The NCAA’s Men’s Basketball Championship will be played next Monday. The field of sixty-four college teams has been whittled to four. Warren Buffet’s $1 billion bounty for correctly predicting the winner of each game in the tournament will go unclaimed. And for weeks, people asked—they had to ask—the question, How is your bracket?
So, how are your brackets, dear ZYZZYVA friends and contributors?
Kate Milliken: I’m offended by the question.
Ben Greenman: The way this tournament has gone, the only way to look at brackets is philosophically. What is victory, really? What is loss? Who can say for certain that the Stephen F Austin game even happened? We think we know, but do we know that we know? Bracketology, meet epistemology.
Vanessa Hua: My bracket’s busted. In the stack of books on my bedside table, I have books-by-friends, The Dismal Science by Peter Mountford and Soy Sauce for Beginners by Kirstin Chen, matched up against books-whose-structure-I’m-studying-for-my-novel, Monkey Hunting by Cristina García and The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. The latest-book-by-a-favorite-author, At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón, facing off against an award-winning-book-by-an-author-new-to-me, The Miniature Wife and Other Stories by Manuel Gonzales
I’ve started on each. But the book I finish night after night, I am Invited to a Party by Mo Willems, features the adventures of Elephant and Piggie and illustrations of the fancy pool costume party, a tale my toddlers twins demand when we pile into bed to read before they sleep.
Paul Beatty: Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, fellow citizens, readers of ZYZZYVA:
Fifty-one years ago, John F. Kennedy declared to this Chamber that “the NCAA bylaws makes us not rivals for power but partners for progress … It is my task,” he said, “to report the State of the Bracket – to improve it is the task of us all.”
Tonight, thanks to the grit and determination of the American hoopster and Mercer, there is much progress to report. After a year of grinding up and down war, our brave men and women in basketball uniform are going to the rim. After years of grueling recession, our TV networks have created over six million new jobs–all bracketologists. We fill out more American brackets than we have in five years, and depend on less foreign oil and players than we have in twenty. Our mid-range jump shot is healing, our offensive rebounding is rebounding, and consumers, patients, and sports talk radio enjoy stronger protections than ever before.
The state of the bracket is strong.
Thank you,
Barack O’Beatty
(This a copy of the Prez’s 2013 State of the Union Address with very few changes.)