Spectator Life

In 2013, I was studying for a Master’s degree in Beirut when a bomb went off in Baghdad. I remember receiving a message from a friend checking in to see if I was all right — even though I was 500 miles away. It can be hard to convey to people back in the United States that violence in the Middle East is not necessarily a part of everyday life. At times — in Iraq in the years following the US invasion, for example — it is. But such attacks are usually a tragic anomaly. All this stands in stark contrast to news about the earthquakes in southern Turkey and northern Syria, which struck last week and killed at least 36,000 people.

Progressives have long sought ways to get us out of our cars. In recent months, a little-reported trend has emerged in furtherance of this goal: the elimination of parking minimums for new housing developments. A host of cities has done this, either citywide or in select districts, among them Anchorage, San Jose, Raleigh, Minneapolis, Nashville, and Sacramento. California’s Gavin Newsom recently became the first governor to sign legislation prohibiting parking minimums statewide for projects within a half mile of a major transit stop. Liberal policymakers contend that parking minimums are bad for the climate and make housing needlessly expensive by forcing everyone, including those who don’t own cars, to pay for parking.

In the run up to the Super Bowl, writers were tripping over themselves trying to capture the essence of the Philadelphia Eagles Fan™. Most of these observations focused on the degenerate behavior of a few diehards after key games, or the nonsensical yet diverse array of superstitious traditions (looking at you, guy who runs into the underground pillars on the Broad Street Line on purpose). Some dug up the old chestnut about Santa Claus getting pelted by snowballs at an Eagles game — ignoring that many of the fans responsible for that misadventure died without ever seeing the Birds win a ring.

Republicans are in disarray... over the outcome of the Super Bowl, where they’ll be watching and even if they’ll be watching it at all. In the days leading up to the year’s premier sporting event, I spoke with dozens of House Republicans to get the lowdown on their plans. A bitterly divided House Republican caucus is siding with the underdog Kansas City Chiefs by a vote of 17-10 (five who won’t be watching). One congresswoman thinks this because “Patrick Mahomes is fucking hot” while others back them as they have Mahomes and Travis Kelce as constituents. But some GOP reps are picking the Eagles, because of spousal pressure in Marc Molinaro’s case, or simply because “it’s the Eagles’ year,” according to Darrell Issa.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has released new guidelines on childhood obesity, advocating that children receive medication and even surgery as early as twelve years old to avoid long-term health consequences. The authors of the new guidelines argue against the historical belief that obesity can be overcome exclusively by lifestyle changes. They say that doesn’t adequately address “socioecological, environmental and genetic influences” that affect children. Childhood obesity rates, however, are higher than they’ve been in fifty years — and genetics didn’t cause the concerning rise. The most obvious changes in the Western lifestyle since then have included a massive increase in processed foods and the integration of the internet into everyday life.

Two Democratic lawmakers in Tennessee have introduced a bill that, if passed, would make the day after the Super Bowl a statewide holiday. The initial version of the bill also proposed removing Columbus Day as a holiday. With Republicans dominating the state legislature, two Democrats offering a popular, seemingly apolitical holiday in exchange for eliminating a more controversial, clearly politicized one was unlikely to fly. So it's unsurprising they've dropped that stipulation. The idea of a holiday the day after the Super Bowl has been a pipe dream for NFL fans for almost as long as the Super Bowl has existed, and the subject comes up just about every year around this time.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday in New York. You’re at a bar having some beers with your friends, watching the youngest quarterback matchup ever. You think the Eagles have got this in the bag. In fact, you think they’ll win 33-28 — so you hand the bartender five bucks and enter the establishment’s squares gambling pool, where you’re betting on the final digits of what the score will be. Suddenly, the door bursts open. The cops are here. They shout “we hear there’s gambling going on in this establishment!” and slap the owner with a massive fine. A nightmare? Sure.

It’s an article of faith on the left that misinformation and conspiracy theories originate almost exclusively from the right. But consider the media’s coverage of the latest controversy over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (or any that preceded it). Florida recently rejected a planned Advanced Placement (AP) African American Studies curriculum that DeSantis argued would indoctrinate children. The curriculum includes works from proponents of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the abolition of prisons and police. There are units on Black Queer studies, the case for reparations, “Black feminist literary thought,” BLM, intersectionality, and other pet progressive causes. “In the state of Florida, our education standards required students to study Black history,” DeSantis explained.

In Sunday's AFC Championship game, the refs played a role in the outcome, as they sometimes do in the NFL. Most glaringly, at least according to some fans, the officials in the fourth quarter gave the Chiefs an additional attempt at a third down when they ruled they'd whistled the action dead before a failed Kansas City play, citing the fact that the game clock had begun to tick again despite the Chiefs' second-down play being an incomplete pass. On the Chiefs' next attempt at third down, quarterback Patrick Mahomes was sacked. However, Cincinnati cornerback Eli Apple was called for defensive holding, extending the drive. Kansas City ended up winning the game 23-20 to advance to Super Bowl LVII.

Six months of the year, I’m a (wannabe) Lisboeta, “a person from Lisbon.” A peripatetic British food and travel journalist somewhat scuppered by Brexit, I’m allowed in the Schengen Area for up to ninety days in any 180-day block. I max them out before I’m sent packing. I’ve come to think of these moments in time as “chapters,” in a half-hearted attempt to romanticize the loss of my border privileges. Lisbon is the object of my affections — and has become my base for European chapters from which I breathlessly ping between countries. I try new dishes and try not to fall in love with anyone before I’m ordered home (rather inconvenient: "getting married for the visa" jokes grow less and less funny).

The latest news in the Hamline University saga is that a large majority of the faculty — seventy-one of ninety-two members — have called on university president Fayneese Miller to resign. Miller had played the principal part in the dismissal of art history instructor Erika López Prater, after Prater had shown two images of the Prophet Mohammed in her online art history class. One image was a slide of a fourteenth-century painting by a Muslim artist; the other was Muslim painting from the sixteenth century in which the Prophet is veiled. Condemnation of the Hamline administration for dismissing Prater has been nearly universal in American higher education.

Who is Ali Slagle? A fan of New York Times Cooking might recognize the name: nine of their fifty most popular recipes of 2022 are credited to her, the most of any of their contributors, including household names like J. Kenji Lopez-Alt and Melissa Clark. But despite the tremendous popularity of her recipes, Slagle herself is a bit mysterious. She crops up, cheerfully and occasionally, on NYT Cooking channels. Her 142,000 Instagram followers are a mere fraction of the followings of her food-celebrity contemporaries, like Molly Baz, Alison Roman, or Claire Saffitz. She doesn’t appear to be developing a platform; she has no Twitter, no Substack, no YouTube channel. She appears to live in a camper van.

I rarely open, let alone read, promotional emails, but one I got last summer about the World Equestrian Center in Ocala, Florida captured my attention. The place was described as a “playground for the 1 percent... where that Ralph Lauren picture-perfect fantasy is within reach — if only for a night.” The message referred to rubbing elbows with the rich and famous and I wondered what on earth they were talking about. After all, the super-rich in Florida mostly congregate further south in Palm Beach and the affluent bits of Miami, right? Ocala is a small city ninety miles northwest of Disney World and it’s long billed itself the horse capital of the world.

Few things whip American sports fans into a frenzy more than a downtrodden franchise finally about to get off the schneid. Baseball especially in recent decades has gloried in this, first with the Boston Red Sox ending their eighty-six-year championship drought in 2004 and then the Chicago Cubs breaking the Curse of the Billy Goat that had lasted over a century. That the NFL has its own version of this flies in the face of the league's gushing about its parity of talent. If several teams have gone the entire modern era without sniffing the promised land, surely that parity isn't all it's cracked up to be. Nevertheless, there are a small handful of teams that NFL fans recognize as especially tortured, and few would deny the Buffalo Bills their place as a top woebegone franchise.

The NFL’s regular season has come and gone: the playoffs are upon us. Fantasy football players everywhere must wait until the summer to draft their next winning teams. And the anti-fun freaks at the IRS see all of this as an opportunity to tax the hell out of Americans who just want to enjoy some football. Soon, fantasy football commissioners will be under massive scrutiny by the feds, who are set to crack down on Venmo payments that go to the winners. These commissioners, the unheralded heroes who make their seasons happen, volunteer their time so they can spend an entire season trash-talking their best friends. Thanks to the Democrats, they're now left to wonder if they need to hire a CPA to oversee future draft days.

Nothing says "it’s going to be a fine day" like a catcall. A short line at the coffee shop, great. No pushing and shoving to get on the subway, wonderful. But hearing that whistle when walking past a group of builders up on the scaffolding really makes me smile like nothing else in my morning routine. If I’m lucky, I even get a “looking good, darling.” It’s an act that me and my nameless builder friend have perfected. I blush, he gives me a cheeky smile, we both get on with our day. Yet in London, this morning staple of mine is about to be made punishable by up to two years in prison. Bye bye, builder friend. Late last year, the British government launched their war on ogling.

At long last, Father Time and the Dallas Cowboys have caught up to Tom Brady. When the seven-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback retired for 40 days in early 2022, there were ample reasons to believe it would be short-lived. Brady, like any athlete thought to be the GOAT in their particular sport, is a hypercompetitive freak. What's more, he was coming off a season in which he led the defending champion Buccaneers to a 13-4 record, topped the NFL in passing yards and touchdowns, and was only narrowly eliminated by the team that ended up winning it all that year — all at the age of 44. It would be nigh impossible to look at Tom Brady's football résumé and think he has unfinished business.

There was a time, not long ago, when any NFL franchise with a coaching vacancy was desperately searching for the next Sean McVay. This was explicitly spelled out: we want the next McVay, a literal clone if possible. Now, only six years into his head coaching career and following his first losing season, Sean McVay isn't entirely sure he wants to be Sean McVay anymore; at least not Sean McVay the football coach, at least not for a while. That McVay spent years representing the mold that coaches aspired to had something to do with the cult of the wunderkind. Every few years, there's a new hotshot coordinator or ascendant college coach who is said to be taking the NFL by storm.

Another bowl season has come and gone. For a college football fan such as myself, bowl season has typically been its own holiday. Taking trips to popular vacation destinations like Miami, New Orleans, or Southern California if your program is pretty good, or slightly less popular destinations like Shreveport, Mobile and Birmingham if your program is mediocre. Hanging out with family and catching up with old school chums and seeing who’s getting fatter and who’s getting richer. Participating in low- or high-level alcoholism, depending on your preference. (Like the Air Force, I prefer to Aim High.) I loved bowl season. For years, I used to watch practically every game.

For Christmas this year, Santa Claus brought me the most splendid Maine Mountain Parka from L.L. Bean, rife with thoughtful details and flawless construction from hood to hem. Standing in the living room, I admired the weather-proof cuffs and pulled the oversized zipper with rubber grip pull cord (a must when wearing gloves). I fastened the button-front storm placket — such a satisfyingly haughty act, akin, I’d imagine, to how one of Napoleon’s cavalrymen might have felt strapping on his saber. I flipped the adjustable snorkel hood with its removable faux-fur ruff onto my head and burrowed my hands into the deep snap pockets. I then plopped down on the couch and gazed smugly out the window at the bomb cyclone raging outside.

According to the mainstream media, there’s a national teacher shortage, though ongoing reports of this “catastrophic” phenomenon have left me skeptical. On one hand, there does seem to be a shortage of almost every type of worker these days, yet on the other, public school teaching has traditionally been a comfortable sort of job, offering a pretty predictable schedule, plenty of time off, benefits, and the rewarding opportunity to improve children’s lives. Where I live, teaching is considered a high-class career. It has its fair share of challenges, no doubt, but it's also not a sector where I would expect to see a shortfall of employees.

This week, while politics has resembled something akin to The Real Housewives franchise, I’ve been far more concerned about the horror show that is their outfits. Politicians' dress isn’t just a personal statement; it’s an ideological one. Look at Ron DeSantis. As the Florida governor was sworn in for his second term this week, he donned a crisp blue suit and slicked-back hair, complimenting the dresses of his daughters Madison and Mamie. His four-year-old son, Mason, looked immaculate in a matching suit. Some say shoving a blazer on a child this young is vulgar. I disagree. Mrs. DeSantis’s mint-green cape dress was chic. The whole family’s sartorial elegance oozed American conservatism.

Had Benjamin Franklin stuck around another two centuries, he would have added “Holidays Promise Travel Hell” headlines to his list of life’s certainties, though the Hellfire Club’s most famous member would no doubt take umbrage at the implication. The featured players in America’s security theater, as well as its taxpayer-bailed-out airlines, rival only deadbeat dads in their inability to prepare for annual celebrations. There’s a reason transportation secretary and closet-2024 presidential contender Pete Buttigieg flies private these days, even as he reassures frustrated flyers about the abundant supply of useless meal vouchers and travel credits on offer from America’s most incompetent industry.