Pip: The Redd Blog this week: gold medals, shoe boxes, a Fed chair who needed three adjectives to say one thing, and a burnout post that starts with nearly losing your closest friendships. Light reading.
Mara: Jo Redd covers a lot of ground here — the Indiana Fever's playoff sprint, some significant market moves, a weekend full of movies and music, and a genuinely personal piece on what burnout actually looks like before you notice it. Let's start with the Fever, because the clock is running.
Indiana Fever: Four Games, Everything On The Line
Pip: The Indiana Fever came out of a three-week layoff carrying a gold medal and a locker room full of unreleased sneakers. The actual basketball question is whether any of that translates into playoff seeding.
Mara: The shoe story is real. Clark returned from the FIBA World Cup — Team USA beat France 97-79 for their fifth straight gold — and handed every Fever teammate a pair of her unreleased Nike Caitlin 1s in the "Racer Blue" colorway, which doesn't hit shelves until October 1.
Pip: The catch being that Aliyah Boston, Kelsey Mitchell, and Sophie Cunningham are signed to Adidas and PUMA respectively, so they got a very nice souvenir for the closet.
Mara: Rookie Makayla Timpson summed up the moment best: "My CC win a gold medal, she come back and give the whole team a pair of shoes!" The Fever then had four games in seven days to close the regular season, coming off that layoff, with seeding still live.
Pip: The Toronto preview piece flagged the trap-game energy immediately — expansion Tempo, road game, loud building, Clark listed as probable with a lingering back injury and seven technical fouls, one away from an automatic suspension.
Mara: And then came the Washington game. The Mystics won 93-77 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse. Indiana scored 30 points in the first half — their worst of the season. Clark shot 6-of-20 with five turnovers. Kiki Iriafen and Shakira Austin combined for 24 rebounds by themselves.
Pip: The piece on that loss is titled "The Fever Have Two Games to Fix What's Broken," which is doing a lot of honest work as a headline.
Mara: Three fixes identified: start on time, get scoring from someone besides Clark and Mitchell, and win the glass. The playoff preview against Las Vegas puts it in higher stakes — Indiana took two of three regular-season meetings with the Aces, both wins coming in Las Vegas, and the blueprint runs through Kelsey Mitchell's perimeter pressure and Clark's ability to create advantages without forcing every shot herself.
Pip: Evidence of winnability is not the same as a guarantee, but it's better than nothing going into a best-of-three.
Mara: The seeding math made every remaining game consequential. Win out and they could host. Stumble and they open on the road against someone good. The rust, the tiebreakers, the Minnesota back-to-back — no soft landing anywhere on that schedule.
Markets, Rates, And A Very Buffett Sign-Off
Pip: Two pieces this week that reframe who's in charge — of money, and of a company worth more than most countries.
Mara: The Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time in more than three years, moving the benchmark rate to a range of 3.75 to 4 percent. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh called it "a sober decision, serious decision, responsible decision." The Fed's own forecasts pencil in one more quarter-point increase before year-end.
Pip: Borrowing gets more expensive, savings accounts get marginally more interesting, and the Canada-EU trade piece reminds us that "who's trading with whom" has quietly become the defining economic story of the fall — Trump called Canada's potential EU associate membership a hostile act and floated new tariffs on Europe.
Mara: Warren Buffett's exit from Berkshire Hathaway fits the week. He stepped down as chairman at 96, handing the title to his son Howard, and signed off with a line about Howard being "a policy the shareholders own and hope never to claim against." The man built a trillion-dollar conglomerate and closed with an insurance joke.
Resident Evil, Biscuits, And A Room That Surprised Everyone
Pip: This segment contains a zombie franchise reboot, a breakfast chain under geographic house arrest, and a concert where the opening act briefly outran the headliner.
Mara: The weekend movie roundup covers the new Resident Evil from director Zach Cregger, a crime thriller with Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe called The Weight, Angelina Jolie directing Salma Hayek in Without Blood, and the 1989 Batman back in theaters for Batman Day. Something for everyone, which apparently almost never happens in September.
Pip: And then there's Biscuitville, which won USA Today's best fast-food breakfast award for the fourth straight year and operates in exactly three states, all of them not Iowa.
Mara: The pitch for Iowa expansion is detailed and genuinely argued. Biscuitville hand-cracks its eggs, makes biscuits from scratch every 15 minutes using a three-ingredient family recipe, and sources from local family-owned businesses wherever possible. Iowa leads the nation in eggs, pork, and corn simultaneously. The supply chain case is not subtle.
Pip: The concert piece from Val Air Ballroom rounds out the theme. Coheed and Cambria headlined, The Home Team opened, and the crowd during the opening set was — in the piece's own words — more intense than the room during the first part of Coheed's set.
Mara: "There's a specific kind of grin a band gets when a room exceeds what they expected, and they had it." The verdict: two bands with different jobs, both doing them at full commitment. Worth the drive.
Pip: Burnout, it turns out, has its own version of that grin — the one you wear while everything quietly falls apart.
Burnout: What It Looks Like Before You See It
Pip: The burnout piece opens with a confession — not a framework, not a list of tips, but a specific admission about nearly destroying close friendships without realizing why.
Mara: The framing matters. The World Health Organization classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon, not a personal failing — chronic workplace stress gone unmanaged. But the piece argues the hardest cases are the ones where you love the work, because the meaning quietly talks you out of noticing what the work is actually costing you.
Pip: Loving your job makes you a worse judge of your own limits. That's the part that doesn't get said enough.
Mara: The symptoms listed are specific: sleep that doesn't restore anything, physical changes without obvious cause, irritability aimed at people who have nothing to do with the job, looping thoughts about work at 2 a.m. And the piece is honest about the outcome — recognizing the burnout didn't arrive in time to save the job. Leaving wasn't the failure it felt like.
Pip: The MLB playoff chaos piece lives in this segment too — the AL Central at half a game with two weeks left, Rangers and Astros tied at .500, the Yankees watching from a clinched wild card spot. It reads like a companion piece: you can be technically still in it while running on fumes.
Mara: The recovery list in the burnout piece is practical — one held boundary beats five abandoned intentions, use your PTO, separate what's actually urgent from what just feels urgent. And it ends with a real acknowledgment: sometimes the honest option is leaving, and that's still a good one.
Pip: Gold medals, rate hikes, a grandmother's biscuit recipe, and burnout hiding behind a job you love. The Redd Blog had range this week.
Mara: The Fever's playoff run starts September 27. We'll see if they fixed what was broken in time.
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