Spectator Life

After the bizarre, weather-beaten and at times purely controversial Olympics opening ceremony, the finale to a largely successful event was more assured, not least because of its most spectacular coup de théâtre. The now-sixty-two-year-old Tom Cruise, still the biggest movie star in the world, literally and symbolically, transferred the Olympics from Paris in 2024 to Los Angeles in 2028 by abseiling from the top of the Stade de France, collecting the Olympic flag and transferring it to the Hollywood sign above LA, with much airborne derring-do and implicit early promotion for the next Mission: Impossible film, to be released next summer. Cruise’s status as a living legend is now beyond discussion.

When I was sixteen, my dad took me along to a conference he attended in Calgary just days after the city hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics. By this time, the Eddie the Eagle and Jamaican bobsled T-shirts were all half-price, but everyone was still talking about the joke athletes that were the talk of the games. The International Olympic Committee wasn’t happy about it, though, and created what came to be known as the “Eddie the Eagle rule,” making it much harder for athletes to qualify for the Games. Since then, the number of ridiculously bad athletes competing in the Olympics has declined, but there are still dreadful performances to be found, and the Paris Games have been no exception.

This year’s Copa América soccer tournament in the US was a dress rehearsal for the 2026 World Cup, which will also be hosted by the US, along with Canada and Mexico. And to put it mildly, folks appear to hate the dress. With the US group opener against Bolivia barely attracting 48,000 fans to an 80,000-capacity stadium and players voicing frustration over the conditions of the fields, public opinion already seemed to not be on the host’s side. What transpired last night, however, likely caused more anti-US sentiment in the western hemisphere than any military intervention.

For those of us with a poor grasp of time, who can still recall when a night at the bar could be sharply revisited by a Proustian wave of stale smoke arising from yesterday’s clothes, it can almost feel as if vaping crept up on us out of nowhere. One moment, it seemed, all the authorities had firmly agreed that pushing for vaping was creepy, and were pledging to legislate and tax cigarettes into oblivion; the next, great hordes of schoolchildren were apparently free to suck constantly on little vials of liquid nicotine with sugar-rush names such as Cherry Fizzle and Blue Razz Lemonade. What happened?

Every time Bill Maher goes viral for being a "non-woke" liberal, the conservative pundit class is eager to remind readers that Maher is not one of them. It’s a pedantic and pointless exercise, because Maher has never claimed to be.  Case in point, earlier this month, National Review published another piece in a long trilogy of tired conservative columns bitching about Maher acting as some sort of “leftist agent” because he “has always made his bed with the mainstream.” “As entertainment,” wrote culture critic Armond White, “Real Time has a limited audience of HBO subscribers, yet its clips serve as a crutch for conservative TV programs — those outlets too feckless to generate their own talking points but that are always following the lead of left-wing media.

I recently found myself scrolling World Cement Weekly in search of news of a massive rewilding project in northern Mexico, created and funded by the cement giant Cemex. The growing success of the rewilding movement is strangely little known — though there are now places that are wilder, more vibrant, more teeming with life than they have been for centuries, few outside the movement know anything about them. Two decades ago, a nature-loving chief executive of Cemex decided that the company would acquire 346,000 acres of degraded land on Mexico’s border with America, an area larger than Los Angeles, renamed the El Carmen Nature Reserve.

Over the past two weeks, one of the biggest culture war conversations in America has had absolutely nothing to do with Donald Trump, Joe Biden or the 2024 elections. Instead, it’s centered on, of all things, the WNBA.  The discourse around Caitlin Clark, the Iowa phenom who won rookie of the month in May, has run the gamut of everything wrong with how we argue today — injecting racism, sexism, talk of “pretty privilege” and allegations of “assault” for hard fouls. Most non-sports commentators writing and discussing Clark’s controversial entry into the pros have never had an opinion about basketball until five minutes ago, but no matter — let a thousand takes bloom about a hotshot rookie on a bottom-feeding team.

Strong, old pine tree branches cutting through a cloudless cerulean sky — a sight I find hard to beat. Throwing open the curtains at Pine Cliffs Resort in the Algarve, I wondered why I’d been away from Portugal so long.  Bleary-eyed, I reflexively photographed my first glimpse of the Atlantic from my Junior Ocean Suite’s balcony, seagulls cinematically swooping into the frame. Another vain attempt to capture the colors that always keep me coming back; the pictures somehow never as good as the real thing. I’d posted up from Tokyo gone dinnertime the previous night, just outfoxed by Japan’s famed pink sakura (2024’s late bloom meant I missed them by twenty-four hours). Waking up deathly early, I soaked away grizzly jet lag in my spacious room’s egg-shaped tub.

Setting an early alarm while on vacation never comes easily to me, but making time to wander Babylonstoren’s fruit and vegetable garden before the day’s searing heat took hold was no problem. One of the oldest Cape Dutch farms, set at the foot of Simonsberg in Cape Town’s Franschhoek wine valley, it’s a sprawling, fantastical, technicolor utopia — positively Eden-like, with a lot more than apples to tempt you. Scarecrows made from terracotta plant pots wave from fields teeming with 300 edible crops, fat pomegranates growing alongside tangy tamarillos, willow trees swaying in the breeze.

Earlier this week, the New York Times asked an intriguing and surprisingly overlooked question: why aren’t black students on historically black college campuses protesting against Israel and marching for Palestine? It’s an important query — made all the more urgent by President Biden’s commencement address this coming weekend at Morehouse College in Atlanta, one of the nation’s preeminent historically black colleges and universities.   Considering the seemingly endless ways African Americans have pledged their allegiances to the suffering in Gaza — and Palestinians in general — America’s 107 HBCUs should be exploding with anti-Israel rancor.

World-class golf, more than 300 days of sunshine a year, flavorsome local seafood, excellent wines and more than 1,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean coastline. There are countless reasons to add Portugal to your bucket list, not least that United Airlines has announced direct flights from New York to Faro, starting in 2025. Me, I might have been living in Lisbon on and off for four years, but I’m continually surprised by new discoveries, from quirky bookstore openings in central Lisbon (Salted books, I love you) to secluded coves or gnarly rock formations in the Algarve’s emblematic places such as Praia do Marinha.