A quick announcement before the start of the column: the speaker list has dropped for our fall conference in Minnesota! Mark your calendars for October 2–3, check the speaker list and schedule, and register now for what’s shaping up to be an excellent weekend!
1. If you’re not a sports fan, this week must have been a bit of a slog for you. The US won its first match in the World Cup. The Knicks won the NBA championship for the first time in over 50 years. My own West Virginia Mountaineers made it to the final four of the college world series (so proud of them!). MLB is bouncing back in popularity thanks to pitch clocks and instant replay reviews. The Brandon Sorsby saga continues draw attention from college football and NFL fans. It’s the athlete’s world right now, and we’re all just streaming in it.
At the Free Press, Arthur Brooks explores the social science link between happiness and sports fandom. Speaking frankly, I’ve found that the happiness-and-social-science genre of think pieces has become rote: “Here’s a thing that makes a lot of people happy. Social science says this makes us happy. So go do the thing and you’ll probably be happy.” What sets this reflection apart is that, after the requisite stats drop and literature review, Brooks has some insights that go beyond that formula:
So, do you want to unify America and make us better citizens? Then, get us cheering for our team and enjoying games together, regardless of other particular loyalties.
And that brings us to a huge opportunity in the soccer World Cup, being played across North America right now. Recently, the president of soccer’s world governing body, FIFA, Gianni Infantino, gave an address at the United Nations in which he stated that his goal was “to really unite the world.” I know, I know: You’re rolling your eyes as if you’d heard just another outlandish marketing claim like “Christmas morning she’ll be happier with a Hoover.” (Enjoy sleeping on the couch, bud.) But in fact, the research robustly supports Infantino’s proposition. The more excited we all get about Team USA and the tournament overall, the more likely we are to see a reset in our polarized culture, at least temporarily.
Of course, such comity is not in everyone’s interests, so there will be plenty of pushback. Polarizing leaders from the worlds of politics, media, and activism aim to conquer people by dividing them. When you’re induced to hate others for ideological reasons, you have been turned into a commodity, and someone is profiting — just not you. Your joy and friendship are existentially dangerous to the Outrage Industrial Complex. Enjoy the NBA Finals or the World Cup together and, the next thing you know, we might actually figure out that we like one another, despite whatever urgent political story is being served up on cable TV to stir indignation. So, expect to see disparaging comments about teams and players from politicians, media stories that seek to politicize the tournament, and perhaps even some displays of narcissistic activism from a player or two.
Block all that out. Erase it from your attention. Enjoy the games with friends and family, and let America heal a little. On Saturday night, the whole of New York City was united. There were no political factions nor religious divides; there was only a city full of fans, watching their beloved players doing something great, and doing the only thing that makes sense after a victory: running to each other.
If we’re trying to parse out why sports fandom is such a powerful unifier, I think Brooks is onto something: the only judgment in sports fandom happens on the field. To love and follow a team is to have a welcoming community with very few barriers for belonging and very few mechanisms for ejection. Certainly you’ve been at a sporting event and given everyone around you a high five when the home team scored! If you haven’t, I will testify that you are missing out. It’s not a deep connection, but it’s connection enough in our isolated age, and it’s worth guarding from the conflict entrepreneurs who would steal that joy away.
2. The flip side of this, of course, is that the low barrier for community can lead to all sorts of insincere flattery. That’s the new hip thing in my short video feeds: international World Cup fans coming to America and posting about their awe-filled experience. Buc-ees, Waffle House, Costco, Walmart … if our familiarity with these American touchstones breeds contempt, the wonder and enjoyment of these outsiders is a breath of fresh air. Maybe America is awesome? But is it all too good to be true? Via Will Oremus at the Atlantic:
Posts like Freddy’s and Thora’s tell a story that’s flattering to Americans — that unfettered consumerism has gotten a bad rap; that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there is such a thing as American culture; that it deserves celebration, even adoration. But telling people what they want to hear is exactly what today’s attention economy is designed to do. Algorithms don’t guarantee that those posts will reflect reality. As long as the demand for the content is genuine, the supply doesn’t have to be.
No doubt at least some of the mutual enthusiasm between Americans and visiting football fans is sincere. Bostonians joined Scotland’s “Tartan Army” as it marched through their city, blaring bagpipes and drinking its pubs dry. Philadelphians embraced a crowd of raucous Ecuadorans who draped their national team’s yellow jersey over the city’s beloved Rocky statue (a classic blunder, as it turns out). It’s probably not a coincidence that so much American hospitality has been showered on [popular German tourist] Freddy, the character whose story feels the closest to authentic of the bunch. I verified with spokespeople for both the Houston police and mayor’s office that his interactions with them really happened.
Yet even Freddy is keeping close control of his own story and has studiously stayed anonymous, at least to online fans. He has been careful not to show his face in any of his posts and has not disclosed his real name. Whatever his initial intentions for posting through his World Cup trip, his great American adventure has gathered a momentum that professional influencers dream of.
Between AI slop, influencer culture, and Twitter trolls, we might want to take a step back from the online enthusiasm. There was a viral Twitter post from a supposed Japanese World Cup tourist gushing about the free tortilla chips he received while dining at a Mexican restaurant. His amazement sounded like something St. Paul would write: “In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.” It was going to have its own link here at the weekender! Sadly, Oremus reports that this account is 100% AI, and its creator likely made the whole thing up. Darn. Maybe it’s best to ask why America has such a voracious appetite for this kind of content instead of taking it all at face value. Are we so used to online anger that online flattery is becoming our new cultural blind spot? (See this week’s final item.) Jesus warns as much: “Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”
3. Adam Mastroianni is begging us to “Stop eating Lady Gaga’s Oreos.” (What a title!) What starts off as a reflection on the great ’90s sin of “selling out” turns into a wider reflection of economics, celebrity, and art. Thirty years ago, musicians were essentially canceled if they were to mix any commercial incentive with their artistic endeavor. Today’s pop stars have their own line of Oreo flavors, are sponsored by car companies, and see zero line between entertainment, advertising, spectacle, and commercialism. What shifted? Riffing on that Steinbeck quote about how poor people in America used to see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” Mastroianni flips the idea around to suggest that modern Americans see ourselves as “temporarily unknown celebrities.” “As it got harder to become rich,” writes Mastroianni, “it got easier to become famous…” The result: we don’t want to hold celebrities back from excess. Any restraint we ask of them may be asked of us:
I think this is why we now tolerate such blatant greed among famous people: we think we have a chance of becoming one of them. We once saw ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires; now we see ourselves as temporarily unknown celebrities. […]
I’m being harsh, but look around: are you pleased with the state of our culture? Are you excited by music videos that double as commercials for Wonder Bread and Miracle Whip? Do you enjoy jockeying with ten million other people for Taylor Swift tickets, nine million of whom are attempting to invest in them as speculative assets? Does it warm your cockles when The Rock brags on Twitter that Red One, his Christmas movie, has “a long shelf life and multiple verticals – kudos to our Amazon partners for their strategic win”? […]
If we want this to stop, the solution is simple: we have to stop eating Lady Gaga’s Oreos. We have to stop pretending that celebrities are just like us, and that their success is our success. We have to redraw the line between art and entertainment, and more importantly, we have to redraw the line between art and advertisement.
I have no problem with artists making money — everybody has to pay their rent somehow. I don’t even have a problem with artists getting rich — if you can write a song that makes the whole world sing, then you deserve a big fat check.
I have a problem with artists doing commerce under the guise of art. I listen, I read, and I watch because I want to inhabit, even if just for a moment, the mind of another human. I want to feel what it’s like to be them, and in so doing, I want to better understand what it’s like to be me. But if I journey to the center of someone’s psyche and all I find there is a billboard for Pizza Hut, I’m turning around. If your art is just one node in your business empire, if your albums are merely commercials for your cologne, if you’re trying to turn your first billion into your second billion, you are no longer an artist at all. You are a credit default swap with a discography attached.
We’re missing the most potent part of that 90s counterculture, the part that said there’s nothing noble about the act of consumption itself. I’d like to live in a world where a heavy metal musician who shills for margarine would become a laughingstock rather than a millionaire. Our world used to be a little more like that, and I think it could be again. We don’t need to revive rockism — it was always stupid to think that you can only make good art with a Fender Stratocaster. But we do need to revive our desire for seriousness among our cultural elite. If we’re going to let these people into our lives, they ought to stand for something more than themselves.
The effectiveness of distinguishing between law and gospel comes not from emphasizing the gospel over the law but from using both good things for their highest purposes. Mastroianni’s observation: a whole host of Americans need someone to lay down the law and disabuse them of the notion that they will one day be famous. Until then, we won’t hold our celebrities in high enough regard for them to produce high art, and those people who are capable of producing high art won’t have an opportunity to grab our attention. If it sounds a little snobby, Mastroianni admits as much, but the trade-off of low and no standards isn’t exactly producing the creative fruits one might imagine.
4. Father’s Day is this weekend, and McSweeney’s understands the assignment with “Dad Bands Dad Jokes”:
Which guitarist had the sauciest riffs?
Spagh-Eddie Van HalenWhy did AC/DC cancel their pool party?
Thunder struck.How much dental work did the members of Boston need?
More than a filling.Duran Duran: “I’m hungry like the wolf.”
Dad: Hi, “Hungry Like The Wolf.” I’m Dad.Why does Bono never take his glasses off?
He still hasn’t found what he’s looking for.
Brilliant. See also: “Things I Am Worried Will Happen While I Drink Coffee from My ‘Super Dad’ Mug” and “This Summer’s Hottest Audiobooks for Dogs.” And don’t associate with the Bog Rat. He’s no good.
5. This week was President Trump’s 80th birthday, and the New York Times asked other 80-year-old public figures about their experience with aging. You can skip most of it, frankly, with the exception of Bob Dylan’s response. What does The Bard think are the best things and worst things about turning 80?
The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It’s freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control. You don’t chase the parade anymore. You’re an old king from some vanished country. You’re harder to program. You’re not rushing to become anything and you’re not haunted by things that you did. You’re haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.
The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it’s not, and also you’ve run out of illusions. People treat you like either you’ve solved something or you’ve lost something, and you haven’t. You see life repeating itself everywhere.
The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you’ve got an understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you’re young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn’t; it stands still. We’re the ones that move.
6. Samuel James’s takeaway from the summer hit movie Project Hail Mary: millennials are tired of being angry. I think he’s right. And I think his concluding thoughts on the matter — that Christianity offers a better way forward than activism and anger or resignation and despair — is also right. He gets the last word this week, while I go off to google whether PHM is available for streaming yet.
My millennial generation turned activism into a way of life. Anger at religion, climate villains, police, Lehman Bros., the patriarchy, and insufficiently progressive colleges intersected with the social media age in a way that transformed millions of people into keyboard prophets. Some kinds of this online activism were more real and rooted than others (more body cams on officers was a huge win compared to the cancellation of Aziz Ansari). But would anyone claim that millennial activism of the late 2000s and early 2010s has built anything of real substance? I doubt it. […]
Project Hail Mary is a ‘feel good’ movie — the kind that well compensated columnists in the 2000s said betrayed the vulnerable with their ‘toxic positivity.’ That kind of critique almost can’t be made with a straight face now. Culturally, we gave constant anger and activism a sincere try, but it failed to do anything but burn us out and make us alienated from each other. It seems like we’re seeing a rebalancing now. Rather than political obsession and a “planet of cops,” what people seem to want right now is a sense of beauty and meaning to their lives. […]
A decade after our phones and hashtags felt like a revolution in our pocket, many of us just feel alone. The world is not better, but we’re worse. Trying to make meaningful connection feels for many like trying to communicate with an alien. Right now, the stories we gravitate toward are not stories about overcoming the regime, but somehow finding one another.
Christianity has its own dilemmas in the digital age, but it sure is an appealing story in a world like ours. A tale of a perfectly loving husband who wins the trust and fidelity of his bride suggests that true love is possible even in the world of gender war. The story of a king who destroys all evil and wipes every tear from his people’s eyes feels like relief from the burden of bringing Utopia to earth. Even the image of a shepherd who leaves the 99 to find the wayward one seems like a welcome message of being seen and pursued, even as an indifferent world is fine with watching us choke on what it gave us to eat.
I’m not sure whether there’s a Christian “vibe shift” afoot. I hope there is. But even if not, or even if a real shift eventually gives way to lifestyles of anger and digital atomization once again, the stories above will stay true and real. By the end of Project Hail Mary, we aren’t impressed with Ryland Grace. We’re just moved by the drama of a persistent love, and we feel something like hope that our story, too, could end, not starving in the blackness of space, but somewhere like home. Millennials learned that we can’t force this world to change. Can they begin to look for the world that never needed to?
Strays:
- Two new heretofore unknown sermons from Augustine of Hippo have been discovered in the archives of a Polish monastery. Whoa! Get ready for a deep dive into King Saul’s encounter with the Witch of Endor!
- At Vulture, a lovely reflection on the late film critic Gene Shalit from one of his assistants.
- Olga Khazan on “Hasslers” and the tradeoffs of having bothersome people in your life.
- ICYMI, everything in our store — books, the magazine, “low anthropology” stickers, etc. — is 25% off for our summer sale with code JUNE25. Get while the gettin’s good.
