Local life

We Americans have been instructed to burst our buttons with pride over Artemis II’s drive-by of the Moon. But out here in cratering America, far from Mission Control, we remain buttoned-up. This is not due to our skinflint nature or lack of imagination; nah, it’s just that Big Science – “corporate socialism,” as the late parsimonious populist Democratic senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin termed the space program – is spiritless, mechanical and inhuman. In their distaste for massive undertakings – National Greatness, in DC-speak – members of the Leave the Moon Alone caucus are heirs to Henry David Thoreau, who said of a previous exercise in National Greatness: “As for

FanDuel and DraftKings ads spice the early spring airwaves, robots deliver their unimpeachable verdicts on human actions and a family of four shells out 500 bucks for parking and tickets to attend a game. Major League Baseball has returned! At least this year MLB scheduled its Opening Day game – a March 25 interleague (yech!) contest between the New York Yankees and San Francisco Giants – to be played stateside. Mixing America Last-ism with corporate-culture imperialism, six previous Opening Day games have been played on foreign soil. That other countries might have sports of their own annoys the panjandrums of professional baseball and football, who seek to impose spectatorial homogeneity