The International Olympic Committee is corrupt, as we all know. And the national-level organizations… well, pedos and doping are the most recent headlines, but we all know FIFA’s dirty, and the NFL’s dirty, and every stadium funded by taxpayer money is dirty, so let’s go ahead and assume that all sports management is in some way crooked.
Malcolm Gladwell’s 2001 New Yorker article “Drug Store Athlete” was the first to introduce me to what turns out to be a line from Brecht: “Competitive sport begins where healthy sport ends.” (It’s also cited in Modern Sports Law: A Textbook, which … hey, there’s a textbook about sports law.) But it’s not a surprise. We know it’s sordid.
We know that fandom is simply the way that managers and owners hack the human need for belonging and identity to siphon our dollars while they distract us from our daily boredom.
We know that large public events are an opportunity both for terrorists and the global panopticon. This year’s celebration will feature drones with facial recognition software to identify malefactors, and also drones with drone-recognition software to identify drones that aren’t supposed to be there. Yes, anti-drone drones.
We know concussions and CTE and plain old injuries are inevitable in our love of the game. We watch athletes cheat death to do incredible things knowing that one of these days, an Olympian snowboarder or ski aerialist will land face-first and die on camera, and when it happens we’ll be complicit in that death.
We know that winter sports in particular are the domain of rich white people. But we can’t look away. We love sports. We love ice skating. As Patricia Lockwood (a name you must remember, a brilliant writer) notes in her profile of Jason Brown:
At … points, onlookers burst into the spontaneous laughter of babies. I love that laughter. It happens when the viewers overlap so completely with the athlete, with one another, that they don’t know where their own bodies end anymore. We watch sports for these moments. They’re why, every two years, the planet stops spinning and everyone turns their eyes to the spectacle of the Olympics.
Sport is metaphor, ideal, goal, inspiration. Even curling. I mean, the Finland/Korea mixed-doubles match, which took place on Wednesday, was as thrilling a shuffleboard-on-ice match as you’ll ever see.
Tonight I’ll be eating Korean takeout and drinking soju and watching the Parade of Nations to celebrate the fact that the Republic of Korea has gone almost 100% over budget and blown 13 billion dollars on this beautiful, corrupt display of glitz and fireworks and human toil. It’s wasteful and terrible and beautiful and inspiring and I love it.
Also Korean-style fried chicken is delicious af.
Cultivating interest
New Orleans topography is a long long story.
The persistence of paper jams is fascinating (also: the first recorded fatal paper jam happened in 1867).
Smart homes are really dumb: Your vacuum can now ask you to help it clean your house. Your bed will only make you coffee in one kind of coffeepot. Your vibrator is keeping track of your orgasms. And your TV is definitely watching you.
A lengthy eulogy for Lil Peep, who seems to be taking a place in the generational pantheon like ODB and Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse — gone far too soon, and on the verge of so much more, undone by his own fuckups and his self-destructive persona and the monsters of fame and addiction and mental illness.
Our dumb news cycle
Trump administration sidelines drug policy experts when making drug policy.
On-campus white supremacy propaganda is up 258% this year.
An actual Illinois Nazi is a likely Republican nominee for congress. (See also: More Nazis).
Here’s a real example of illegal immigrants marrying for citizenship and bringing their talentless family over to mooch off the government: Melania Knauss and her parents.
VP Mike Pence is lying about his prior anti-gay advocacy while arguing with a gay figure-skater. He’s leading the US Olympic delegation, with the support of approximately none of the athletes.
Cultivating joy
If you really lay it on thick, you may be able to get as many puns into one article as The Economist has in an article titled Margarine sales: Investors can’t believe they’re not better.
This dog has majestic ears.
Girl Scouts of America trying to decide whether it’s OK to sell cookies outside marijuana shops.
Crowdfunding project creates votive candles for Robert Mueller and the distribution of the Trump pee tape.
Secretly Ironic 