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Two More Athletes Join Kyrie Irving in Wacko Flat Earth Talk

In case we needed any more proof that nonsense is contagious, Jaylen Brown and Sammy Watkins are subscribing to Kyrie Irving's newsletter.
Photos by Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports, Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

There's a part in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a novel in C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia series, where a character sails over the edge of the world in a barrel. When I read that part, I remember thinking to myself that the physics of the whole thing seemed off. Where would you go? Does the water just fall off into the deep abyss of space? What's on the other side, then? How do you account for stars? Horizons—what about curved horizons? Even to a child, that just doesn't make sense.

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And yet, here we are: in a (perfectly spherical) world where a pro athlete can muse about a non-truth, and it can spread like a rash. The captain of Team Flat Earth is of course Kyrie Irving, who famously said during a podcast back in February, that, "There is no concrete information except for the information that they're giving us." Now, I'm all about questioning authority, but this is… wow.

Well, just when we thought we had put this thing to bed with enough WTF articles in the past eight months—including one where a middle school teacher had to talk his students out of Kyrie's argument—several people got all "Flat Earth" woke in the past 24 hours. One of them is Kyrie Irving's new teammate on the Boston Celtics, Jaylen Brown, who told reporters that he's ready to sit down and have that conversation with Kyrie:

Brown says the whole thing with a smile, and that he's just considering it, which is somewhat reassuring. But when he gets around to the part where he says, "as of what my eyes have told me, the world may appear to be flat"—and then hearing a reporter laugh, saying "he's already convinced you," and watching Brown nod—you get a deep "yuh-yoh" feeling in your stomach. This could be the end of days.

But then, just a matter of three-and-a-half hours later—somewhere past the (curved) horizon that settles across our great nation—Los Angeles Rams wideout Sammy Watkins threw his hat into the Flat Earth ring:

I suppose you could argue that because we're in the age of the internet, anything could be fabricated even a spheroid planet. Except there are processes that people rigorously enforce to make sure mistruths like these aren't propagated. Like journalistic ethics and science. And millennia of proof.

The only thing that is certifiably real, however, is that the feeling of disbelief in so many high profile Flat Earthers out there is probably what these Flat Eathers felt when they realized the earth is flat. So I guess we're all in the same boat, sailing over the edge.