 Kareem's first year in the NBA I watched, Kareem's last game in the NBA against the Detroit Pistons which was a great game by Kareem I watched and most of the year is in between. I think today actually is a Kareem moment There's an HBO special about his life. Here's a time where people are talking about race relations again They're talking about religion and Islam and its role in public life again And here's Kareem, an honest guy who takes real stands and the public truly trusts And this is the Kareem moment where he is reappearing again as one of our most important public intellectuals Two questions. First, why is segregation in some ways reemerging in American life today? And second, is it possible to teach more NBA centers the skyhook? It was a deadly weapon. No one can stop it. It's a shot you cannot block There are many tall centers, but very few of them have a skyhook So what was it in Kareem's background? Was it that he trained in dance in seventh and eighth grade? Is that he practiced his footwork so much? Is it that he was so much better at getting position in advance? Why is it that Kareem had the skyhook and so few centers after him have replicated that technology? It sounds like a basketball question, but it's actually a management question, an economics question, and a how to succeed at life question all rolled into one I have a much better sense of how integrated a thinker he is, so whether he's talking about how he coached basketball to a Native American team Or how he felt about being blown out by the Celtics, 148 to 114 in 1985, or who's his favorite poet from the Harlem Renaissance He thinks about it analytically in the same way, and unlocking that structure in his thought is what really interests me