On February 6, 1988, at the old Chicago Stadium, Michael Jordan took off from the foul line and by the time he reached the rim he had in effect created the 1990s; created Gatorade commercials, and all the clothes you wore, and every Golden Era rap video ever made. He determined the look and feel of basketball thereafter. He plotted the blueprint, and we have been treated to nearly three decades of new tweaks, subsequent iterations more precisely spelling out the pervasive feel common to sport and fashion and music and speech. We learned our lean, our walk, our dance from it. We developed a collective muscle memory of slouchiness with explosions of dynamism; swagger; casualness punctuated by athleticism. A physical language we all speak but can’t name. Our bodily lingua franca.

— “Human Graffiti,” on the dunk’s importance to the modern world, at Medium