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I.

The first thing you have to do in order to absorb the bizarre charisma of one of the best soccer players in the world is to take a good, long look at him. I mean, give it a minute and behold this dude, if you haven’t done so before, and if you tell me you fully understand just what the hell it is you’re looking at, I will know you are lying.

That guy’s name is Erling Haaland. He is 6-foot-5, with the build of a cartoon Viking and a pale and hairless Norwegian face redolent of sunless Knausgaardian winters. He also happens to be one of the most freakishly talented goal-scorers of his generation. Just the other day, playing for Norway in his first World Cup game, he scored two goals without much effort, and nearly completed a hat trick. He is, according to the GQ profile that accompanied that photo you can’t stop staring at, the kind of prolific attacking talent that people discuss like “an old wives’ tale.” He has been likened to the Terminator, to the Predator, to prime Mike Tyson, to a Yeti, and to an assortment of space aliens. He purports to drink raw milk, to gorge himself on heart and liver, to consume Tomahawk steaks the size of a car tire, and to regularly biohack his own life.

He once scored nine goals in a single game when he was still a teenager (around the time he also recorded one of the worst rap videos you’ll ever hear). He was so unstoppable at such a young age that the developers of a video game called Football Manager have to “tweak his stats,” writes GQ, “to prevent him from breaking it.” And, as if burnishing his own robotic image, he grinned his way through press conferences by giving one-word answers, like a bizarro Marshawn Lynch.

Haaland has been a dominant force in the English Premier League for the past few years. But the first time I came to appreciate his singular weirdness was in 2024, when he posted a video on social media. He was sitting upright in the aisle seat of a plane, and he had a blank look on his face that was straight out of either Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Mannequin Two: On the Move. The caption proclaimed that Haaland had just engaged in a very stupid and fleeting social-media trend called “Rawdogging” (I know), which involved doing absolutely nothing except staring at the flight map for seven hours straight.

Whether Haaland actually did this almost felt irrelevant; it was more that he appeared to relish his own blank asceticism, as if he were attempting to prove that he really did exist on a (metaphorical) separate plane. Here was a striking Scandinavian with an inscrutable ethos who appeared to enjoy pulling the strings of the tabloid media that chased him around England, a playful Nordic robot with a knack for scoring goals like no one else I had ever seen in my short time watching soccer. And all of that was a conduit for a naive American like me to appreciate just how wonderfully strange the culture of soccer actually is.

II.

There are people who are drawn to things like movies or music or sports by sheer beauty: By the technical brilliance of Christopher Nolan or the crystalline voice of Whitney Houston or the sparkling athleticism of Michael Jordan. But then there are those of us who find a way in through the stark weirdness of the iconoclasts: The surreality of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, the parody songs of Weird Al Yankovic, the antic dancing of Ickey Woods. I guess I’ve always leaned toward the latter category, in that I’m looking for something that defies the stereotype of greatness in order to lure me in. I know Lionel Messi is great, but there is nothing striking to me about his presence; I know Cristiano Ronaldo is great, but the most interesting about him was when they erected a statue that made him look like a character in a MAD Magazine satire.

For me, Erling Haaland splits the difference between those two poles. He is an incredible soccer player who you cannot help but stare at, if only because it’s difficult to believe he hasn’t been conjured by an animator or a chatbot. I mean, here he is on the pitch, chasing after another goal and leaping high enough to plant his knee directly into a defender’s chin:

In the past year or so, the Guardian’s Barney Ronay wrote, Haaland has seemingly found his equilibrium. He is part man, part alien, part Predator. He scores a goal a game, pretty much, even when he doesn’t seem to be trying. He’s made Manchester City, one of the most coldly dominant clubs in English soccer, into one of the more freewheeling and fun teams to watch. “He’s doing YouTube videos in Aldi,” writes Ronay, “drinking raw milk, goofing about with (coach) Pep Guardiola, alternating with alarming ease between annihilating athletic entity and just a fun, cool guy doing stuff.”

Sometimes, as an American, particularly at this moment in history, you start to think that we’ve cornered the market on the dark arts of strangeness. But part of the joy of the World Cup is the recognition that the rest of the world is just as weird as we are, and often in a much more joyful way. Here, for instance, is a cache of Norwegian fans of Haaland and their national team rowing their way up an escalator in Boston in a display that is equal parts treacherous, charming and stupid:

Really, this is all I’m looking for out of soccer. Bring me your weird, your inscrutable, your huddled masses seeking 6-foot-5 Scandinavian dudes who consume offal and wash it down with unpasteurized bovine byproducts and then soar so far above the pitch that they wind up planting their knees in their opponents’ dental work while their man-bun soars halfway toward the mothership. Once you start to understand the cultural currency of soccer—once you immerse yourself in the superhuman peculiarity of a dude like Haaland—it becomes a hell of a lot more fun. So to hell with it. The World Cup is here, in our backyard. Let’s get on our escalators and row. I’ll bring the liver.

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I.

By the summer of 1978, as the gay-rights movement crept outward from San Francisco and into the heartland of America, a sense of foreboding had overtaken Harvey Milk’s day-to-day life. He didn’t know how or when, but as the country’s first high-profile openly gay politician, he began to believe that something ominous was coming for him. Milk, a city supervisor representing the city’s Castro District, began recording a kind of political will for posterity; he spoke more openly of the likelihood of not being around to witness the fruits of his labor. As July 4th approached, as Milk prepared to speak at the Gay Freedom Day Parade, he received one of a number of death threats, a postcard with a neatly typed declaration: You get the first bullet the minute you stand at the microphone.

All around the country, in the wake of singer Anita Bryant’s successful campaign to repeal a Florida ordinance outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation, the opposition to the movement had begun to galvanize. In Wichita, St. Paul, Seattle, and Eugene, opponents filed petitions to repeal their own local ordinances; in the California State Senate, a man named John Briggs planned to put a measure on the ballot to ban gays from working in schools. In Arkansas, the legislature considered a ballot measure that would ban gays from teaching, as well as a variety of other professions.

“Fear and anger dominated many of the street-corner conversations of many of the men and women who had moved to Castro Street,” wrote author Randy Shilts. “Now the threats could be defined as flesh-and-blood religious activists mounting concrete political efforts.”

Two weeks before Milk stepped to the podium in front of an estimated crowd of 375,000 people and delivered one of his most memorable speeches, a young outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers named Glenn Burke learned he had been traded back to his hometown of Oakland. On the surface, these things had little to do with each other, but there was much about Burke that had yet to be revealed. Glenn Burke was gay, and the Dodgers knew he was gay, even if he hadn’t come out as gay. And the one place where he felt like he could live the way he wanted was in the Castro District of San Francisco.

The previous fall, after playing a key role on the Dodgers’ 1977 World Series team, Burke celebrated by returning to the Castro, his spiritual home away from home, where he walked in and found a party happening in his honor at a place called the Pendulum Bar. Burke wanted nothing to do with that celebration. He loved the Castro because it allowed him to embrace his true self. He bought a nice house nearby, drove a nice car, and made plenty of friends. But amid the political turmoil of the moment, he didn’t have any interest in becoming a totem.

“I walked out,” Burke told Inside Sports magazine a few years later of that party at the Pendulum. “They weren't my friends there, they were mostly people just making a big deal because I was a gay baseball player.”

II.

The remarkable thing about Glenn Burke, said biographer Andrew Maraniss, is how neatly his life seemed to dovetail with a watershed moment of the gay-rights movement. It is a story of a man woven inside the story of a city woven inside the story of a revolution, which is why it’s so disheartening to hear that even someone with clout of Jamie Lee Curtis couldn’t find a way to convince Hollywood to produce a Burke biopic. (I’ve been wanting to launch a series here about athletes worthy of biopics, and Burke would be near the top of that list.)

Burke was born in Oakland and played high-school baseball in Berkeley, where he emerged as one of the best pure athletes in the history of the area. He came of age in the 1970s, just as Milk helped transform the Castro into the epicenter of a movement. He was playing spring-training ball in Florida when Anita Bryant was launching her campaign; he returned to the Bay Area just a few months before Milk was assassinated by a fellow city supervisor named Dan White.

It was a tumultuous moment, and Burke was a tumultuous personality who often veered between extroversion and melancholy. Yet his natural ability and his effortless charisma led him to become one of the most popular players in the Dodgers clubhouse. (That Burke reportedly invented the high-five when greeting teammate Dusty Baker was proof of that inherent coolness.) But as his teammates and his coaches and the front office slowly learned who Burke was—as it became clearer that Burke was less willing and less interested to contain his true self—many of those same teammates began to keep their distance.

“By 1978,” said his teammate Davey Lopes, “I think everybody knew.”

The Dodgers offered Burke $75,000 if he would get married. I assume you mean to a woman, he told Dodgers general manager Al Campanis. Burke refused. When Burke befriended the gay son of Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda, it was seemingly too much for Lasorda to bear. On June 18, 1978, the Dodgers traded Burke to the Oakland Athletics. The A’s were a mess, cutting money and losing games under owner Charlie Finley, and Burke’s psyche began to unravel. He learned from a teammate named Mitchell Page that a scout had been asking whether Burke might be bisexual.

One gay friend of Burke’s tried to get him to come out by setting up a lunch with legendary San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen. Burke refused. Caen wrote an anonymous item about a gay baseball player hanging out on Castro Street.

In the Castro, in May of 1979, Harvey Milk’s assassin, Dan White, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, getting the lightest possible sentence for murdering Milk and Mayor George Moscone, which led to a series of riots, which led to San Francisco police storming into a gay bar called the Elephant Walk and beating the patrons.

Two weeks later, Glenn Burke walked away from baseball.

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III.

Burke came back in the spring of 1980 with the promise of playing for new manager Billy Martin. But Martin was no better than Lasorda. (“This is Glenn Burke,” Martin reportedly said at one point, while introducing the younger players to the veterans, “and he’s a faggot.”) Burke got sent to the minors to start the season. He was 27 years old, playing baseball in Ogden, Utah, when he decided he’d had enough. “I had finally gotten to the point,” he said, “where it was more important to be myself than a baseball player.”

Burke moved back to the Castro. He officially came out in 1982. Years later, in the late 1980s, his former teammate Mike Norris was driving down the hill from Twin Peaks and into the Castro and saw Burke on the street, wearing a pair of denim overalls with seemingly nothing underneath.

“What have you been doing?” Norris said.

“‘Look at me,” Burke told him. “I’m six-foot-two, 190 pounds, and still slammin’!”

And yet the regret was palpable. In and around the Castro, Burke suffered through years of drug addiction and stint with homelessness before he died of AIDS in 1995. “He loved baseball,” his mother later said. “When that went down the drain, so did he. They just didn’t want him around.”

IV.

Last Friday, as the San Francisco Giants celebrated Pride Month, four of their pitchers decided they could not wear the team’s rainbow-colored caps without making some kind of statement of their own beliefs. One of them opted instead for a regular orange-and-black tinted cap; the other three chose to scrawl a Bible verse on their cap in an apparent attempt to “reclaim” the rainbow symbol. When asked how he would respond to an LGBTQ person who took offense, pitcher Landen Roupp replied, “I would push them to read the Bible.”

You can make the argument that pitchers like Roupp shouldn’t be forced to embrace a gesture that causes them discomfort. But you can also make the argument that if he wants the rest of us to read the Bible, that Roupp should perhaps read Randy Shilts’ biography of Harvey Milk (or watch the excellent Milk biopic), or perhaps he should read Maraniss’s book or read Burke’s autobiography or watch the documentary about Burke, or perhaps he could merely gain a basic understanding of how much Burke suffered because he was forced to conceal his true self inside of a baseball clubhouse.

On a fundamental level, this isn’t about approval or disapproval; it’s about acknowledging basic human dignity. Roupp and the other pitchers repeatedly insisted their gesture wasn’t about hate. But there is no way to view it other than a gesture toward the same kind of exclusion that drove Glenn Burke out of baseball. No one hated Glenn Burke, but they shunned him anyhow. And beyond the cheap political churn it’s inspired, that utter lack of awareness of the freighted history of this city is why those pitchers’ gesture betrayed their own ignorance.

“I think that you have the right as a player to believe and say whatever you want,” the beloved Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow, who himself has a gay son, told columnist Ann Killion. “But you have to take a broader look at the city you’re playing in. What makes San Francisco so great is the acceptance of others — ethnicities, opinions, cultures — and that extends to the gay community.

“I would just hope they would understand the demographic of San Francisco and respect people for who they are. What you do to your uniform, that has weight to it. You can offend people. And why would you do that?”

Baseball remains, by far, the most conservative of the three American sports. And it means something that 29 out of 30 Major League teams have at least embraced Pride Month, and it matters that the Dodgers have unveiled a permanent display that honored both Burke and the late Billy Bean, the first two Major League players to openly identify as gay. But it also means something that these are two of only three Major League players in baseball history to ever come out; it means something, all these years later, that even in the San Francisco where Glenn Burke embraced his true self, there can exist such blatant disregard for the history and promise of the city itself.

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I.

The thing you realize when watching a man fumble a football on purpose in order to win a bet is just how organic it all appears from the outside. Case in point: In 1994, with Northwestern trailing Iowa by three touchdowns, the Wildcats recovered the ball on the Iowa 1 yard-line. (That fumble, as far as I know, was of the artisanal home-grown variety.) Two plays later, a Northwestern running back named Dennis Lundy botched a handoff and fumbled the football back to Iowa on the goal line. It didn’t look different from what Iowa had just done, and yet this fumble was later revealed to be the desperate act of a man who wanted to ensure that Iowa covered the roughly six-point spread.

Five years later, Lundy admitted he had placed a $400 wager against his own team. When questioned by a federal grand jury, he initially lied; then, in 1999, he admitted to lying and was sentenced to a month in prison and two years of probation.

Lundy’s fumble came at the tail end of an era of chaos and upheaval in college football. The money had gotten so big over the course of the 1980s that no one appeared obliged to abide by the rules of the NCAA, because the rewards were tantalizing enough that they outweighed the risk. Schools like Oklahoma—while simultaneously fostering a culture of near-lawlessness under head coach Barry Switzer—directly challenged the authority of the NCAA, demanding that more games be put on T.V. so they could make more money.

At Nebraska in 1995, a star running back named Lawrence Phillips engaged in a brutal assault on his girlfriend. He was suspended briefly, but the formal hearing on the charges against him was postponed until after the season, and Nebraska won the national championship. College football reverted to the frontier attitude that had been present since its founding: The rules didn’t matter if the schools themselves were bigger than the game. In that context, at a moment when it felt like no one was watching out for college football itself, what did it matter if you staged an otherwise meaningless fumble in the midst of a blowout loss?

Wrote author John Sayle Watterson in his definitive history of college football:

In retrospect the lawlessness of football players reflected many of the changes that college football had undergone in the 1970s and 1980s. The interplay of costs and revenues drove the big-time gridiron powers to go all out to create powerful and profitable teams. When the major football players decided that the NCAA provided too few T.V. opportunities, they challenged the NCAA as a way to maximize profits…All these evils, in truth, had one common thread. The colleges and college presidents had not come to grips with the creed of “bigger is better.”

And decades later, here we are.

II.

I know as well as anyone that college football was founded upon an unsustainable myth, and I know that the nature of this myth means the sport has always been fundamentally flawed. I know that Knute Rockne himself used to wager on games as a college student; I know that there have been gambling scandals in nearly every era of college sports history, and I know that college football itself has always had an uneasy relationship with the idea of succumbing to any sort of central authority. In some ways, that’s what made this sport so fundamentally American: That it was driven by a fragile and unsupportable idea—that education and big-time sports could somehow co-exist—and yet it was still so joyous and compelling when it actually came together the way it was supposed to.

Yet we’ve achieved the impossible: A new nadir for sport that’s fostered a screamingly hypocritical culture of self-interest over the course of decades. I believe this has been the bleakest off-season in the history of the sport, and the fact that it reflects the nature of America at this moment only proves my long-held belief that college football’s uneasy experiment so often reflects the vagaries of the American experiment. And right now, the leaders of the Big Ten and the SEC are so narrowly focused on their own narrow self-interests that they seem to have given up on the idea of a collective good altogether.

Calls for a bloated new playoff format, and whispers of a separate “Super League” comprised of the Big Ten and SEC: No one who watches college football actually wants these things, but we are so far beyond want at this point that want doesn’t even matter anymore. These people do not care how their sport is perceived, or what the people who fuel their financial future might actually think of their choices. They look around them and see a world where the concept of personal responsibility has been entirely abandoned and think, What does it matter if we abide by the laws if no one else does? In this scenario, why not make our own laws? Bigger, in their mind, is still always better, and that leads us to a moment where it’s unclear what we’re even watching anymore, and if any of it is even still real at all.

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I.

What I remember is not the men who played soccer. What I remember are the names of the men who played soccer. Here were these dudes gliding across the television screen with mellifluous names that would remain lodged in my brain for my entire life: Giorgio Chinaglia. Franz Beckenbauer. Carlos Alberto. Johan Neeskens. For a brief period in New York City, at a moment when I was too young to remember much of anything except the way those names sounded, these men were members of a professional soccer team called the Cosmos. They were not American, but they had come here to embrace the American dream, to win games and to get fabulously rich and famous and to briefly play alongside a Brazilian named Pele, who at that moment (and arguably even now) was the best soccer player who had ever lived.

The Cosmos, a moribund franchise in a flailing American soccer league, somehow lured Pele to New York City in 1975 with a larded contract and the promise that he could singlehandedly transform soccer into a major sport in America. Pele played his first game with the Cosmos at a crumbling stadium on New York’s Randall’s Island, on a pitch so completely devoid of grass that they’d spray-painted the whole thing green in order to make it look better for the CBS cameras covering the game. (When he saw his legs coated in green paint, Pele worried that perhaps he’d attracted some kind of exotic fungus.)

Soon, the Cosmos moved to New Jersey and began playing the Meadowlands. They drew 77,000 fans for home games. They became rock stars who shimmied in front of rock stars like Mick Jagger. For a brief time in New York, even after Pele’s departure in 1977, the Cosmos were a phenomenon, a conflagration of international talent who partied at Studio 54 and peacocked their way to North American Soccer League championships and briefly charmed a city into believing in the promise of soccer. Fifty years later, the Cosmos remain arguably the most charismatic soccer team ever to play their home games on American soil, largely because their stars came from elsewhere to prove their worth to a skeptical country. They are a reminder that America’s relationship with soccer, even now, is driven not from the inside, but from our inherent connection to the outside world.

II.

It’s a fun parlor game to dig back into the clippings from the 1994 World Cup and unearth headlines like this one:

It wasn’t just famously cranky Chicago columnists spewing that kind of vitriol. You could find replications of that column in newspapers all across the country, from Detroit to Louisville to Los Angeles. Much of the default attitude was xenophobia: The World Cup was a novelty that would change nothing, and a new American soccer league scheduled to debut the following season would soon go the way of the New York Cosmos, because there was no room for soccer in America. Soccer was not ours, the reasoning went, and we did not play well enough with others to make it work. If we were not the best at something, why would we bother to engage with it at all? (“Soccer,” one writer said in the 1970s, “was just a game played by Commies and fairies in short pants.”)

Thirty-two years later, as America prepares to host the World Cup once again, soccer in America is now at least as popular—if not more popular—than baseball. And yet soccer’s place in America remains entirely unique, largely because we’re still kind of bad at it around here.

III.

A decade ago, as a kind of personal growth experiment, I joined a fantasy Premier League group with a handful of genial dudes who were far more passionate about soccer than I was. Over time, I began to process the rhythms: The promotion and the relegation, the sheer financial force of Manchester City and the shocking rise of Leicester and the inevitable heartbreak of Arsenal. There’s a cultural shorthand to soccer that I’m just beginning to apprehend, but that shorthand has become so popular that it’s turned clever British podcasters into American media moguls. The English Premier League has become my Rosetta stone, my way of processing the reasons why soccer matters in the first place.

And over the course of that entire decade, I have never had a single conversation with the folks in my fantasy league about American soccer.

I know there are pockets of America where Major League Soccer kind of means something. (I lived briefly in Portland, where professional soccer is arguably more popular than professional basketball.) But for the most part, America’s passion for soccer has very little to do with America itself. MLS, for all its success, is a place where European stars retreat into semi-retirement. The best American players are still generally viewed as marginal talents abroad.

And this is the strange contradiction of the 2026 World Cup: It returns to the United States at a moment when the sport is wildly more popular than it was three decades ago. But that popularity is driven almost entirely by the quality of the product outside of the United States.

IV.

In a country that tends to wallow in its own cultural ego—a country that actually stole the name of the world’s sport and transformed it into its own violent pastime—soccer is the one place where the culture thrives outside of America’s own self-conception. And I think this is why this World Cup feels so utterly devoid of meaning: Because it is an event premised on our connection to the outside world that arrives at a moment when America has managed to so thoroughly alienate the outside world.

How do you reconcile those things? How can you enjoy a tournament that’s dependent on interdependence while the host country retreats into abrasive isolationalism? I’m not sure if you can. And that might make for an awkward few weeks.

Fifty years ago, the New York Cosmos briefly imported the rest of the world to New York City. By 1985, the North American Soccer League was dead, and the players had gone back to Europe, and America had retreated into its obsession with the bruising rhythms of its own brand of football. Now the world is coming back here, to a country that’s more attuned to soccer than ever—and is also in the midst of wrestling with the limits of its own ego. Here comes this thing we’ve grown to love, and yet it doesn’t belong to us at all.

This newsletter is a perpetual work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Respond to this newsletter, Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please join the list, consider becoming a paid subscriber, and/or share it with one or two people you know.

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Here is the sound of an ‘80s Sunday evening encroaching:

That is a 17-second clip that commences with four seconds of placid Summerallian silence. Then comes the game reset, and then comes the arguably the most important promo for the most important lead-in in the history of television: Those of you expecting 60 Minutes, it’ll come up right after football, except on the West Coast.

This whole thing was mind-boggling to me as a child. How was there an entire part of the country that existed in an entirely different physical paradigm? What came on in-between football and 60 Minutes in Los Angeles? Did the West Coast temporarily vault into a timeless vortex? And really, what the hell was 60 Minutes? All I knew was that adults watched it in droves; all I knew was that it opened with a ticking stopwatch that I presumed would lead to some kind of epic MacGyver-esque explosion by the end of the hour, but I never stuck around to find out.

Metaphorically, I suppose, I wasn’t that far off. 60 Minutes regularly dropped bombs that shook up the firmaments of American business and politics; it spoke truth to power, week after week. The first episode aired on a Tuesday night in September of 1968; it was introduced by a pair of correspondents, Harry Reasoner and Mike Wallace. Reasoner described it as a kind of magazine adapted for television, an entirely new approach to the way news was presented and consumed on the air. And Wallace laid out the mission statement of a program that would soon become an American institution. “If this broadcast does what we hope it will do,” Wallace said, “It will report reality.”

II.

In time, Wallace transformed his confrontational style into an archetype, and 60 Minutes moved to Sunday, thereby setting up a partnership between the most beloved sport in America and the most universally respected program on television. There was something to that symbiosis: You’d spend your afternoon indulging in a uniquely American brand of gratuitous violence, and then you’d spend your evening watching Wallace and his team engage in bruising conversational aggression with thieves and liars and con artists.

These were a pair of sturdy American institutions that came of age side-by-side, and their synergy made you feel like the country was in good hands—that despite the dark urges of mankind that led us to love football in the first place, someone was watching out to make sure we didn’t ever go too far.

III.

And then at some point, we began to disagree on what “reporting reality” actually meant. And this is when trust in institutions began to crumble. This is when much of the public began to distrust “the media,” as if it was some kind of cohesive monolith that all moved in sync, which is funny because journalists are nothing if not anti-establishment creatures who have been taught to be suspicious of anyone in power. And yes, 60 Minutes was part of a larger network that wielded great power, but everyone understood that the way 60 Minutes sustained itself was to exist in its own bubble where its perception of reality could remain untainted by commercial and political interests.

For a long time, even when I began studying journalism myself, I presumed 60 Minutes was a staid program built for septuagenarians who didn’t know how to work the remote control after football and wanted to stay tuned for what Andy Rooney had to say about the venality of supermarket scanners. But then I actually started watching it, and it changed my understanding of journalism itself—it crystallized the notion that all of reality can (and should) be shaped into a compelling story in order to bolster its impact. Week after week, 60 Minutes transformed seemingly uninteresting topics into fascinating exposes (and it inspired one of the best films of the past three decades). That ethos bled into my reporting, as it bled into pretty much all modern-day reporting. Even ESPN—at least in the time I spent there—understood that it needed to report real news in order to win real respect from its viewers.

That kind of reporting didn’t make you money, but it was capital-I Important, and it made CBS feel more Important as a network. Hell, it even made football feel more Important, because here we were indulging ourselves while understanding that we would help support democracy on the tail end. 60 Minutes was the kind of thing we did in America that no one else did; it was the kind of show that set us apart from any other country in the world.

IV.

In recent years, regular season viewing of the National Football League has occasionally dipped in the wake of Colin Kaepernick’s silent protest of police brutality, and amid the president’s criticism of the NFL as a sport that had somehow gone soft, and in the wake of the recognition that young people consume media in different ways than ever before. But imagine if the NFL had responded to all of this by deciding to change its fundamental nature. What if they’d decided to adopt Canadian Football League rules to make it more exciting? What if they’d decided to allow coaches to call penalties on the officials?

Of course, the NFL would not do this. It is an imperfect institution, but it is an institution that knows what it is.

I remain stunned by the notion that someone would simply choose to corrupt an American institution just because they can. And yet here we are. This week, Scott Pelley, one of the best correspondents 60 Minutes has ever had, literally did what he was trained to do, and what Mike Wallace spent his career doing: He grilled the people in power who had decided to “murder” 60 Minutes and curtail its ability to report reality without interference. And then he wound up getting fired for it.

As ’s writes of Bari Weiss, an opinion journalist who somehow weaseled her way into becoming the head of CBS News:

Weiss has attempted to do to journalism what Trump has done to American government: Transform an ancient, messy, imperfect—but basically functional—web of institutions into a corrupt gangland organization…Weiss dismantles 60 Minutes and pretends it’s about getting more views on digital. Every time someone goes along with this make-believe by treating it as a valid point of you—just like, your opinion, man—they contribute to the corruption.

There is, really, no good reason for doing this. The ratings of 60 Minutes actually rose nine percent last year; it’s still a show people graduate into as they grow older and become increasingly curious about the pharmaceuticals that make up most of its advertising. And sure, you can make broad declarations that broadcast media—and practically all media, for that matter—is splintering off into an uncertain future, and that maybe making money and being popular matters more than the news itself. But the thing about 60 Minutes is that it was one of the last bastions of a universally accepted reality in a nation where more and more people in power are consistently attempting to forge their own reality. The only reason to change that is if you are on the side of an alternate reality.

There is no easy way out of this except to do what Pelley did, and to have the courage to call out the bullshit when you see it. Even if 60 Minutes is now dead, that will remain its legacy. You shatter that trust at your own risk.

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I.

In June of 1999, five days after the New York Knicks lost to the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA Finals, they used the 15th pick of the first round of the NBA draft on a 7-foot-2 inch French center named Frederic Weis. This, as it turned out, was the beginning of the end; this was the first in a litany of absurdities that would play out over the next 27 years like a Univision soap opera. Weis would get ferociously dunked upon by Vince Carter at the Olympics, and never actually played a single game in the NBA, and the Knicks were on their way, burrowing hard into the flaming dumpster of the James Dolan era.

The following year, the Knicks would trade an aging Patrick Ewing, and then they would give a ridiculous contract to a guard with bad knees, and then they would blunder through an era where Isiah Thomas signed every stray free agent who wasn’t nailed down, and then they would blow holes in the reputations of Phil Jackson and Mike D’Antoni and Derek Fisher and a cast of thousands. It is remarkable to see all that idiocy compiled in one place, but Howard Beck and Katie Baker’s Ringer recap of 27 knuckleheaded Knicks decision of the era—one for each year of futility—is a truly remarkable compilation. “Year after year, for more than a quarter-century, the Knicks have been a dead end, a lost cause,” Beck and Baker write. “Whatever happens in the NBA Finals, it’s been a ridiculous road to get here.”

As noted previously in this space, I am not generally a fan of self-loathing New York sports teams, but I will admit that reading this article made me sympathize with the Knicks more than I had before. I will also admit that by the time I finished it, I felt a strange pang of jealousy for Knicks fans. Because I think the lesson of this ignominious chain of events is one that we are often reluctant to embrace. We expect our teams to be good; we expect them to live up to everything we want them to be. But so much of fandom—like life—is about enduring the suffering.

II.

On Monday night, the San Francisco Giants lost 16-2 to the Milwaukee Brewers. The Giants are not quite the worst team in baseball yet, but they are on the verge of fulfilling that promise. They cannot score runs consistently, they cannot pitch consistently, they cannot play defense consistently, they cannot steal bases consistently, and they cannot do anything consistently that resembles what you might call “good baseball.” It is an odd predicament, given that the Giants were expected to contend for a playoff spot this season, but it happens sometimes, and there is no good explanation as to why it’s happening, despite local talk radio’s desperate attempts to make sense of that which has no true cause.

The same thing could be said of the 2026 New York Mets; the same could be said of the 2026 Boston Red Sox. All are potentially good teams that are prolifically not good. Sometimes things go awry for no good reason, and there are two ways to react to this: The first is to get so consumed with anger that you abandon your own sense of humanity. And the second is to embrace the suck.

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I.

Fifty years ago, an Australian publisher made an offer to buy a struggling New York newspaper, and thereby altered the way we consume news in America. In the fall of 1976, Rupert Murdoch sat down over roast-beef sandwiches with the aging doyenne who owned the New York Post, which was then a working-class liberal tabloid. He asked her if she was ready to sell. She acknowledged that she was. Murdoch paid $31 million to buy the Post, one of the oldest continuously publishing newspapers in America, and set about to reconstitute it in his sensationalistic image.

Murdoch had made his name by transforming a variety of Australian and British newspapers into tabloids imbued with what author Jonathan Mahler later called “a burlesque formula—some sex, some crime, some news, and plenty of hysterical headlines.” And yet when Murdoch bought the Post, the initial sense was that New York would never go for that kind of broad absurdity. This was still a classy town; if Murdoch wants to make it in New York, one magazine publisher said, his editorial choices are “going to be a good deal more sophisticated.” But the summer of 1977 in a city struggling with crime and bankruptcy and rampant dysfunction proved that Murdoch had arrived at an opportune time.

“Stories became shorter, pictures bigger, headlines louder, the news more ideologically charged,” Mahler wrote. “The Post hammered away at what it perceived as New York’s permissive criminal culture.”

The Post went about sensationalizing the Son of Sam killings and the aftermath of a citywide blackout where poor neighborhoods were looted; it pieced together stories based on flimsy premises and outright misrepresentation. Sports was an integral part of the mix, as well, given its natural tendency toward melodrama—and the 1977 Yankees had captured the chaotic soul of a city in flux, with the psychodrama between owner George Steinbrenner and manager Billy Martin and outfielder Reggie Jackson stirring up all kinds of debates about race and class, the sort of thing that made the Post both an object of unparalleled kitsch and a disturbing harbinger of where the country’s cultural debates were headed.

Over time, what Murdoch accomplished in New York—this sense that everything was a crisis and an outrage, and that the one thing that mattered most in news was a constant and bleating cry for attention—began to radiate outward to the rest of the country. The Murdochization of America was born, on both the front and back pages of The New York Post.

“Murdoch’s editors built stories out of the thinnest shreds of news, jammed them together in unwieldy packages, and shamelessly plugged the results,” Mahler wrote. “And while Murdoch wasn’t the first newsman to realize news could make spectacular entertainment (see Hearst, William Randolph), he mastered the art of news hysteria.”

II.

Roughly three decades later, I found myself standing outside of a New York City hotel, waiting for Pedro Martinez. Martinez was on the verge of signing with the Mets, and somebody at Newsday had gotten a tip as to where Martinez was staying, and then sent me there in the hope that maybe he’d get out of his car and speak a few words in English. I was a part-timer then; I’d left the business and had one foot back in it and I wound up at a paper that was technically a tabloid but mostly didn’t know what it was anymore.

All Newsday understood for certain was that sports drove a lot of readers, and so of course you sent somebody to stake out a hotel lobby for four hours just in case Pedro Martinez said anything even remotely interesting or controversial. Instead, deep into a stultifying evening, Martinez got out of an SUV, I shouted some absurd question at him, he smiled and ignored me, and with that Beckett-like climax, my shift was complete. And those were the moments when I realized that this was not the journalistic ecosystem I was built for.

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I.

It was a Friday night in San Francisco, one of those absurdly frigid late-spring evenings that kept growing colder as the fog rolled through. That’s when the dudes in center field began stripping off their shirts. The Giants had just given up nine runs in a single inning in what’s been a vexing season full of underachievement and misery, and we were shielding ourselves from the wind by consuming overpriced bourbon and gazing out into the bay at an armada of sailboats. This is the advantage of attending games at the most picturesque ballpark in America: Even when the Giants absolutely suck, the 300 level of Oracle Park might as well be the deck of a Viking cruise ship, offering an unparalleled view of the vast expanse of the Bay.

For an inning or two, the air kept getting chillier. The Giants continued to strike out and ground out and pop out, to grind away through an offensive slump that looked as if it might last through the decade. Finally, a handful of the fans, wracked with frustration, did something they almost never do around here: They began booing their own team. Nothing was going right, and nothing seemed like it would ever go right. And I can’t say this is what led the dudes in center field to strip to the waist and wave their shirts above their heads, but I also can’t say it wasn’t the reason, either.

At first, as a bunch of middle-aged dudes with little to no awareness of modern pop-cultural trends, we had no idea what the hell was happening. But then the epidemic became contagious, and there were men of all ages and sizes and shapes stripping to the waist and waving their shirts above their heads like rally towels. This, it turns out, was the latest iteration of a trend called Tarps Off, a movement so utterly pointless and relentlessly stupid that it aroused the amusement and envy of a pair of seventy-something television broadcasters.

For a brief moment, Tarps Off livened up a miserable game in the midst of a miserable season, in the midst of a miserable moment in America characterized by a relentless torrent of bad news. And as it turns out, that’s pretty much the only reason for its existence.

II.

On an October afternoon in Stillwater, Oklahoma, things were going terribly for the Oklahoma State Cowboys. They had started the season 1-4, they had fired longtime coach Mike Gundy, and they were trailing 36-10 to the Houston Cougars. That’s when an Oklahoma State fan named Callista Bradford turned to her brother, Trent Eaton, in an attempt to liven things up. I’ll give you ten bucks, she said, if you go to one of those dead sections, take your shirt off, and wave it around above your head.

Why not, Eaton thought. He worked his way over to Section 231, which was completely empty, he stripped off his shirt, and he began waving it above his head. He was soon joined by another fan he’d never met, who asked if he could join. In time, there were a half-dozen of them.

And then, inexplicably, it caught on elsewhere. Some kids at a local high-school volleyball game went tarps off. The following week, fans at Camp Randall Stadium in Wisconsin and at the Rose Bowl for a UCLA game did the same thing. Then everyone started doing it. Tarps Off has now become a regular occurrence in baseball, where fans in St. Louis and Anaheim and beyond have begun to embrace the pointless idiocy of the thing. But it is worth noting that in nearly all the places where it started, it emerged out of a sense of boredom and frustration with the on-field results.

“You're not always on top,” one Oklahoma State fan told Yahoo. “But you can also always have a good time.”

III.

I was lucky enough to attend college at an irreverent moment in American history. The problems of the world in 1990s, in the wake of the Cold War, felt laughingly lightweight in retrospect. We draped ourselves in tie-dye and listened to ridiculous proto-folk music and watched movies whose stakes were defined by slacker angst. Very often at my sprawling public university, when something cool happened—or when nothing happened at all—we amused ourselves by gathering in the street and screaming and cheering until the cops could convince us to move out of the way. The vast majority of us were not driven by any sense of anger or toxicity. We just understood that our youth was a gift, and part of that gift was to engage in the kind of innocuous antics that we’d someday look back upon as pointless and stupid.

I can’t imagine what it’s been like to grow up in an age where morality itself has become so twisted, where toxic masculinity has become a performative stance, and where the future feels (for lack of a better phrase) so relentlessly fucked by billionaires wielding powerful machines. And maybe I’m reading too much into what’s happening here, but I wonder if that has something do with the popularity of Tarps Off: It is a harmless and stupid way for young people—and young men especially—to confront the shittiness of the modern moment and make it feel a little bit lighter.

I imagine the trend won’t last, but I’m hoping that maybe the vibe will—that maybe we’ve had enough of the dourness of modern America, and are starting to create our own fun in order to compensate. Maybe this is why the Savannah Bananas, a team grounded in absurdity, just drew 100,000 fans to a college football stadium in Tennessee. Maybe this is why even the flailing San Francisco Giants have begun celebrating their rare victories by engaging in a hip-thrusting celebration so absurd that it apparently drew the ire of Major League Baseball’s purse-clutching schoolmarms.

In so doing, the Giants also triggered the worst of the Internet’s incessant whiners and raging homophobes, many of whom already view this city as a modern-day Gomorrah. But I’d like to think that’s part of the fun, too; I’d like to think that decent young people have grown so tired of the culture being dominated by some of the worst among them that they’re beginning to reclaim the conversation. In such a toxic world, there is something to be said for exposing both your stomach and your own vulnerability. It is a reminder—both to them and to us—that while things might be bad right now, it won’t be like this forever.

This newsletter is a perpetual work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Respond to this newsletter, Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please join the list and/or share it with one or two people you know.

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I.

I don’t know about you, but this is the reason I watch sports:

That is a clip of a 7-foot-5 inch Frenchman coolly pulling up and nailing a 30-foot jump shot to tie a crucial playoff basketball game in overtime. A few minutes earlier, the same Frenchman made a ridiculous spinning, floating layup in the lane to tie the game in regulation; a few minutes after this, he clinched the game by catching a lob pass roughly the height of Mount Rainier and stuffing it into the hoop over his head.

I realize I am probably not telling you anything you don’t already know, but there has never been anyone like Victor Wembanyama before. He so completely defies the archetypes of professional basketball that he’s slowly threatening to render them obsolete. He can play everywhere, and he can score from everywhere, but when he calmly pulls up a sinks a shot like that, it’s the kind of incongruous image that makes you wonder if you might be hallucinating.

Here is the thing about these NBA playoffs: Like much of America at this juncture, I don’t really care at all who wins or loses. I have no attachment to any of the remaining teams (other than the fact that I cannot ever root for a Knicks teams owned by one of the worst New Yorkers in modern history), and so I am watching these playoffs almost entirely for Wemby. I want to see things that blow my mind; I want to bear witness as a likable 22-year-old giant who enjoys reading sprawling science-fiction novels shows me something night after night that I have never, ever seen before.

“Every game, I’ve walked away thinking, ‘Oh my god, oh my god, I don’t want to overhype this, but this is ridiculous,’” NBC broadcaster Mike Tirico said this week. “And even in the game on Sunday night, I was really conscious of, ‘Don’t go too far, don’t act like this is ridiculous.’”

While I appreciate Tirico’s push toward restraint—it’s what makes him one of the best broadcasters of his era—I also understand where he’s coming from. The most thrilling thing about Wemby, to me, is that he utterly subverts our expectations. We don’t have any synaptic framework for knowing how to process a guy the size of Ralph Sampson who shoots the ball like Steph Curry. And I imagine it feels even more ridiculous than it normally would because we’ve become accustomed to living in a world where ideas have become increasingly homogeneous.

II.

A few months ago, I watched a television show called The Chair Company. I cannot begin to explain what this show is about, or why it was so captivating; all I can say is that I had never seen anything quite like it before. It is a batshit paranoid conspiracy thriller that also captures the mundanity of modern life and the absurdity of our times, and even that sentence is not fully doing it justice.

The Chair Company stars Tim Robinson, who also helmed a sketch comedy show called I Think You Should Leave, which essentially has become a meme factory for the hipper sectors of social media. I never got into I Think You Should Leave, in large part because I could never quite figure out the joke. But watching The Chair Company’s inscrutable narrative unfold, it made me realize that it wasn’t about figuring things out. It was about immersing yourself in an entirely new post-modern consciousness.

III.

The other day, I stumbled across something entirely counterintuitive: A clip of a CEO talking about artificial intelligence in a way that was both even-handed and logical. The CEO’s name is Strauss Zelnick, and he runs a company called Take-Two, which is best known for the Grand Theft Auto video-game series, which is the only video game that has ever completely taken over months of my adult life.

There is a point Zelnick makes in that clip that I’d never really heard put together in quite the same way before, and certainly not from a CEO. The first is that AI is a backward-looking technology, meaning that it takes what’s out there and processes it. But, Zelnick says, creativity is not backward-looking; creativity is forward-looking. And this is a problem that no one seems to get—that AI can churn out completely derivative ideas, but that it’s never going to have a truly forward-thinking idea that can break through due to its sheer originality. It’s just not capable of thinking in that way.

The thing that made Grand Theft Auto break through is that it was based on an inherently subversive idea. To create a video game that is dark and antisocial and cartoonishly violent and unapologetically subversive—that is the spiritual inheritor of Donald Westlake’s Parker books—requires the ability to think outside the box, and not merely to piece together what’s already there. You can clone ideas faster than ever, Zelnick says, but they won’t be original ideas; you can make a replication of The Chair Company and Grand Theft Auto, but it won’t be The Chair Company or Grand Theft Auto, so what’s the point, really?

IV.

Now, you might argue that the vast majority of the populace is content to dutifully consume a mediocre clone, and the box office gross of Mortal Kombat II and the overnight ratings of CSI: Wichita would prove you at least partially correct. But you still need original ideas to carry the industry forward; you need those things that advance the conversation and remind people why culture matters at all. You need artists like Tim Robinson and Boots Riley, who I believe is the only person ever to sneak an openly anarchistic television show about a 13-foot teenage giant (no relation to Wemby) in Oakland, California, onto Amazon Prime, of all places (and is about to release a movie that essentially glorifies shoplifting).

And, frankly, the NBA, in the midst of a relatively staid period of its existence, needs Victor Wembanyama to remind us why it remains a viable product.

It’s always been human nature to presume that what we’re looking for is something we’ve already seen. When Michael Jordan finally retired for good, NBA writers spent years wondering when the next Michael Jordan would come along. They got LeBron James instead, a different kind of talent than Jordan, who still winds up getting inevitably compared to Jordan. And now that James is nearing the end of his career, it is easy to presume that some other athlete in the rough mold of LeBron or Jordan would eventually come along. But Wemby is not that at all. Wemby is entirely his own thing. Wemby is here to remind us that we don’t really know what we’re looking for until an entirely subversive new idea is thrust upon us, and then we can’t remember how we ever lived without it.

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I.

On a Tuesday in August of 1974, Nolan Ryan pitched the kind of epic game that has long since gone extinct. That night, Ryan threw nine shutout innings for the California Angels against the Detroit Tigers, only to find the game tied at the end of the ninth. Both Ryan and Tigers starter Mickey Lolich carried on into the 10th, and then into the 11th, when Ryan gave up a pair of singles in the top of the inning that would deliver the Tigers a 1-0 win. Ryan gave up four hits over the course of the night, walked five, and struck out 19 (it was, in fact, the second time in eight days that he’d struck out 19 hitters in a game). This was Ryan’s 13th loss of the season against 16 wins; he would wind up pitching 332 2/3 innings that year, walking 202 hitters and striking out 367.

Ryan may or may not have been the greatest pitcher in modern baseball history, but he was unquestionably the most enjoyable to watch. He slung pitch after pitch after pitch, many of them the same laser beam that once got him discovered by a scout in rural Texas when he was an impossibly skinny teenager (that scout, Red Murff, upon Ryan watching uncork his first fastball, wondered for a moment whether he’d had a break with reality. How in the world, he asked himself, could anyone that kid’s size throw like that?). He threw hard, he threw inside, and he never let up, even after 11 innings. And this particular game against the Tigers in 1974 proved to be a watershed moment, both for Ryan and for baseball itself.

That evening, for the first time, a group of men from Rockwell International’s Electronic Research Division had set up a infrared radar in the press box, which projected over the catcher’s head and onto the dirt near home plate. This was a test run, and that night, writes the author in his new biography Nolan: The Singular Life of an American Original, “Ryan threw four pitches of 100 m.p.h or better, two that registered 100.9 m.p.h.”

Two and a half weeks later, Rockwell debuted the equipment to the public as Ryan pitched against the White Sox. The speed of Ryan’s fastball lit up on the scoreboard, inning after inning, as Ryan stretched out and reached 96, then 98.8, which was faster than rudimentary devices had once recorded Cleveland’s Bob Feller. Finally, in the ninth inning, as Ryan finished off yet another complete game—his seventh in his last nine starts—he uncorked a fastball to Chicago’s Lee Richard. The display read: 00.8, as there weren’t enough bulbs to add the 1.

“The crowd cheered,” Brown writes. “Nolan Ryan had broken the scoreboard.”

II.

Even in his own time, Nolan Ryan felt like a throwback to some Rockwellian era of American life. Ryan pitched game after game, week after week, year after year, until his longevity became both a medical mystery and the central part of his folklore. When Sports Illustrated’s Leigh Montville went to watch Ryan hurl fastballs on a Texas farm in 1992, he painted a portrait of a man who seemingly existed outside of time itself, a throwback to the Gary Cooper cowboy archetype. This was a man who would, the next year, at age 46, lasso Robin Ventura around the neck like a baby calf and throw a few haymakers straight into his gullet.

“The fact that he can still compete with the young and wild-eyed millionaires of his game and still make them look silly is only the beginning,” Montville wrote. “Here is Nolan Ryan, cut from a good bolt of denim cloth and served with a glass of milk and no apologies.”

By the time his career ended—by the time he finally, actually did throw out his arm— Nolan Ryan had transformed into a living, breathing American myth. How much was that myth grounded in reality? It’s hard to say, though in Brown’s book, the legendary Dallas broadcaster Dale Hansen calls Ryan one of the last bastions of the classic Texas archetype. “Strong, but quiet,” he says. “At least that’s the way we used to be until the Ted Cruzes of the world came along.”

What was most interesting about Ryan, in retrospect, had nothing to do with the cowboy imagery and everything to do with the fact that he always seemed to be laboring so hard to keep it going. Every pitch Ryan threw felt like it threatened to take years off his life, let alone his career. He worked out before games and after games, riding stationary bikes and reportedly dunking his arm in a bucket of uncooked rice to strengthen it. He wound up tightly, almost as if curling himself into a ball, and then he let loose, and the radar gun, once it became a regular fixture, routinely popped a hundred. And then he reared back and did it again.

Everything that happened along the way was kind of an epic western adventure all its own. In addition to setting the all-time career record for strikeouts, Ryan also set the all-time career record for walks. One year when he was pitching in Houston, he won eight games and lost 16, despite an ERA of 2.76. He was so underappreciated in his prime, so regarded as a kind of primal pitching machine, that he never won a Cy Young award. Writes Brown:

His imperfections were legendary…He walked too many batters, booted too many comebackers, ignored too many base runners, lost too many games, and heaved too many wild pitches, any one of which might have muddled a typical career before it got started.

In a way, Nolan Ryan succeeded because baseball allowed him the room to succeed. He was, it turned out, a freak of nature, in that his arm held up for 25 years. But even so, he was allowed to labor through his imperfections until he crafted something entirely unique. And less so than the gauzy Texas mythology which never really existed in the first place, I think this is the thing we’ve lost.

III.

“In 2008, there were just two hundred and fourteen pitches thrown at a hundred miles per hour or more,” writes the New Yorker’s . “In 2025, there were 3,701 of them.”

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I.

What I remember is that the newspaper wasn’t always easy to find. I was a kid, and I had only a bike and my own two feet as means of transportation, and in the central Pennsylvania college town where I grew up, many of the academics viewed the rainbow-hued publication known as McPaper with an air of snooty contempt. And so I went on a tireless quest to track USA Today down however I could, wherever I could. Every Tuesday and Wednesday during the baseball season, I scouted and scrounged until I found myself a copy of the USA Today sports section. From there, I extracted the cherry-red sports section, pulled out the pages rife with numbers, and went to work.

What had happened was this: One day a couple of years earlier, I wandered into a bookstore and came across a title called Rotisserie League Baseball. I was too young to get the sly sense of irony behind the whole thing—fantasy baseball was, of course, never meant to spark an industry—but the larger idea of it felt like something entirely novel. I began playing on my own, against no one, combing the individual box scores on the stripped-down agate page in The Centre Daily Times each evening, and compiling statistics as best as I could. Then I showed the book to a three or four friends and twisted their arms until they agreed to play, too.

We formed a league. We held in a draft in my musty basement. It was my job to compile the numbers, which is how the epic quest for USA Today slowly took over my life. Every Tuesday and Wednesday, USA Today wouldn’t just publish box scores; they would publish the motherlode: The full statistics for every team and every hitter in the American and National Leagues. I asked my parents if they would consider subscribing to USA Today, and they regarded me with such an air of concern that I would have been better off confessing to a cocaine habit.

So I would go out and find USA Today on my own, by whatever means necessary. More than once I think I yanked a copy straight out of a garbage can, like a youthful hobo desperate to catch up on 250-word updates on the stock market. I would sit there in the school lunchroom, the paper spread out before me, and I would calculate the numbers by hand for each and every one of the teams in our league. Very often, I got it wrong; very often, friends in the league who were smarter than me would correct my pidgin math. But none of that really mattered. The point is that it was just us and the numbers spread out before us, and the way we interpreted those numbers was all our own.

II.

I’ll admit, I hadn’t thought about this USA Today-obsessed period of my childhood in many years. I had grown accustomed over time to the idea that fantasy sports—and sports in general—came to you pre-packaged and overwhelmed by unnecessary context. And then I read ’s piece about a South Dakota weekly sports newspaper that inspired the invention of USA Today, and how a young South Dakota kid named Tom Brokaw viewed it as a kind of Bible of his teenage years. And I started thinking about how, in my local paper, the comics page essentially transitioned straight into the sports agate page: Berkeley Breathed into Mike Schmidt. And I realized just how much I missed those pages, rife with numbers and unadorned by any attempt to process them for our consumption.

I figured I wasn’t alone in this. I figured I wasn’t the only one who had grown tired of wading through over-interpretive and poorly constructed slop. I figured I wasn’t the only one who wanted to stare at something that didn’t shout back at me, but instead allowed me the space to get lost inside my own head. I know some of this is pure nostalgia, but it’s also true that one of the great shames of the Internet is that it swallowed up the agate page and co-opted the box score, thereby depriving a generation of kids from their own ability to daydream. While Baseball Reference and its sister sites are miraculous resources that I cannot live without, they are something different than what came before. They demand clicking and linking and calculating, but the agate page and the box score just lay flat and waited for you to create your own links.

And then I stumbled upon something kind of remarkable.

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I.

There is a case to be made that the greatest rivalry in pro football history never played out on an actual football field. This rivalry commenced in the years before the merger of the National Football League and the American Football League in 1966, when two men who represented the opposing poles of modern society first crossed paths; it raged for the next two decades in boardrooms and courtrooms and on the pages of newspapers and glossy magazines. One of those men was Pete Rozelle, the commissioner of the National Football League. The other was Al Davis, the owner of the Oakland/Los Angeles/Oakland Raiders.

Rozelle was a Southern California-born public-relations man who built his power by charming a room. “He used his soothing, honey-coated manner of diplomacy” wrote author Mark Ribowsky, “to amass a barrow of goodwill.” Rozelle was 33 years old when he became commissioner—his nickname was “The Boy Czar”—and as he grew into the job, he succeeded in convincing a room full of disparate owners to embrace the collective good of the league over the will of their own franchises. And Davis, a combative and conniving Brooklynite who thrived on guerilla warfare, viewed Rozelle as the antithesis of everything he stood for.

Long after Rozelle was named commissioner of the newly merged NFL and Davis was displaced from his brief tenure as the commissioner of the AFL, Davis continued to believe that the only way to succeed was to attack, attack, attack. By the early 1980s, as Davis nakedly defied Rozelle by importing his team from Oakland to Los Angeles, there was a sense that Rozelle’s slick style had run its course, and that a league besieged by drug use and labor disputes and by the looming threat of the USFL had perhaps lost its way. Davis had succeeding in making it increasingly personal; he accused Rozelle of turning the NFL into “political theater.”

The more you read about the Al Davis and Pete Rozelle, the more you start to wonder whether within their rivalry lies some essential dichotomy in the American character—one that we’re watching play out in real time in the 21st century. Is there still a place for the leadership style of Pete Rozelle in a world overwhelmed by performative noise and defined by naked conflict? I thought about that again the other day, as I read a profile of another commissioner whose league appears to have lost its way.

II.

“The NBA is always in trouble,” Chuck Klosterman wrote nearly 20 years ago, and I think about that sentence all the time, because every time you believe maybe that sentiment has become dated, it circles back again. For a time in the 2010s, the NBA felt surprisingly stable, but apparently it was only a matter of time, because now the NBA is in trouble again, and this time, it is commissioner Adam Silver who is at the heart of the angst. That led an Atlantic writer named Tim Alberta to agitate for an interview with Silver, and to write a profile that essentially mused about whether Silver was somehow too soft to survive this moment of transition.

Alberta—a talented reporter who normally covers politics—writes through the lens of his childhood fandom of the rough-and-tumble Detroit Pistons, and seemingly laments the way the league has essentially gone soft in the years since. At the same time, he looks back longingly on the tenure of commissioner David Stern, who ran the league with a dictatorial fervor, and he wonders whether perhaps Silver is so focused on making money that he isn’t willing or able to confront the big problems the league faces. The key moment in the profile comes when Silver recalls how harshly Stern treated people—“It was devastating to some people to be talked to that way, and it was unnecessary,” Silver says—and how Stern once said to him, “It’s too important to you to be liked.”

What disturbed me was that this exchange was portrayed as an indictment of Silver rather than a condemnation of Stern. Maybe, Alberta implies, it means Silver is too weak to meet the moment; just as the NBA, in Alberta’s view, had kind of gone soft in the years since the Pistons had stopped beating the hell out of opposing shooters and given way to the era of Steph Curry beautifying the game, maybe Silver had facilitated that softness by refusing to embrace the dictatorial fervor of his predecessor.

Writes Alberta:

Companies take on the personality of their leader. For 30 years, the NBA was a reflection of David Stern: feisty, colorful, unpredictable, entertaining. Silver’s NBA has embodied his best qualities—competent, commercially successful—while also suffering from a certain dispassion, the type that suggests someone who has never fought to survive, only to maintain.

I think there are legitimate questions about how the NBA moves forward from here, and Alberta raises many of those. This is a league that is perpetually obsessed with imagery above all else, and it is possible that Silver may be overly concerned with that imagery. But what bothers me most is that Alberta portrays Silver’s modesty and attempts to strive for a kind of quiet competence—his refusal to force himself directly into the story, and his reluctance to act out for the cameras—as an inherent weakness.

At one point, Alberta compares Stern favorably to Vince McMahon, the odious and perpetually over-the-top leader of World Wrestling Entertainment, and a man who essentially presaged the performative buffoonery of the current president. And that makes me wonder if perhaps being ensconced in the bubble of modern politics has completely skewed certain people’s notions of what leadership can actually look like.

III.

Early in his tenure as NFL commissioner, writes the late author David Harris, Rozelle went to meet with Washington owner George Preston Marshall, a blowhard and virulent racist who was nearly impossible to deal with. Rozelle sat patiently and listened as Marshall berated him, as he declared that Rozelle was in diapers when he helped found the NFL, as he went on and on until Rozelle circled back to the original reason for his meeting. “Mr. Marshall,” Rozelle said, “you still haven’t answered my question.” Eventually, Rozelle got the answer he was seeking.

This, writes Harris, was the key to Rozelle’s success, even at a moment of crisis: He subordinated his own ego, remained dispassionate and persistent, and convinced the stakeholders involved that the good of the league mattered more than any individual’s needs, including—and especially—those of Al Davis.

Said Rozelle of the NFL owners:

You have to be patient with them and when they’re up-tight and angry about something, you’ve got to be cool, get as much information on the subject as you can and try to convince them with logic, using as a basic premise the fact that when we stay together on something, we’re normally successful and we grow. When we’re going to splinter off, we’re not as successful. It’s mainly just patience, calm preparation, with, I guess, a degree of political persuasion.

It is worth noting that Al Davis won several of his battles, but in the end, Rozelle won the war. The Raiders wound up moving back to Oakland from Los Angeles, where they struggled in Davis’s later years as he micromanaged his dynasty to oblivion. The USFL—due in large part to the performative aggression of the current president—blew itself up while Rozelle patiently waited it out. The labor and drug issues were resolved, the television contracts ballooned, and Pete Rozelle became the greatest and most successful commissioner in the history of American sports. And I don’t know how this whole thing plays out for Adam Silver, but when a sense of dispassion is somehow viewed as a political weakness—and when dictatorial leadership and performative contempt are viewed as the only way forward—then maybe it’s worth wondering if we’re the ones who are in trouble.

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I.

The interesting thing about it is the way Ted Turner just kind of imposed himself into our lives as an omnipresent figure. One day, we were perfectly content with an 18-inch RCA with four channels and a malfunctioning volume knob and an extended pair of rabbit ears, and the next day a volcanic billionaire had convinced us all to get wired up, and to persuade us that we could not live without news around the clock and without a random baseball team showing up on our television screens for every single summer day of our entire childhood.

This, of course, is what I came back to this week, when I heard that Turner had died at the age of 87: The 1980s Atlanta Braves. If you were alive at all back then and you cared even a little about sports, how could you think of anything else? It was remarkable the way Turner imposed the Braves onto our lives, because back then, the Braves were a terrible baseball team in a boxy stadium with no real tradition at all. I had never been to Atlanta, and I had no real desire to go to Atlanta. And yet kids like us didn’t care, because—unlike the teams who existed much closer to where we lived, and who were often blacked out or simply not available television at all—the Braves were there for us every single day, alleviating the boredom of our July afternoons and evenings.

In 1986, the Braves won 72 games and lost 89, and in 1987, they went 69-92, and in 1988, they went 54-106, but it didn’t matter, because they were so ubiquitous in our lives that Turner had begun to brand them as “America’s Team.” And the thing is, he wasn’t wrong, because literally every sports fan of a certain age who I have ever met in my life still has some kind of vestigial attachment to those Braves teams.

The funny thing is that I remember those Braves teams being better than they actually were. They seemed good, even if they weren’t. They had Dale Murphy, the most clean-cut and hospital-cornered superstar of his era, and they had squat rec-league softball dudes at the corners like Bob Horner and Ken Oberkfell. Maybe I was brainwashed, because the Braves seemed skillful even when they were terrible. Part of this retrospective halo I put around them, I imagine, is because eventually they did get better, and those great teams were being seeded by the arrival of minor-league prospects like Tom Glavine and John Smoltz in the late 1980s. (Good Lord, remember when Ron Gant emerged from the minors in 1987, 22 years old and sculpted like He-Man?)

But part of it, I think, was just the way the Braves were presented to us by Turner himself, as if they were a fait accompli long before they’d done anything. If the Braves were actually “America’s Team”—if we were being shown these games even in the middle of central Pennsylvania, and if we were talking about them the next day—then we figured they must be a legitimate franchise with legitimate players. The longer they hung around, the more we watched them, the more we began to believe the Braves were something real. And then we began to ask ourselves, if we could see every game from a random baseball team—and if we could feel the power of that attachment to a team that we had no reason to be attached to at all—why couldn’t we see more and more like this? Now that we were wired—now that we had TBS and CNN and ESPN and the lucky ones also had Harry Caray doing Cubs games on WGN and Phil Rizzuto and Bill White doing Yankees games on WPIX and Ralph Kiner doing Mets games on WOR—why couldn’t we see everything, everywhere, all at once?

This is the lasting legacy of Ted Turner: He dragged us from a period of scarcity into an era of ubiquity by sheer force of personality. And for that, we remain both grateful and resentful.

II.

Turner forged his reputation as a swashbuckling businessman in 1970, when he went into debt to buy a failing Atlanta television station. He began televising Braves games a couple of years later, forcing every Braves fan in the south to buy a UHF antenna and recognizing before pretty much anyone else that people would follow sports wherever they went. In 1976, Turner purchased another failing enterprise: This time, he bought the Atlanta Braves, using some sneaky maneuvering that allowed him to essentially buy the team on layaway and televise every single one of their games at the same time.

Turner was a flamboyant salesman who relied on histrionics to spread the gospel of TBS. He would literally get up on chairs during meetings and scream at the top of his lungs in front of potential advertisers. He was also a philandering drunk whose first marriage ended after he rammed his wife’s yacht during a race to prevent her from winning. And yet all of it worked to his advantage, because Turner knew the best way to sell the idea of an attention economy was to call attention to himself.

In 1980, Turner launched CNN, and at first it seemed like an insane idea that nobody wanted, but then Turner convinced us that we couldn’t live without it as the news unfolded in real time. Over the course of the decade, both sports and news became increasingly ubiquitous, and all of it led us here, to a moment where everything is at our fingertips all at once. And yet you can easily argue, especially at this particular moment, that none of it (outside of Turner Classic Movies, which remains the greatest channel on cable, despite repeated attempts by corporate monoliths to degrade it) has made us that much happier.

That’s the interesting thing, when I think back on those years of watching Braves games as a kid: In those days, all we wanted was more. I spent time as a very small child futilely lobbying my parents to buy a satellite dish so I could watch every game on television in every time zone; long before the iPhone existed, I dreamed of sneaking one of those boxy Sony portable televisions to weddings and bar mitzvahs so I wouldn’t miss a Penn State football game. The omnipresence of Turner’s Braves was only the beginning; the Braves were the tip of the spear. They marked the transition from scarcity to ubiquity.

We live in a Turnerized world now, a world where everything is meticulously colorized and calibrated to the attention economy, where every game is available all the time, presuming you’re willing to pay for it. And that ubiquity paralyzes us. It renders us complacent. We know more and we feel less. How do you navigate a world where everyone is leaping onto the table and trying to sell us on something all the time?

I don’t know if I can say I ever really loved the Atlanta Braves. I think we all were more enamored with what we thought they were ushering in, an era where we could see anything we wanted, whenever we wanted. But eventually the novelty wears off. It was unbelievably compelling to watch, until it became exhausting.

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I.

A strange thing happened last weekend inside the most embarrassingly retrograde stadium in baseball, and it led me to ponder a number of weighty ideas, including A.) The pending downfall of a renegade golf league, and B.) The nature of reality itself. But before we get into all of that, let’s begin with a simple visual: A towering fly ball off the bat of a San Francisco Giants outfielder named Heliot Ramos.

The ball soars into deep center at Tropicana Field, the home stadium of the Tampa Bay Rays. It appears to be a home run, and given that the Giants’ hitting prowess this season can accurately be characterized as “Pedro Serrano trying to measure up a curveball,” it would be a desperately needed boost for a team that’s sinking fast in the standings. But then comes the Rube Goldberg twist, the kind of ground-rule disruption that might lead to a fistfight in a backyard wiffle ball game. And it served as a potent reminder that the Rays have now spent three decades subsisting in such an odd baseball purgatory that it’s easy to forget they’re still here at all.

Instead of continuing its trajectory into space, Ramos’ ball takes a sharp, physics-defying turn and comes tumbling back toward earth. The center fielder for the Tampa Bay Rays—whose name I don’t recall, because I cannot ever recall the name of anyone who has ever played for the Rays, even when I am actively watching the Rays play baseball—backs up and then ambles forward, which is not something that tends to happen at Tropicana Field, given that balls don’t often get caught up in the wind inside a domed stadium. The center fielder catches the ball, and the umpires rule it an out, and even after a review, no umpire seems to notice (or is willing to acknowledge) that the ball had almost certainly struck a random catwalk high above the field itself and then caromed back into fair territory, which should have made it a home run.

Now, all of this was very stupid on its face, though it got progressively dumber, because an umpire named Hunter Wendelstedt—having blatantly fucked this all up—apparently used the opportunity to insult the Giants for hiring a manager who emerged straight from the college ranks. (This is odd, because Hunter Wendelstedt is not only a product of nepotism himself, but also one of the worst umpires in baseball.)

But mostly, it’s just remarkable, in an era of artisanal baseball stadiums, that something like this could happen in the first place. Why is a major-league baseball team still competing in an arena that looks as if it could be situated on the surface of the moon? I know that the Rays are once again attempting to build a new stadium after literally getting the roof blown off this one, but it’s been a long time now, and there is still uncertainty about when or if it will ever happen. And in the meantime, they continue to play Major League Baseball inside the bounce house at a seven-year-old’s birthday party.

Even after all this time, the Rays still feel more like a construction of a baseball team than an actual baseball team. How is that they have been around for three decades—and made two World Series—and yet they still resemble an opposing team conjured from a low-budget B movie starring Mickey Rourke and Josh Lucas? I mean, look at this:

What in the hell is going on here? Is that a desiccated road runner on the helmet? Why is there an Izod alligator on the pants and an exploding emoji on the sleeve? The font and color scheme appears to be borrowed from the aesthetics of Florida’s least distinguished gentleman’s club. (I mean, how desperate did the hive mind at Nike have to be to throw up their hands and say, “Fuck it, no one’s gonna care, let’s just go with neon green and purple”?) The entire kit is reminiscent of Tampa itself, in that I’m not sure what the point of any of it is except to inspire Hold Steady songs.

Every time I am confronted with the fact that the Rays continue to exist, I mostly just find myself amazed they continue to exist. And I think I know why this is: It’s because the Rays have never taken on any true meaning. They are the closest thing baseball has to a ghost franchise, free-floating through their cavernous stadium and bouncing against their elevated catwalk like a loose molecule drifting into a black hole. They are enough to make you wonder just how it is that anything in sports takes on any meaning at all.

II.

It is worth noting that the Rays and Giants have an intimate history, given that the Giants almost moved to Tampa back in 1992. This now seems unfathomable, the notion that a baseball team would abandon one of America’s most picturesque cities for a place that brags about its wild chickens, but it’s true. That year, a miserly man named Vince Naimoli, a New Jersey native who, according to SABR’s Steve Rennie, “made his fortune buying struggling companies and then steering them to profitability by aggressively cutting costs and selling off assets,” agreed in principle to buy the Giants and move them to Tampa.

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I.

Before we get to the curious case of the $150 World Cup train tickets, can we talk about that time James Dolan pulled the plug on the worst musical in the modern history of New York City? I feel like we have to talk about it, if only because of this remarkable paragraph:

That was The New York Times in 2014, discussing the dissolution of a planned spring musical at Radio City Music Hall called “Heart and Lights,” which was kind of like “Springtime for Hitler” but way creepier. The musical was the brainchild of James Dolan, who is the owner of Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall and the man who has steadily, over the course of decades, led even rabid fans of the New York Knicks to profess a white-hot hate for the New York Knicks. And I’m not implying that everything terrible about New York City is James Dolan’s fault—I’d imagine there’s another decrepit wastrel down in D.C. who would have something to say about that—but I will say that Dolan has a strong record of driving potentially good and lucrative things out of New York City.

In this case, Dolan’s fanciful dream of a jingoistic musical featuring animatronic puppets, talking lions, and a 26-foot tall replica of the Statue of Liberty was one of the last straws that wound up pushing the NFL Draft out of New York City. For years, the draft was held at Radio City Music Hall in April, but then Dolan’s dream of an acid-laden mashup of On The Town and The Muppets Take Manhattan forced the NFL to push back the draft by two weeks…only to realize that they’d contorted their calendar for nothing after Dolan cancelled the show upon advice from a soon-to-be convicted sex offender. That was the final push the NFL needed to experiment with taking its own show on the road, where it drew over 800,000 people for this year’s draft in Pittsburgh. (By contrast, when Dolan’s springstravaganza did finally debut in 2015, the Times called it a “numbingly overblown 90-minute infomercial for the city that never sleeps…Imagine having the Empire State Building stuffed down your gullet, floor by floor.” It closed soon after.)

The thing is, this was not the first time James Dolan had pissed off the National Football League. A decade earlier, the NFL draft had found a home in Madison Square Garden, another building that Dolan happened to own, but in 2004 Dolan freaked out and got paranoid, which is apparently something he tends to do quite often. The dude who once berated his underlings for bringing him an outdated can of Diet Coke got mad because the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, wanted to build a stadium for the New York Jets on the city’s west side.

I’m not entirely sure why this triggered Dolan, though I assume it had to do with more money potentially getting wrested away from his own venues (which he turned out to be quite adept at doing on his own). Dolan went on a rampage and became the face of the opposition to the project, which led the NFL to actually shuttle the draft out of Madison Square Garden in 2005 and park it at a nearby convention center. Eventually, Dolan and his NIMBY army won out, the city pulled the plug, and the Jets wound up once again sharing a stadium with the Giants in the swamps of New Jersey, a rebuilt version of the Meadowlands known as MetLife Stadium. That stadium remains one of the least interesting and least accessible in the country, despite being situated in a city and region known for world-class public transportation.

And that winding path leads us to the modern day, where somehow, this ridiculously located venue will host the world’s biggest sporting event this summer.

II.

You may know that the United States (along with Canada and Mexico) is hosting the World Cup this summer. But the more you hear about this thing, the more you come to realize what an unbelievable boondoggle the World Cup has become. And apparently a large part of that is not just related to phantom Peace Prizes and large-scale grifts; in fact, a large part of the boondoggle comes at the expense of public transportation, which is already struggling for money in a number of cities in the wake of the pandemic and the shift to work-from-home policies.

According to The Guardian, this World Cup is expected to bring in roughly $13 billion in revenue over the course of four years, and $8.9 billion this year alone. And yet—even as World Cup organizers are closing down the parking lots at most venues—they have offered no money to subsidize the additional burden on public transit, which is why New Jersey Transit is now charging $150 for a round-trip ticket to MetLife Stadium to watch a soccer game. The notion of these bloated World Cup organizers actually chipping in to help pay for these tickets appears to be beyond their ken, so in the meantime, Europeans are wondering why they can’t just walk from the city to MetLife Stadium, given that it’s only a few miles from one to the other. “I know walking is an unfamiliar concept for most Americans,” one European fan posted on the site formerly known as Twitter, “but it is a thing in the rest of the world.”

It is a simple observation, but it fails to take into account that there is no easy way to walk to MetLife Stadium without winding up dead and/or radioactive. I would argue that there are not really any great parts of New Jersey, but this is truly and honestly the worst part of New Jersey we’re talking about. This is the place where mobsters and teamsters are buried alongside three-eyed fish and the fissile material in the suitcase from Pulp Fiction. “There’s no way to walk to the stadium,” one Brooklyn native told the Times. “It’s a death trap.”

Think about that. This is the largest and most vibrant city in North America, and this is its showcase venue, and there is no way to walk there without Froggering across several freeways and wielding a Geiger counter while Tony Soprano runs you down in his SUV on the way to Satriale’s. Here is Ian Nicholas Quillen at Forbes, framing the absurdity:

Why doesn’t the nation’s largest and most commercially significant market have best-in-class access and infrastructure for its only NFL stadium and proposed World Cup venue? Well, because the appeal of the New York market has made it possible to attract premier events without making improvements we’ve seen in other, more modern venues across North America.

If you assessed the logistics of MetLife Stadium against nearly any other venue in the tournament – including those in Mexico and Canada – without accounting for the market’s other benefits, it would compare unfavorably to nearly all of them.

So MetLife Stadium is essentially too big to fail. Just like James Dolan. And again, I’m not blaming all of this on James Dolan. But his willful ignorance and embarrassing territorialism cannot be ignored, and neither can the willful ignorance of a country whose biggest city is unable to grasp the notion that perhaps it shouldn’t have constructed its marquee venue in the middle of nowhere. (And trust me, they are not alone here.)

“Whether it’s technically possible to walk to MetLife is perhaps beside the point,” the Times wrote. “The debate fits within a larger trend of Americans and Europeans arguing on social media over cultural differences, real or imagined.”

That is the Times’ gauzy way of noting that Europeans find Americans to be utterly insane at the moment. And in this case, I can’t blame them. Nothing about this $150 train tickets story makes sense; it is a failure of the imagination (and of the public interest) on multiple levels. And it kind of says something about where we are as a country.

I was watching the news the other day after the King of England gave a speech to Congress, and a reporter who covers the royal family was asked about whether the King had overstepped his bounds by bringing up issues that were now considered “controversial” in America, like climate change and the preservation of democracy. And the reporter replied that these issues were considered mainstream concepts in Europe, and that it was not the King’s problem that somehow America had become swallowed up in its own willful dysfunction. And I know it can’t all be traced back to mercurial billionaires stuffing their fanciful and territorial whims down our gullets, but there are times when it’s all so maddening that it makes you want to take a long walk into a murky swamp.

This newsletter is a perpetual work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Respond to this newsletter, Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please join the list and/or share it with one or two people you know.

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I.

For more than four decades, the most prolific kick in NFL history felt as if it had been conjured in a bizarre dream. It took place on November 8, 1970, on the rutted field of Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, and it lives on in grainy footage that further frames the sheer surreality of the moment. There we see a wide-bodied kicker named Tom Dempsey, lining up three yards directly behind the holder, at his own 34-yard line. When the ball arrives, he marches forward three yards, like a wind-up toy soldier, and strikes it with his right foot. And then…we wait.

The ball seems to sail in the air for an eternity, so long that the broadcaster, the legendary Don Criqui, actually has time to exclaim, I don’t believe this. And then it keeps going. And going. So far away that even Dempsey himself couldn’t see it anymore. In the stands, a young man named Michael Lewis, who will eventually become one of the most prominent authors of his generation—and one of the great chroniclers of how systems and markets shift over time—hears his father swear for the first time ever.

“Holy shit!” he says.

When the referee raises his arms, the entire stadium shakes, and Dempsey’s teammates mob him. Just seconds earlier, with Dempsey’s Saints trailing 17-16, the Detroit Lions defenders saw Dempsey lining up for this kick, 63 yards long, and began laughing out loud. Even in the aftermath, when the euphoria subsides, there is an increasing conviction among those in the know that what just happened could never possibly be repeated—and that the only reason it happened in the first place is because Tom Dempsey is the only kicker in NFL history to have been born both without fingers on his right hand or toes on his right foot. People just assume that the square kicking shoe he wore, shaped like the head of a 3-wood, was the only thing that enabled him to make a kick from that distance, so much so that the NFL soon changed the rules to disallow a Dempsey-shaped kicking shoe.

Never mind that Dempsey’s shoe may have actually had nothing to do with the length of the kick itself. Never mind the fact that this presumption marginalized Dempsey’s accomplishment even as it became immortalized. The overarching attitude among the masses, for the next 43 years, was that Dempsey’s kick could never be repeated, that it was a fluke of nature and circumstance. Even when a kicker named Matt Prater finally bested Dempsey’s record by a single yard in 2013, it, too, was considered an anomaly, given it took place in the mile-high altitude of Denver, Colorado.

But by the time Prater booted that kick on a frigid December day, things were already changing. Over the course of the years that led up to Prater’s kick, and in the years following, something fundamental had shifted. Kicking had finally begun to be taken seriously as an avocation. Instead of standing around during practice or spending their idle time breaking in footballs for the benefit of their quarterback—as the Cowboys Chris Boniol once did over the course of the 1990s—kickers had begun to train and prepare in ways that utilized sports science and modern technology. They attended specialized schools; they bulked up and stretched out and analyzed their gait and their plant foot and perhaps most important, they began to share all this information with each other as a small fraternity of dudes attempting to hang on to their jobs. No longer, Prater told The Athletic, was his job “just about kicking the crap out of the ball and hoping it goes straight.”

“There’s 32 kickers in the NFL, that’s the reality,” the Jaguars’ Cam Little told The Athletic. “And any time there’s a guy that goes out there, we all want each other to succeed … and we all want to share whatever is going to make the other guy successful.”

In 2021, the Baltimore Ravens’ Justin Tucker kicked a 66-yard field goal that caromed off the crossbar before bouncing through the plane. In September of 2024, just six days apart, both the Dallas Cowboys’ Brandon Aubrey—a former soccer player who became a completely self-taught kicker—and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ Chase McLaughlin kicked 65-yard field goals. In November of 2025, Little kicked a 68-yard field goal before following it up with a 67-yarder in January. It now seems possible, as one sports scientist had told Wired magazine a few years back, that within our lifetimes, we could see someone kick an 85- or 90-yard field goal. For four decades, the limits seemed insurmountable, and then all at once, they were shattered.

II.

Last weekend in London, a Kenyan runner named Sebastian Sawe crossed the finish line at the London Marathon in one hour, 59 minutes and 30 seconds, thereby shattering a barrier that had once seemed impassable: A sub two-hour marathon. But this, to me, was not the most interesting part. The most interesting part is that the second-place finisher, Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, also crossed the finish line in one hour, 59 minutes, and 41 seconds. (Even the third place finisher, Jacob Kiplimo of Uganda, crossed the line in two hours, 28 seconds, thereby breaking the previous World Record.)

For decades, the very idea of a sub two-hour marathon was viewed by many as “truly, utterly absurd,” wrote Alex Hutchinson in The Atlantic. But then an interesting thing happened:

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I. Phil Garner

In 1972, five years after the official release date of I Am The Walrus, Reggie Jackson showed up at spring training with a beard. I cannot imagine any way in which these two events are directly correlated, but what I can say is that, as with the Beatles’ hirsute period, Jackson’s defiance altered the look of baseball—and arguably America itself—for the better part of a decade. When Oakland A’s manager Dick Williams ordered Jackson to shave, he told Dick Williams, in so many words, to go shave himself. Jackson’s teammates got upset that Reggie seemed to have his own rules, and the quandary reached all the way to mercurial owner Charlie Finley, whose team, up to that point, had lived by the officious rules of grooming that had defined baseball. Finley, being Finley, decided the way out of this quandary was to offer every player on the team $300 to grow a mustache, somehow presuming that mustaches were such a peculiar quirk that they wouldn’t bother to take him up on it.

But the A’s did take him up on it, largely because Finley was a notoriously cheap character and the men who played for him were willing to do whatever it took to make a little extra cash. “For three hundred bucks,” said pitcher Rollie Fingers, “I’d grow (a mustache) on my rear end.” The mustaches became part of a Father’s Day promotion in Oakland, the A’s became known as the Mustache Gang, and a decade defined by hirsute upper lips had found its mascots in sporting virility. Fingers sprouted his handlebar mustache; Mike Epstein cultivated a Fu Manchu; and Dave Duncan said to hell with it and grew a full beard.

In those years, Phil Garner was a young third baseman in Oakland’s minor-league system, but he also chose to join the mustache revolution. By the time he rose to the majors in 1973, a small English garden had sprouted on his face, and by the time he got traded to Pittsburgh in 1977, he himself had become the walrus, a man who cultivated a remarkable duster that evoked a bygone era, a style preferred by charismatic characters like Einstein and Roosevelt and Twain. By sheer dint of his voluminousness facial sprouts, Phil Garner became one of the most beloved baseball-card characters of his era.

While I can find no record as to why Garner—who died earlier this month at the age of 76—chose to grow this particular varietal of mustache, I’d like to think it had something to do with the duality of his personality. Garner was a tough guy nicknamed Scrap Iron who was also sensitive and thoughtful and beloved by his teammates. When he became a manager later in life, he would scream at his players after a loss and then immediately break character and start whispering sweet nothings to his wife. He was smart and savvy and tough and self-aware, and yet utterly unconcerned with performative masculinity. He was, in other words, the archetypal bearer of the walrus mustache, which I’d like to think found him as much as he found it.

II. Craig Stadler

In early 1980, Craig Stadler grew a beard to keep his face warm while he was skiing. When he showed up at the Bob Hope Classic in Palm Springs a few weeks later and then won the tournament, wrote columnist Murray Olderman, “the stuffy nabobs of the Tournament Players Association didn’t know where he was coming from.”

A couple of weeks later, Stadler missed the cut at a tournament in Los Angeles. He came home, took a shower and stared at himself in the mirror.

“What the hell?” he said.

He sheared off the beard and left intact the most famous mustache in the history of professional golf.

When Stadler won the Masters in 1982, this was his look. And it was a reflection of his ethos, as well: In a sport that, Olderman wrote, had long been owned by a “covey of cloned money machines, sleek in pastel slacks, with sun bleached hair,” Stadler was a portly dude with a mustache so bushy that it led the British media to begin calling him The Walrus. He had no agent; his entourage was comprised of his own family. He was everything golf wasn’t: Unpretentious and real. He gathered the few endorsements he had on his own. “Nobody manages me,” he said, and in that way, he too was the ideal inheritor of the mustache that birthed his nickname.

III. Phil Jackson

As the Oakland Athletics assembled their mustache brigade in the summer of 1972, Phil Jackson retreated to Canada, where he spent part of the summer hiking with his brother, communing with nature, and learning to keep his food hidden from bears. He spent the rest of that summer questioning the values of modern American society and campaigning for George McGovern. A value system based on “money is power,” Jackson told columnist Bob Harding, is “completely distorted.”

“He doesn’t bully you with his slogans or try to overwhelm you with his opinion,” Harding wrote. “He is, in short, a reasonable man.”

Jackson became one of the most prominent countercultural athletes of the era, and two decades later, when he became the most prominent countercultural coach in basketball history, the mustache traveled with him. It served as a central part of his ethos, a counter to the brute force the more upright Ditka-esque mustache had imported to Chicago years earlier. “The whole concept (of our system),” Jackson told New York Times columnist George Vecsey in 1994, “is to defy pressures, to work against another team's force. Basically we try to get the other team to overload in one area and then work with their energy (to defeat them).” And maybe that sounds hippy-dippy to you, but that mustache—combined with the possessor of another, slightly more controversial mustache—enabled Jackson to become the most successful NBA coach of all-time.

Can we say that the facial hair and the ethos were entirely related? No, but we also can’t say they were unrelated. One hand clapping, dude.

IV. Andy Reid

I would like to believe that Andy Reid already bore a walrus mustache under his plus-sized helmet as a freakishly large 13-year-old on the verge of bigfooting the punt, pass and kick competition. But even if he hadn’t cultivated the look yet, he’d cultivated the feel of what he was to become: A big man with big ideas that did not conform to the rigid ideals of the NFL. He would devise offensive schemes that built off the ideas that another maverick intellectual, Bill Walsh, had pioneered before him. “He had a grandfatherly way about him,” one person who knew him said, “even when he was young.”

When Reid became head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles in 1999, he inherited the second overall pick in the draft, and instead of reaching for Texas running back Ricky Williams—the player his noxious fan base demanded—or falling for the illusion of Oregon quarterback Akili Smith, Reid chose Donovan McNabb, the quarterback out of Syracuse.

The Eagle fans in attendance in New York City booed the pick. Reid didn’t care. And he’s done a surprisingly good job of thinking outside the box ever since. He treated his players like actual human beings; he devised offensive schemes that advanced the game; he drafted another quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, who was a bit of a wildcard prospect, and turned him into the greatest football player of his era. He even made a grown man coveting chicken nuggets somehow feel childishly endearing.

“His personality…was more intellectual,” an old friend said of Reid. “Defensive players, we hit somebody and we go crazy running around the field. Not Andy. He'd block someone literally off the field and just walk to the bench and sit down.”

I imagine with people like these, the walrus mustache just grows itself, as if it was meant to be. After all, the walrus mustache is not something a man enters into lightly. It does not carry the post-modernist weight of the handlebar or the Easy Rider rebelliousness of the Fu Manchu or the full-on sleazecore complexity of the pornstache. The walrus mustache is something a certain man grows in order to reinforce that he is a certain kind of man, the kind who isn’t doing this for the shock effect or the irony but because it just belongs on their face, and they’d feel naked without it. They are thinkers and doers and leaders and believers. Those men don’t come along very often, but when they do, they often change the course of history.

And I’m thinking that in this moment, we could use a leader who befits the walrus mustache—a leader who questions the status quo but also has the ability to operate within it, a leader who is both tough and decent, a leader who counters violence with intellectualism. Best as I can tell, there is only one high-profile modern-day political figure with a walrus mustache, and that man is John Bolton, who is certainly an inscrutable figure but is too defiantly strange and combative to ever run for president. But the opening is right there for someone to embrace their true selves, the way Teddy Roosevelt did when he grew a walrus mustache in order to disguise his rodent-like teeth, and then rode it all the way to immortality. Let that man honor Phil Garner the best way he knows how; let him embrace the look that has awaited him all along.

This newsletter is a perpetual work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Respond to this newsletter, Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please join the list and/or share it with one or two people you know.

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I.

Sometime in the late 1970s, people began showing up at hotel ballrooms in New York City to watch the NFL draft in person. They did this in part because they were mildly deranged, and also because they’d come to realize that others out there in the world were equally deranged. A handful of those people, like an impossibly skinny guy with a near-unintelligible New York accent named Joel Buchsbaum, had begun to write about the draft in a serious way for specialty publications like Pro Football Weekly, which forged the earliest strands of draftnik culture. That sent a signal to the others: They were not alone. Some people bonded over Dungeons and Dragons or Kiss concerts; others spent their idle hours poring over college football rosters and obsessing over what the New York Jets would do with the fourth pick of the first round.

By 1979, the NFL allowed fans to line up before dawn and stream inside to watch an event that had all the inherent pizzazz of a middle-school graduation ceremony. It started at 8 a.m. on a weekday morning, because no one had ever imagined that something as tedious as a draft could ever be packaged for television. It was the kind of thing that literally broke every rule of television itself, so much so NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle—himself a television visionary—considered it a completely insane idea to televise the draft at all when ESPN started doing it one year later. But the draftniks lining up outside were the first indication that maybe even Rozelle had missed something here.

The vast majority of the people who flocked to the draft in those early years were New Yorkers, because, in those days, you would have had to be clinically insane to actually travel a long distance to the draft. More than that, these were New Yorkers with strong opinions; and in 1979, these New Yorkers with strong opinions streamed into a ballroom at the Waldorf-Astoria and waited anxiously for the New York Giants to make the seventh overall pick. They knew football—who else but a hardcore football fan would skip work for this?—but they didn’t know everything, because their resources were limited, and there weren’t a ton of college football games on television in those days.

So when the Giants drafted a quarterback from a Division I-AA school in rural Kentucky, the New Yorkers with strong opinions did what they know best: They booed like hell, so much so that the cameras filming for the local six o’clock news asked Rozelle to read the name a second time so they could capture the full scope of the moment (Rozelle happily obliged). The fans reflexively condemned the choice as yet another example of the Giants doing something that made no sense. In 1975, the Giants had drafted Al Simpson, an offensive lineman from Colorado State and all-around nice guy (nickname: Big) who had one problem: He was incredibly slow. “Big can bury any defensive tackle in the league—if the guy stands still,” said one Giant coach. “If the guy moves, though, Al is in trouble.”

By 1977, Al Simpson had been cut by the Giants, and one fan in the gallery held up a sign that read, Don’t Draft Al Simpson. But now the fans began to wonder if the Giants had drafted the Al Simpson of quarterbacks.

“They panicked,” one fan lamented.

“They’ll probably draft a wide receiver out of Morehead State in the second round,” another said.

The consensus among the masses seemed to be that the Giants had scrambled after the Bengals took Washington State quarterback Jack Thompson—nicknamed the “Throwin’ Samoan”—with the third overall pick, which led New York to reach for another quarterback farther down on the list of prospects. So the fans let the Giants have it for drafting Phil Simms out of Morehead State, who became one of the first athletes ever to get booed before he’d ever played a down of football in the NFL.

It didn’t matter that the masses were wrong; it didn’t matter that Phil Simms became an excellent NFL quarterback and Jack Thompson became a bust. The Simms incident was proof that the draft was becoming an event where amateurs believed they could outwit the experts in real time, and where the wisdom of crowds helped shape perceptions in an instant, even as the results played out over years. The people in the gallery that day didn’t know a damn thing about Phil Simms, but it didn’t really matter, because they were already convinced they knew everything.

II.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of years researching the entire 90-year history of the draft for a project I’ll be able to tell you more about soon. But in the process, I’ve learned that there are two primary threads to the story of the draft.

One is a tale of innovation and sophistication and sheer growth, the story of how a non-event populated largely by wonderful obsessives became a traveling circus with a million eyes cast upon it. In the early days of the draft, a lot of teams chose blindly, using magazines they bought at a nearby newsstand and hoping for the best. The first primitive forms of scouting came into being in the 1950s, and then came the combines and expanded scouting departments of the 1960s, and then, by the 1980s, when the draft grew into a televised event, the off-season infrastructure of every NFL franchise came to be built almost entirely around the draft. And now, as the draft has become a yearly festival that draws Coachella-sized crowds, it’s easy to presume that it has moved closer and closer to becoming an exact science, and that any misses are entirely the fault of a few fumbling cronies in the draft room.

But that brings me to the second primary thread, which is that even as the draft-industrial complex has grown to unprecedented proportions and embraced the tenets of advanced analytics and sports science, at its core, we’re still flying blind. We think we know more—and in some ways we do—but at heart, we kind of don’t. It’s an echo of the legendary screenwriter William Goldman’s line about Hollywood:

Nobody knows anything…Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.

It’s in the reconciliation of those two threads—that we know more than ever, but we still don’t really know anything—where things get interesting. Because the NFL draft is now the most literal manifestation of a moment in a society where we’ve increasingly begun to confuse educated guesses with absolute certainty.

III.

Over the past couple of weeks, an ESPN talking head named Dan Orlovsky has spat out a hot take that’s infuriated the draftnik community (which has now evolved into an entire industry). The consensus No. 1 overall pick this week is Fernando Mendoza, the quarterback from Indiana, who is almost certain to be drafted by the Oakland Las Vegas Raiders. But the second quarterback on the board is Alabama’s Ty Simpson, and Orlovsky has climbed out on the edge of a very long and narrow tree branch by proclaiming that Simpson and Mendoza might not actually be that far apart in terms of pro potential. This has led people to pile on Orlovsky, and to speculate whether perhaps he might be engaging in some kind of secret quid pro quo with his own agency representation.

In a broad sense, I get it. The overwhelming consensus is that Mendoza is better; every mock draft everywhere and nearly every NFL scout seems to agree, and it’s hard to imagine that they’re all wrong, and you do kind of have to respect that people who study film for a living tend to know what they’re doing. Maybe Orlovsky is just play-acting here. But then you start to ask yourself, How many times has the consensus been at least somewhat wrong before? And the answer is: Quite often.

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I.

Midway through the pilot episode of the AMC series The Audacity, we cut to a shot of Zach Galifianakis sitting in a psychiatrist’s office. The show is sometimes a little bit too on the nose, but it’s also the kind of Zeitgeisty thing you can’t turn away from once you start watching. It’s the first truly post-empire tech satire, a show that traffics on its principles’ obliviousness to the damage they’ve done, and nobody in the modern history of satirical comedy has done obliviousness quite as well as Zach Galifianakis. His character, Carl Bardolph, is the self-loathing middle-aged guru who can’t quite understand why so many people have come to despise everything he stands for.

“People act like we took something,” Bardolph says. “As if we didn’t build everything they touch. And we didn’t build it to be worshipped. We built it to work, and it does work. But where’s our parade?”

The Audacity is set in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, in a part of the country where normalcy no longer exists. Every day, something else happens that reminds you just how far removed the tech world is from the remainder of humanity. Just this week, a company named AllBirds—which sold environmentally friendly shoes to eager tech-bros who wanted to signal they were part of “the coastal Millennial techno-optimist tribe,” before the tech bros apparently decided environmentalism was too woke to bring in any real money—announced that it was suddenly and inexplicably pivoting to AI, abandoning its fundamental principles and sending its stock soaring.

It is comical and pathetic, and it signals a level of cluelessness that defies satire itself. It gives a show like The Audacity an abundance of material, but also a high bar to clear, because there is nothing more pathetic than watching people who are too oblivious to realize they’ve become the villains in their own story.

II.

After I watched The Audacity, I changed the channel to a streaming network owned by the most ubiquitous tech company in the world, founded by a man whose new wife also seems entirely disconnected from reality. And there I found the one thing that felt entirely uncorrupted by the sheer exhaustion of modernity. Because it was there that I found Stephen Curry.

He is 38 years old now, and it has reached the point where every time you watch him, you can’t help but think about the end. For months this season, as the NBA suffered through perhaps the worst regular season in modern history, as teams tanked and stars sat, Curry sat, too, hampered by a knee injury caused by overuse that forced him into prolonged rest for one of the rare times in his career. He came back just last week and took a few games to raggedly prepare for the playoffs, as the Golden State Warriors faced a play-in tournament in which they would have to win or go home.

I found it hard to watch the Warriors without Curry. They were disjointed and tentative; it was as if they were grappling in the dark, attempting to rediscover how they’d gotten here in the first place. They had no joy. They had no soul. But then Curry showed up last night and did what Curry does, and in the fourth quarter you could kind of feel it building … and in the final minute, he launched one of those 3-pointers from an impossible angle that with anyone else on earth you’d be wondering what the hell had just happened, but with Curry, there is that sense of breathless anticipation, where the crowd falls silent and just assumes. The shot went in, the Warriors took the lead, and they survived to play Phoenix tonight.

It was both blissful and surprisingly innocent to watch Curry’s triumphal return, especially when contrasted with the dreary and autocratic brilliance of the Clippers’ Kawhi Leonard, and especially because Curry did it in Los Angeles, in front of one of the most performative fan bases in sports. (Why do the Clippers continue to exist? There is no good answer to this question.) And maybe despite all of this, you are one of those people who (like Charles Barkley) professes to hate Steph Curry, but I’m going to set you straight right now:

You don’t actually hate Steph Curry.

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I.

Before we dive headlong into the sordid tabloid saga of the reporter and the football coach, let’s take a moment and travel back to Vietnam in the early 1960s. And yes, I’m aware that’s kind of a bum trip, and I’m also aware that it feels like a wild historical connection even for a newsletter that specializes in wild historical connections. But bear with me for a moment, because I really do believe we’ll wind up in the same place.

Let’s start with the lodestar for this newsletter’s very existence: The journalist and historian and Throwbacks unofficial mascot David Halberstam, who somehow managed to write about both war and sports with the same exacting depth of field. In 1963, when Halberstam was covering the early era of the Vietnam War for The New York Times, he found himself in an increasingly perilous position. At a moment when “optimism about the situation in Vietnam became an essential element of American policy itself,” Halberstam was one of a group of young reporters who found themselves growing increasingly skeptical of what they were seeing. Wrote Halberstam:

No one becomes a reporter to make friends, but neither is it pleasant in a situation like the war in Vietnam to find yourself completely at odds with the views of the highest officials of your country. The pessimism of the Saigon press corps was of the most reluctant kind: many of us came to love Vietnam, we saw our friends dying all around us, and we would have liked nothing better than to believe the war was going well and that it would eventually be won. But it was impossible for us to believe those things without denying the evidence of our own senses…. And so we had no alternative but to report the truth…

The pressure exerted upon Halberstam and his colleagues was immense. They were accused of being a cadre of countercultural new journalists who sympathized with the Communist elements in Vietnam and therefore rooted against America. When the editor of The New York Times went to visit the White House, John F. Kennedy asked if perhaps Halberstam was “too close to the story, too involved.”

What Halberstam was actually doing was just the opposite: He was distancing himself from the story in order to tell the truth. But Halberstam was savvy enough to understand why Kennedy said what he said. The implication that he couldn’t separate his personal relationships from his work, he later wrote, was “the most insidiously damaging thing that can be said about a reporter.”

II.

Later in his career, when Halberstam began writing about sports, he acknowledged the obvious differences between writing about war and writing about basketball or baseball or football. But he also acknowledged that there are similarities, and observed that the reverential nature of much of the Times’ writing in the 1960s and 1970s—both in sports and in politics—betrayed its central purpose. “The problem, of course,” he wrote, “is that good writing demands irreverence, skepticism, a certain edge.”

And that brings us back to the present day. Last week, The New York Post published photos of Dianna Russini, an NFL reporter for The Athletic, and Mike Vrabel, the head coach of the New England Patriots, commingling at an adults-only resort. Much of the speculation—both before and after Russini announced her resignation on Tuesday—has revolved around whether Russini and Vrabel (who are both married) were having an affair. But let’s put that aside for a moment, because for journalistic purposes it doesn’t really matter if they were having an affair or not. What really matters here is whether someone who has gained a reputation as an “NFL insider” has become too close to the story to retain any sense of credibility. (And I certainly acknowledge the difficulties of being a female reporter in a male-dominated paradigm, but I also think that’s not the central issue here. Also, I can personally vouch for the fact that I have never sat in a hot tub with any of my profile subjects, but they’ve also never invited me.)

While they exist in completely different gravitational pulls, the themes of both the Halberstam story and the Russini story revolve around a precarious question inherent to journalism: How do you cultivate sources and gather news and build relationships without compromising yourself? And how do you judge what’s real and what isn’t if you’ve allowed yourself to drift too close to the story?

III.

Here is where I will admit that I’ve never been very good at this part of the job. I tend to keep my guard up at all times, to maintain a healthy distance, and if that makes me a lesser reporter, then so be it. But I was also lucky, because I didn’t have to navigate those complexities as deeply. I’ve spent most of my career writing feature stories and books, parachuting from one story to the next, and the advantage of being someone who spends his career this way is that you don’t have to worry about how it might affect things in the long term. The advantage of being a roving reporter is that you can quote Tiger Woods telling off-color jokes without concerning yourself with how it might affect your relationships on the PGA Tour.

This is not the case with a reporter like Russini, whose job is to gather information from her sources on a daily basis. The balance is more delicate. In this case, it appears that Russini may have cared more about deepening a friendship than she did about the work itself. It may prove insidiously damaging to her career. But in a larger sense, it also gets at the complex and thorny questions of journalism itself. The hard part is figuring out how to navigate those relationships in a way that doesn’t affect your judgment but also doesn’t feel manipulative; the hard part is transcending your own human instincts in order to maintain fealty to the truth above all else. And when you lose those things, it isn’t easy to get them back.

“I have seen male reporters slash columnists become ‘friends’ with players and coaches to the point that they socialize. That they went to dinner. And that would outrage me, also, because I’m not gonna cross that line,” one longtime sports journalist said. “I’m going to remain completely objective. Because if you do mess up on the field or off the field, I’m gonna say so.”

I cannot believe that the journalist who said this is Skip Bayless, and I cannot believe I’ve somehow connected Skip Bayless to David Halberstam, but here we are. These are strange times, and lines are being crossed constantly, and the idea that journalism requires distance and objectivity feels increasingly antiquated. It was never easy. But it used to matter. And maybe it’s naive, but I’d like to think it still does.

This newsletter is a perpetual work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Respond to this newsletter, Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please join the list and/or share it with one or two people you know.

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