five quotes (10.25.24)

five things I read in the forty-third week of 2024

FanDuel Americans also greatly disappoint the woke. They don’t want to hear about gender theory. They don’t want to check their white privilege. They don’t want to protest for racial justice. And they certainly don’t want to read the latest Ibram X. Kendi book. They just want to watch the game and amuse themselves. Anything that gets in the way of that agitates them. They see wokeness as a hindrance to fun, and therefore oppose it. 

The difference between right-wingers and FanDuel Americans is that the latter don’t pine for some lost Golden Age. They like the current era; they want fewer annoyances and more access to the distractions.

—Scott Greer, “FanDuel Americans” (Highly Respected)

FanDuel Americans is sort of analogous to the movement that has been called “Barstool Conservatism.” It is a sort of mix of some level of social conservatism (anti-woke) with mostly libertarian economic sensibilities. As Greer points out, this is not a principled philosophical position. These people, generally men, want to be left alone to live however they wish with whatever supplements they think will enhance their lives. That last line is pretty damning but accurate. If this is what the revitalization of the right looks like, it’s pretty bleak stuff.

“Liam [the dog] is like a child to me,” said Ms. Sim, 34, who does not plan to get married or have children. “I love him the way my mom loved me. I eat old food in the refrigerator, saving the freshest chicken breast for Liam.”

Her mother, Park Young-seon, 66, said she felt sad that many young women had chosen not to have babies. But she said she had come to accept Liam as “my grandson.”

—Choe Sang-Hun, “One of the Loneliest Countries Finds Companionship in Dogs” (New York Times)

This is sad. And bad. And does not make me glad. I will just say this: you can love a pet tremendously, but you can never love a pet the way a human mother loves her human child. I don’t want to go full great-chain-of-being here, but this type of love we feel for other humans can only be allegorically applied to pets.

It’s common nowadays to talk about the “culture wars.” The notion is that we’re profoundly divided about the kinds of people we want to be, and that we express these divisions in everyday, sometimes petty ways. But, in Roy’s view, this framing is wrong. It would be more accurate to say that there’s a war on culture; what we call the culture wars are just skirmishes among the ruins. Hold this idea in mind, and you may find yourself seeing the ruins everywhere. Many houses in my neighborhood, for instance, fly variations of the American flag—rainbow flags, Blue Lives Matter flags, Thin Red Line flags, and so on. The flags are part of the culture wars. But, going by Roy’s account, they also reflect how much the “sociological grounding” of common culture has eroded. Less and less in our culture is self-evident—the phrase “our culture” might even seem suspect—and so the American flag, which should have some intrinsic, unchanging, obvious meaning (isn’t that the point of a flag?), has become a more fungible outward-facing sign, perhaps not too different from the campaign placards that we put in our yards. Flags are just vocabulary. Why not let them multiply?

—Joshua Rothman, “Is Culture Dying?” (The New Yorker)

I like Rothman’s use of multiplying flags as an emblem of a disintegrated culture. The culture wars reflect the notion that there is very little culture held in common any longer. We can’t fly the flag of unity; we fly, instead, the flag of difference.

I don’t know for sure that all the students in the class got D’s on that first speech, but I do know there was a lot of frustration in our classroom that day. But then our professor made it clear that this grade was not in any way the final verdict on our performance. Our grade for the semester would be based not on how we did on that first speech but on how we did on our final few speeches. She wanted us to use her feedback and get better, even if we were already pretty good. I’ve rarely been more motivated to excel in a class as I was in that one.

—Teresa Preston, “Always Room to Grow” (Kappan)

I had a similar experience in graduate school. A professor gave me a D on an essay that I had almost completely mailed in. It was a fair grade but initially, I was irate. He wrote a lengthy comment calling me out and allowed me to revise. It was such a gift. At some point, even gifted writers need to know that they are not as good as they think they are. We all have room to grow. And if we began to treat our classrooms as laboratories for growth rather than rubber-stamping on the path to the next thing, we would transform students’ classroom experiences.

One of [the objections] is sporting: What is international soccer for, if not to test the best of one country against the best of another? That principle applies to the players on the field and is, rightly, fiercely defended. Nobody would dream of suggesting that England, a little short at central defender these days, should go and pluck some uncapped prospect from Argentina. FIFA took exception years ago when Qatar, for one, attempted to field a team of naturalized players.

It is possible to draw a line there, to say that the manager is an accessory to a game, rather than a participant in it. But that seems at odds with the pervasive atmosphere in modern soccer, in which the most consequential figure in any fixture is often assumed to be the manager.

—Rory Smith, “Thomas Tuchel and the Moral Maze” (New York Times)

This is an interesting, nuanced article on sports, specifically England’s hiring of Thomas Tuchel, a German, as their national team manager. The move naturally precipitated some xenophobic chatter on social media (but what doesn’t?). But Smith gets at a valid point: if the national team must be stocked with national players, should a similar requirement apply to the manager? If the national team is truly a reflection of the soccer strength of the nation (yikes for the USA), then should that be a top-to-bottom endeavor?