Unsure about the future? Watch a ton of basketball.

What do you do when you’re done with the “learning” part of your life? This is one of the more terrifying parts of graduating, but for one writer, the answer was clear: watch basketball. This might sound like a waste of time, but paying $199 for the NBA League Pass and getting really, really into lower-stakes NBA games (the ones that ESPN doesn’t even bother showing) let [Maitreyi Anantharaman become a student again]( when the prospect of not being one was too scary to face. For her, the most daunting part of graduation wasn’t finding a job or making it on her own; it was the idea that she’d be too busy to, as Anantharaman writes, “tend to my own curiosity.” —[Rebecca Jennings](, reporter for The Goods Check out the latest episode of [Why'd You Push That Button?](, a podcast from The Verge and The Goods all about the decisions technology forces us to make. This week, Kaitlyn Tiffany and Ashley Carman talk about why any regular person would [pay to promote their tweets](. The best $199 I ever spent: an NBA League pass [basketball]( Dana Rodriguez/Vox Much as I love listening to men loudly agree with each other, I resolved to give up politics podcasts last year. They had made me sufficiently miserable, not because the news was miserable (though it was) but because of the vague, repulsive sense you got that the people babbling into the microphones were enjoying all this, that they found some sporting rush in a country governed by entropy. But the podcasts were noise — precious noise! — the sort of ambient, murmuring distraction I feared my restive brain might explode without. (It was my senior year of college; nothing felt worth paying full attention to anyway.) So last October, in the search for a new source and when opera proved beyond my grasp, I decided to turn to actual spectator sport and reawaken my long-dormant love for basketball. [Read the full story on Vox ]( How AirPods became an unlikely status symbol AirPods have become a meme because of the way they signify the atomization and isolation of modern life; the tension between the frivolous lives of the global elite and the dwindling health of our planet; the disillusion of millennials and Gen Z, who do not have the same fondness or capacity for displaying wealth as previous generations; and the apparently unstoppable ability of the power players in Silicon Valley to tell us how to live, even when their ideas are not particularly smart. [Read the story here ]( Can a man earn a living on sperm donation alone? This guy did. About six years ago, John Carpantier worked as a full-time sperm donor in Northern California. Carpantier was in a fortunate situation with his other expenses (he was living rent-free), but he remains one of the few men in human history to literally make a career out of what the rest of us make of our morning showers. [Read the story here ]( More good stuff to read today - [Online ads can be targeted based on your emotions]( - [Why Marie Kondo’s method is ideal for my ADHD]( - [Urban Outfitters is introducing a clothing rental service]( - [Disruption comes for death]( - [When I couldn’t tell the world I wanted to transition, I went to Dressbarn]( - [Airbnb is partnering with 23andMe to send people on “heritage” vacations]( Manage your [email preferences](, or [unsubscribe]( to stop receiving emails from Vox Media. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2018. All rights reserved.