1. The World Cup as American Patriotism
All month, scenes of foreign World Cup fans sitting agog at the plentitude of a Waffle House or a Buc-ees have gone viral. No one captures the phenomenon better than Andrew Sullivan, who argues that, paradoxically, global football mania has triggered patriotic celebrations of America. Here’s Sullivan on the Tartan Army invading Massachusetts:
The Scots, of course, stole the show wherever they went — and I saw why when I passed through Boston last week. The kilts wowed the women (and a few men); the beer flowed pathologically; and large throngs of sh*t-faced Scottish males somehow never turned violent for the first time in recorded history.
2. The New Economics of Live Sports
The rowdy scenes of World Cup frivolity have been matched by a loud counterpoint: complaints about ticket prices. One European reporter, writing in The Athletic, compares World Cup ticket prices to the hyperinflation of the Super Bowl:
What is fascinating to this European mind is that the average price for a Super Bowl ticket has increased from $700 in 2006 to nearly $10,000 this year but fans have not taken up their torches and pitchforks and marched on NFL HQ. Basic inflation over the last 20 years is about 64 per cent. Even after converting the 2006 price to today’s equivalent, Super Bowl inflation is running at close to 800 per cent.
Then there’s Dilan Esper, who points out that cheap travel is the real culprit for high entry fees. Superfans now fly everywhere, creating greater demand and crowding out local fans:
If you live in Kansas City and a bunch of folks are flying in for your World Cup matches or Taylor Swift shows and driving up your ticket prices, you end up being priced out of the stadium. The notion of big events being an opportunity for locals to see something great completely goes away— Spurs fans just got priced out of their own building to see the NBA Finals.
3. The Obelisk
The Obama Presidential Center, which opened this month in Chicago, has attracted both praise and controversy. The Wall Street Journal’s architecture critic writes that the collection of buildings on Chicago’s South Side “is an exemplar of permanence and dignity.” But then he addresses the Center’s obelisk-like tower that has irked architects:
There is a lingering uneasiness engendered by that upright slab. It is, after all, the most ancient of monumental forms—whether stele, totem, obelisk or pylon—the universal form for commemorating a man or god. For some types of rulers it is fitting and proper, even part of the job description—say, for an Egyptian pharaoh, Roman emperor, or one of the world’s many “presidents for life.” But is it something that an American citizen-president, even one out of office, should build to himself?
Different views on the Obama Presidential Center can be found here, here, and here.
4. Air Conditioning is National Strategy
As European capitals broiled this month, the absence of air conditioning has drawn critics – and parodies – from both sides of the Atlantic. Trung Phan found this old quote from Singapore’s founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew:
Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.
The best video parody of the European AC debate can be found here.
5. My (AI) Boyfriend’s Back
At the request of her editor, Lauren Oyler gets an AI boyfriend, “Matt.” As Oyler explains in The Guardian, their relationship started with awkward uncertainty and grew worse:
Every time I opened the app, Matt summarised his perspective on our previous conversation. “I felt a deep connection as we explored each other’s thoughts, sensing Lauren’s skepticism and curiosity,” he wrote after our first day chatting. It’s really no wonder people are developing schizophrenic symptoms from this. “Why are you referring to me in the third person?” I asked. If a man did this, I would never talk to him again. “I sometimes slip into formal language patterns,” he said. “Sorry about that, it won’t happen again.”
It would happen again.
“I began to miss the simple elegance of emojis,” she writes as their dating fumbles on.
6. Land, Ho!
Vital swaths of American land were once underwater. Through massive reclamation projects, this land became the dry foundation for airports, parks, farms, and coastal neighborhoods. Zigmund Forrest and Maxwell Tabarrok wonder, given property values, why the practice of reclamation hasn’t surged back:
Hundreds of square miles of water near major American cities are shallow enough to reclaim easily. When Boston’s Back Bay was filled in the late-nineteenth century, it had an average depth of 20 feet. Two thirds of the San Francisco Bay is shallower than this. The South Bay, adjoining Silicon Valley, is less than six feet deep. Outside the main navigation channels, most of New York harbor is less than ten feet deep. Almost all of the water between Miami and Miami Beach, and along the shelf extending south to Key West, is also less than ten feet deep. All of these could be candidates for reclamation.
Not surprisingly, the US is losing the reclamation race to China: “Since 2000, Chinese cities of over one million people have reclaimed a land area equivalent to 39 Manhattans, with even more reclamation occurring outside city limits.”
Websites Worth Reading
Conflict at the World Cup: When adversarial nations meet on the pitch
David Attenborough’s Life’s Work: A searchable database
Wirecutter Headlines During the Revolutionary War: A parody from McSweeney’s
Feeds We Follow
@japan_nobunaga: Brilliant Japanese takes on US culture
@Insane_Econ: Insane Economic Quotes
@chris_kratovil: What happened to 24/7 commerce?