Back in May, Matthew Schaefer—the New York Islanders’ 18-year-old defenseman and the NHL’s reigning rookie of the year—announced a new partnership with the Islanders Children’s Foundation and Northwell, the Long Island, NY-based healthcare network.

The goal: give families facing cancer, especially the children of patients, a space inside hospitals that feels cheerier and less clinical than what you normally get in healthcare settings. The news quickly struck a chord with Isles fans, general hockey observers and Southern New Yorkers alike; Schaefer lost his mother, Jennifer, to breast cancer in February 2024, and he has spoken about her openly and often as his career has taken off—from a custom suit jacket by the company Armatura Bespoke stitched with her photo and signature that he wore at the 2025 NHL Draft, where he went first overall, to the unanimous Calder Trophy win he dedicated to her memory this spring (it was the first unanimous rookie-of-the-year vote in three-plus decades).

With $150,000 allocated so far, the Jennifer Schaefer Child Support Center will open in October at Northwell’s R.J. Zuckerberg Cancer Center in New Hyde Park. The room is being designed primarily as a retreat for kids while a parent or close family member is in treatment; it’s polychrome, and filled with games and Islanders memorabilia.

“We’re building this room in my mom’s name for families and kids to go to while a loved one is getting care,” Schaefer told me by phone while driving to his summer cottage in rural Ontario. “It’s more of a fun space—lots of activities, bright colors. I want it to not feel like you’re in a hospital when you step into that room. And I know my mom would be right here with me, building the room with me.”

A few weeks earlier, I’d sent Nirva Milord, the NHL’s VP of Communications, a Hail Mary: would Schaefer ever talk to me about this? Generously, and with coordination from Milord and the Islanders’ comms lead Kimber Auerbach, he agreed. Milord texted me last Friday to say the call could happen right then and there. So we hopped on, during a stretch of decent cell service, as Schaefer was motoring north.

*I’ll pause here to say how much I appreciate this—partly because GAME AND FORM is brand new and I had nothing to show for it yet, and partly because of my own ties to Northwell. I was born at Glen Cove Hospital, now part of the network, and volunteered there as a teenager (in the O.R., which was fascinating). My grandmother volunteered at Glen Cove, too. I still remember her candy-striper apron and, weirdly, I remember getting strawberry milk with her in the cafeteria. I know hundreds of people who’ve been treated by Northwell doctors; my own is in the system. So, quickly: thank you, Schaef, Nirva, and Kimber.

In a year and change, Schaefer has won over many, both with his big-heart personality and his elite skill. Regarding the latter: he’s a super mobile, high-pace player—explosive off the first step, and clever in deciding where that step takes him—and would go on to score 23 goals over 82 games (this tied the record for the most single-season goals by a rookie defenseman in NHL history). In a March, 2026-published article, The New York Times’ Shayna Goldman penned that “Matthew Schaefer has been so good, so soon, that he has almost no true comparables.” A subscriber comment on that same story, written in good humor given how early everything still is (this could also very well be plausible if #48 keeps it up): “Schaefer ceiling: Best Dman of all time. Schaefer floor: 2nd best Dman of all time.”

The guy has touched hearts away from the arena and across social media, too; Schaefer lives with Matt and Sydney Martin on Long Island. Matt, a former Islander himself, and Sydney have two young daughters, and clips of Schaefer babysitting the girls have garnered plenty of good will (and media coverage) in their own right.

Speaking to his character, he says: “The biggest thing my mom and dad wanted me and my brother to be was just good people: always look out for people, be respectful, treat others the way we want to be treated, and always lift people up. Hockey’s one thing, but this [thinking] holds a very big spot in my heart.”

Schaefer officially christened the start of Jennifer Schaefer Child Support Center project with a visit to Northwell in mid-May. He brought the Calder Trophy along with him.

“You got to see the light in the kids’ faces when that big trophy came in,” he says. “They don’t know exactly who I am… they might know I’m a hockey player, because I had a jersey on and I’m a lot taller than they are…”

He continues: “From when my Mom went through breast cancer, from start to end, I look at life a lot differently, now. In a good way, I think. I’ve learned so many things. There are always going to be highs and lows, and you’ve got to stay in the middle, because you don’t want to get too high or too low. But you’ve always got to have a smile on your face, no matter what. And bringing the trophy it, it really was about just seeing a smile. You want [these kids] to be happy. You want them to have a smile on their face. Winning the trophy was one thing, but being able to experience it with those kids was probably the best thing I’ve gotten to do in my whole life.”

The NHL’s next season starts on September 29. Schaefer says he’s “excited to get back with my teammates, because I actually call [the Calder] our whole team’s trophy. I would not have been able to get it if it wasn’t for them. Every staff member, everyone in the day-to-day routines with our team. And, I want to improve this season. I want to be in the gym, putting on weight, and [putting in the work] with on-ice training. We’re going to keep it rolling with the team, look to have a great start, and our end goal is to make the playoffs and go as far as we can.”

That first face-off will occur around the time of the Northwell opening.

Schaefer’s ultimate wish? That everyone touched and impacted by cancer keeps going. “The tough times are just for now,” he concludes. “There’s a light on the other side, no matter what.”

In Widow’s Bay—the gaining-steam horror-comedy from showrunner Katie Dippold on AppleTV—there’s a rapt sense of creepy déjà vu for anyone who has ever spent a rainy, listless evening on a New England island. Remember: the somehow darker than usual shadows, so murky you can’t read the quarterboards above the doorframes. The moldy cedar shingles and sage trims on sea-battered shacks, cold in the wash of still-incandescent street lamps. The prickling sense that, out in the middle of some misty nowhere, things genuinely could go bump (or worse) in the night. Widow’s Bay has this atmosphere in full, and its chilled humidity almost bleeds through the screen.

The series’ spatial strength exists in large part due to the award winning production designer Steve Arnold, whose credits include House of Cards and (the great) Mindhunter. It’s so pitch-perfect—with a tone best described as thorough yet not overly serious—that Arnold now has a fresh Emmy nomination (his fourth). (Widow’s Bay has a total of 19 Emmy noms, and this interview occurred before they were announced—I feel very lucky to have gotten some of Steve’s time!)

Many of Widow’s Bay’s scenes are highly memorable (Patricia’s occult punch party, Rosemary’s unhinged but deeply amusing genealogy sequence), and they’re made all the more so by the dingy rooms and dark roads across which they transpire: Arnold and co. built this freaky little world.

Read more about it in our convo, below!

Nick: Hi Steve. Where are you right now?

Steve: I’m in Washington State. I have a little vacation place up here, on a spot called Whidbey Island.

Nick: Nice. I spent a brief amount of time on Bainbridge Island when I was a kid. I remember it being beautiful. I remember the fog!

Steve: It is beautiful.

Nick: As sort of an umbrella question to lead, how did you generally approach the world building element of Widow’s Bay? I see it as… Salem-meets-Nantucket… but I imagine, to you, an amalgamation of more than that…

Steve: So I actually kind of have a back history of island world. My ancestors settled on this very island, Whidbey, in the 1860s. I was born in Seattle, but I’ve spent a lot of time out here. The town I’m near, Coupeville, only had about 350 people when I was a kid. It’s a very small, historic little place on the water. So I sort of had this familiarity with the ecosystem and contained universe of what it is to really know an island. There’s a certain sense of remoteness, and there’s a certain fact that you just can’t get stuff quickly, even if you want to. So, truthfully, I knew that shooting on an island likely just wasn’t going to work. It was going to be too hard with the crew and everything else.

So, the show set everything up and based itself in Massachusetts about an hour and change west of Boston. We had proper stages there, and we had to build a bunch of things for standing sets, the town hall interior, things like that. We started looking around for more pieces and inspiration, and there are a lot of small towns in Massachusetts…

Kate and Hiro [Murai, one of the show’s directors] and I talked about the reality of the series, that it really needed to look real, and that it’s not actually a fantasy land. So we added locations from there, including on the coast for a few scenes. But most of it was [stagecraft] in and around the middle of Massachusetts.

Nick: That’s interesting. It’s definitely convincing as one place, even though the island is a composite. How far afield from central Mass did your scouting take you?

Steve: We looked at some small towns right on the water, mainly north of where we were. We were up in New Hampshire, and we looked all the way up into Maine. Admittedly, those states do not have the tax incentives that Massachusetts does for filming. So we ended up shooting in Bearskin Neck, which is right in Rockport and the Gloucester area. We shot quite a bit around there. We also looked at an inland town called Sturbridge—and we ended up kind of having to make our own ‘historic village.’

Nick: What was the trickiest set?

Steve: One of the trickiest sets was… well, we know that we needed a convenience store, but we found that they were all on highways. This was too industrialized. So we ended up using a rural auto repair shop. We transformed it, taking everything out and doing a whole-build interior, and then putting gas pumps and signage and stuff like that out front. That shop, fittingly, was on a little back road.

Nick: You puzzle-pieced together a New England portrait that obviously harkens back to its long history, but the place you’ve made also doesn’t have a great economy, no tourist money, and it’s definitely… patinated and a little grubby. How do you design patina? I feel like even in the town hall, which you built, everything looks convincingly aged. Like the paint hasn’t been touched up in years.

Steve: So we had a fantastic construction crew and painters. And in the film business, we honestly do a lot of aging. We build new stuff all the time and then you’ve got to age it. So it looks like it’s 40, 50, 75 years old, but adding that extra layer of being on the ocean and withering away with salt water, and all the kind of atmospheric stuff that happens near the coast—you want to try to bring almost all of that into the interiors.

Nick: Some of that dampness.

Steve: Katie described in the script that the town hall had this wood paneled area, and that there was a hallway with these paintings on the wall. She was pretty descriptive about all of that, but that actual building, it’s shell, is from the 1800s. So we built the interior on a stage to look like it had been upgraded in the 50s—all that wood paneling and stuff is very 50s. It’s actually kind of hard to find that stuff these days, but it is out there, and then we just went through and had our painters spend a lot of time aging from there... There are also old Armstrong floor tiles, which were popular back in the 40s and 50s. We had to give it that quality.

Nick: To hear more about the details is incredibly… it’s just cool. Throughout the entire production, what would you say was your most creative solution to a challenge, big or small?

Steve: So the Salty Whale restaurant was something that we kept searching for, and I knew that Katie had a vision in mind for it. I really wanted it to seem like it was very close to the water, like it was built on a wharf, or had maybe been some kind of an ice house for fish storage in its earliest stages. I wanted it to feel like it had been converted to a restaurant.

And, scene wise, I wanted it to be conducive to a lot of action—kind of crazy running around. So I put in those stairs, and made it a couple of levels so that there would be variety in terms of not only moving through the space but also going up and down within it. The bar is on the lowest level, there’s dining on the mid-level, and you enter at the top level. We added all these beams to make it feel like it was previously a warehouse. We had a lot of fun with that one.

Nick: I think I most noticed the restaurant’s unique layout in Kate’s “Sunset Cocktail” scene. Spatially, the room is very effective—when they all go into that Blair Witch-like cultish possessed moment, having that containment and that bit of claustrophobia gives it just the right amount of horror framing. Speaking of The Blair Witch Project, there are a lot of homages paid in Widow’s Bay. There’s Jaws, The Shining and more. Do you try to avoid being too on the nose—or is it ok to be on the nose? Or do you just sort of design for the scene at hand and let people interpret it at will?

Steve: We had fun with this, and the decorator and I both had fun adding little things. There’s a scene in Jaws in which Ray is walking down a corridor, and there are all these little signs that stick out from the wall that label various offices. He hits his head on one. I thought, OK, we have to do that. Not the head-hitting part, but the signs. In Tom’s house, our decorator matches the drapes in the windows nearly exactly to the drapes that are seen in Jaws. There are a lot of small things that might subconsciously make you remember something…

Nick: Did you have a hand in selecting the cars that the characters drive?

Steve: Yes, yes.

Nick: I’m curious about the process here. This is a total aside, but a good friend of mine who grew up with a house on Nantucket told me that a dead giveaway for… let’s say “new Nantucket”… is having a Defender or a Land Rover, but that the real in-the-know and longtime familiar crowd drives 2000s-era Jeep Cherokees. Which is exactly what Tom drives! How did you research the vehicular element?

Steve: Well, we basically had to see what we could get, because it’s somewhat limited these days in terms of what’s out there. But Hiro and I would get together and go through photos and think, “this feels right, but can we get it in this color?” And the answer is, probably not, but we can maybe get one in another and then repaint it. Sometimes we actually needed two cars for the same scene. For Kate’s mobile bookstore, the “Pattiwagon,” I said, “this has to be like a small UPS delivery van, or even a milk truck.” We finally found something that did work, but it was in Pennsylvania. That was tricky.

Nick: Car casting. Sounds like a dream job in and of itself.

Steve: One other small thing that people have caught onto, that I want to highlight, is this recurring motif of a hand throughout the series. One of the very first things that I did was to design something for the island itself. I ended up drawing around my hand, and I made it very sort of primitive and craggy and claw-like. And that’s what we ended up using for its shape, and for the island’s map. There’s also a scene in one of the middle episodes when a shaman shows a picture that somebody has drawn of a hand—it’s like a child’s turkey drawing. And, the audience has noticed! There’s this subtext that the shape is clawing, or grabbing, or restricting and holding these islanders hostage.

Nick: It grabs the viewer, too. Consciously and subconsciously.

Steve: This show doesn’t let go.

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The more you look at it, the more dynamic it feels: the Detroit Tigers’ famous Old English “D” is as baroque as it is tough.

The flourishes of its contour might be seen as ornate, or dangerous, or both (and these flourishes have terms: a “swash,” a “tail,” a “bowl,” a “spur”). The shape itself is hundreds of years old, with the typeface first having appeared in the year 1150. The “D” was first used in baseball uniform design by the defunct Detroit Wolverines, between 1881 and 1888. The Tigers started employing it in the early 1900s. And even though there have been plenty of minor alterations to the letter over the past century and change—sometimes it’s rounder, sometimes it’s more squat, sometimes it’s spikier—it is largely and immediately identifiable.

Case in point: The “D” has transcended baseball marketing to become a symbol of a city that’s been through it, held on tight and continues to both rebound and motor ahead. You may see ornament, solemnity, nostalgia and/or grit; whatever sentiment it stirs, the “D” is bonded to its home in a way that feels stronger than other athletic symbology.

I lived in Detroit for most of 2025. I said it then and will say it again now: it’s one of the coolest fucking cities on the planet. It is cool because it is so very much itself in a country and a world where homogeneity seems to be the aspiration. Detroit is not sanded down by an algorithmic spillover of basic same-same aesthetics (just look at what has happened to… and I hate to say it… Miami). The city and its people have overpaid their dues and are owed a reputational rebate, and the groupthink that proliferates American culture elsewhere isn’t, so far, in its cards. Detroit and Detroiters have worked too for that (that said, gentrification is creeping in…)

Some observers point out that the “D” didn’t really explode in national recognition until 1968, when the Tigers won the World Series (a tight 4-3 over the St. Louis Cardinals). This win was a big deal, considering the hardships the Arsenal of Democracy had been facing (the 1967 Detroit Riot was still fresh at that point).

The “D” is now soundly international: late last year, I went to a “concept hat” store in Tokyo’s Shibuya neighborhood. I bought a Tigers cap with altered, non-standard team colors, and a scripted text embroidery on its side. When I was looking at the rack, a saleswoman told me, without prompt, that it was a bestseller.

Over the years, the “D” has featured in broader popular culture, too.

A primetime example was when Detroit native Tom Selleck wore it, on a hat, in Magnum P.I. Selleck has gone on the record saying that they filmed six pilot episodes for the show, and that none of them were picked up. For the seventh—the spec that ultimately landed—his character, Thomas Magnum, changed his look.

“He was a navy guy,” Selleck has said, “and navy guys wear ballcaps.” It was Selleck’s choice to wear the logo, and he continued: “The Tigers in 1980 needed a lot of help… it was the number one selling cap once Magnum hit.” The hat is now in the Smithsonian collection.

I reached out to Selleck’s PR team at the fantastic Wolf Kasteler agency in Los Angeles to see if he’d give a comment. He kindly agreed.

“When Magnum started in 1980, I chose the Detroit Tigers baseball cap simply because I was a Tigers fan, and the then underperforming team needed a little help. It became the best-selling major league baseball cap,” Selleck said. “I wore several different baseball caps on the show. But it was no accident that when the Smithsonian asked for Magnum artifacts, they wanted the Tiger cap.”

I asked what he thinks the “D” most strongly reflects regarding its, and his, hometown.

“I think that tradition and renewal embody the spirit of Detroit,” he said.

Today, in 2026, the “D” is back in the spotlight.

Hudson Williams, the British Columbia, Canada-born actor who ascended to fame late last year for his star turn in the show Heated Rivalry, has been wearing a Tigers hat all summer long (check out this story I wrote on the show and its impact on the NHL for Sports Illustrated). Williams was spotted earlier this week in Toronto with his HR co-star, Connor Storrie, in the same cap he’s sported in Paris, Greece, et al. these past few months.

In July, London’s Palace Skateboards released a 7-piece capsule collection with the Tigers, along with a skate video that was filmed over the past decade in the 313 (Detroit’s area code).

The designs sold out pretty quickly through Palace’s web shop—though some are now available via resellers. In 2022, Palace also dropped a small capsule with the Tigers.

I asked Mickey Boardman, a well-known NYC media figure (he’s the editorial director of Paper and the creative director of Playgirl) but longtime fan of and cheerleader for Detroit, about the power of the “D” having spanned far beyond Comerica Park and the Metro area itself.

“Detroit is an original city. And they’ve got original teams. The Tigers are not some Johnny-come-lately expansion team,” he said. “Plus, Detroit just seems to keep getting cooler and hipper. You’re constantly hearing about new developments—the Gordie Howe Bridge just opened, new restaurants, all these cool things. Detroit just has a bad ass reputation.”