On Monday morning, the National Portrait Gallery unveiled its official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama. I thought they were nice and cool and sleek and shit, but some others did not. But, then, some people were mad at the people who did not, like, “You can’t critique art if you’re not an expert on art.” Which is an unfathomably bizarre thing to say on the internet, because offering occasionally hot but mostly tepid takes on things you have opinions about but might not be an expert on is the entire point of the internet.
Of course, there are certain nuanced and difficult topics—race/racism, patriarchy, white supremacy, sexual assault, etc.—that you should probably sit down for if you’re not an expert. Your half-baked takes aren’t welcome then. But when it comes to music or movies or sports or any other sort of arts or entertainment—take the fuck away!
Unfortunately, I’ve decided to take this suggestion to heart. Going forward, I will offer opinions only on the following things on which I am qualified to offer opinions because I’m an expert:
1. Snickers Ice Cream Bars
2. The way my face looks in pictures
3. The NBA League Pass
4. The rims at the LA Fitness in Bakery Square
5. Killarmy
6. Breakfast pork
7. Levi’s discontinued 522 jeans
8. The leaning left-to-right crossover dribble
(Also related: the fact that “the Shammgod” shouldn’t even be called “the Shammgod” because Jerome Allen from the University of Pennsylvania is actually the first person I saw do that move.)
9. Watching Shark Tank reruns on MSNBC
10. Procrastination
11. Pretending to make texts and phone calls to people when in public in order to alleviate social anxiety
12. Founding and writing for a blog called VerySmartBrothas
13. Annoying my friends, my family, my editors, my co-workers and anyone else who knows me because of my pervasive aversion to timely communication
14. Saying “brb” during text convos when I have no intention of coming back soon
15. Growing and maintaining a luscious beard
16. How Pittsburgh smells in the spring
17. The late-’90s and early-aughts filmography of West Coast Productions
18. Hate-reading Reddit’s NBA message boards
19. Forgetting to eat breakfast, and then thinking, “I’ll just eat a super-big lunch to catch up,” even though that’s totally not how metabolism works
20. How the name “Damon” is spelled