You might have heard the Knicks won the NBA Championship. I was outside on the street, gathered around two giant TVs, surrounded by people I didn’t know, screaming at the top of our lungs. It was magic.

The city has been electric throughout the whole finals. A punk-ass tween riding a fixie without a helmet at 9 AM screaming “Knicks in 5!“ had every stranger yelling it back in unison. Friends who don’t usually like sports have been gathering twice a week to cheer for straight men (in 2026? Unheard of), and there’s the resurgence of a term called collective effervescence.

The sociologist Émile Durkheim coined the term to describe what happens in religious ritual—the euphoric dissolution of self into something larger. You feel, impossibly, that you are part of something that was here before you and will be here after. He was writing about tribes around a fire or acolytes at an altar. I’m writing about a parasocial relationship with Jalen Brunson, the MVP, while being the runt of the litter.

Some people will find it performative, but I didn’t suddenly choose to care about the Knicks. I, like so many others over the past two months, caught it faster than I did COVID back in 2020. It’s impossible not to feel it when millions of people are experiencing a shared emotion together at the same time.

But even with the bandwagon allegations out of the way, I keep wondering if I have the right to feel it. There’s a version of this question that’s about sports, and there’s a version that’s about what it means to be a real New Yorker. Some say you have to be born and raised. Some believe that after 10 years, you earn the title. And others believe it’s simply the pace you’re pounding the sidewalk or how many times you’ve cried on the Subway. Whatever your stance, New York is a city of people who came from somewhere else and made themselves at home here with varying degrees of permission.

I have not lived in New York my whole life, and I have not lived here for 10 years yet. I have, however, been doing the slow, relentless work to belong here. I often describe my life as living in a tiny town that happens to be inside the center of the universe. With my closest friends, we’ve built a walkable community where no one’s cats go unfed, curtains unhung, or bidets uninstalled. Spare sets of keys are waiting with a warm slice of banana bread when you’ve accidentally locked yourself out of your apartment.

Still, there is a gap between living in New York and being a New Yorker. I wonder if those are actually the same thing, or if one is a life stage and the other is a birthright. To be a Knicks fan in the way that feels earned, you’re supposed to have grown up watching them lose. You’re supposed to carry Patrick Ewing in your bones. Hell, you’re supposed to know who Patrick Ewing is.

One of my girlfriends has recently started dating a guy from Long Island, à la born and bred category. He implied she wouldn’t understand his intensity toward the game because she’s not from here, and in their mock fight, she rebutted with something I can’t stop thinking about. She argued that there is nothing more New York than the hustle it takes to move here.

I love this excerpt from Glynnis MacNicol:

Personally, I have never known whether to envy or pity people born and raised here: on the one hand, you get to be formed by the greatest place on earth. On the other, you will never get to partake in one of the truly wondrous experiences the world has on offer: arriving in New York for the first time and making your way.

New York is strange because it always feels like you’re agreeing to a shared contract of good, bad, and hot garbage smells. We all agree to the schlep, we all agree to the rapture, and we all agree that this is worth it.

I don’t identify as a New Yorker, but I don’t have anything to prove to this city either. Anyone who figured out how to live here can easily learn what a flagrant foul is.

Knicks in five, baby!

— Gabby

Lucky Dip Links

The redesign of the Knicks logo
See Michael Doret’s 1991 redesign (and rejects) of the New York Knicks logo.

RIP David Hockney⁠
From California swimming pools to Yorkshire landscapes and iPad drawings, David Hockney spent six decades proving that curiosity never goes out of style.

Brik
Creative coding meets motion design, giving designers both high-level generation and fine-grained control over interactive behavior.

Meine Studios laptop stand⁠
This website is awful, but the design of the laptop stand/case is actually quite chic.

Amazonia by Futurebrand⁠
Each character in the logo comes from real coordinates of the river system, meaning the typography is directly shaped by the geography of the region itself.

Fake Tech Ads⁠
A series of delightfully convincing ads for companies and products that don’t exist but absolutely could in this capitalist AI hell we’ve built.

Get your bag, Anguilla
Speaking of AI, it’s amazing how sheer luck made this tiny Caribbean island millions from its web address.

All resources and links are shared purely because I think they are cool, interesting, or helpful. No content is sponsored unless explicitly stated. I am open to submissions, but can’t promise they’ll be featured.

Still want more? Check out the directory where all the (curated) links live.

OMGLORD
Things that make G–Lord say OMG

Copyright © 2014–Now
All Rights Reserved

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