Hi everyone and Happy Easter! What a crazy finish to the week – and no, I’m not talking about my 1 year’s old birthday on Good Friday. I’m of course talking about the $18.5 billion acquisition of SRS Distribution. Think of SRS as a holding company for a lot of individual B2B distributors. If you go into different parts of the country, you won’t necessarily see the SRS logo – instead, you’ll see the names of roughly 50 different local, regional B2B distributors.

While compiling the results of the first-ever reader survey in the history of The Stein Line, I realized that I wished I had phrased one of the questions differently. Instead of just asking respondents to write in a selection of their favorite NBA player, I think it would have been better to ask everyone to register their own choice for Best Player on the Planet. Why rely on ESPN’s or anyone else’s player rankings?

I’ll admit that the origin of this post is a little different from the norm. Usually, I will start with a question and then focus things around the player or team that showed up as the answer. But in this case, I started with the answer, and it gave me more questions. I was poking around a Google Sheet that I made for my former Messenger colleague Mike Charles, which tracks the NBA teams and players who have been the hottest over the previous couple of weeks.

Earlier this week, I slipped out to theaters to see No Hard Feelings, a new comedy starring Jennifer Lawrence as a cash-strapped gig worker who responds to a job listing from a wealthy couple looking for a young woman to “date” their introverted teenage son before he goes off to Princeton. The premise is juicy, like a Risky Business for the age of helicopter parents, only with the focus more on the (hapless, amateur, would-be) sex worker than the virginal high schooler taken on a ride.

Hi everyone, I was going to write an article about the future of deepfakes this week, but decided to address another pain point, why violence is so ubiquitous in movies today, and why female actors are increasingly cast in violent roles. These are big questions, and there are other media to consider, like video games. I don’t play video games and much ink has already been spilled fretting over violence in them, so I leave that to others.