflict, identity, and who gets a happy ending. Producers can try to box politics into a few carefully timed moments, but audiences don’t experience the show that neatly.

For our world, the interesting question isn’t whether the Oscars are “too political.” It’s whose framing survives the night: the polished, scripted messages from the stage or the clipped, imperfect moments that get replayed on social in 15‑second chunks. The show ends when the orchestra plays people off; the persuasion campaign starts when the clips hit the feed.

– Natalie Kopco

A Life Rebuilt in Color.

My Healthy Advantage Magazine. Painting Happiness

To close us out, I’m sharing a story that pays tribute to someone who has defied the odds.

Twelve years ago, doctors removed a tumor from my mother’s spine. Since then, her back and bodily functions have steadily grown worse – to the point where she’s barely able to walk, eat through her mouth, or even lift her head from her stomach. But she’s still able to move her arms and tilt her head high enough to paint. So she does, practically every day.

Since her doctor recruited her five years ago, she’s painted well over 1,000 wooden toys for orphaned children in the Dominican Republic, bringing smiles to the faces of people she’s never met. What are the odds that a person with her afflictions can pick up her life and make such a difference for so many? I can’t say. But by using the few functions she has left, she has certainly beaten them.

– Phil Bogdan