UFC

When President Trump said in July that he planned to host a Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House lawn next year as part of the U.S.A.’s 250th birthday celebrations, people dismissed it as a typical piece of hyperbole and bluster. “We have a lot of land there,” Trump said, which is somewhat true, but that doesn’t mean that you can plop down an Octagon, right? Well, as it turns out, that’s exactly what it means. Trump is like that boy in the old Twilight Zone episode. Whatever he wishes, comes true. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, UFC boss Dana White, one of Trump’s biggest supporters, said that the UFC 250th anniversary (of the U.S.) is definitely going to happen. “Fighters will be warming up in the White House,” White said.

As the Church of England faces an exodus of parishioners, some of its more inventive clerics have rushed to embrace EDM as a new medium to draw young people back to their faith. “Our 90s-themed silent disco will be appropriate to and respectful of the cathedral,” curiously insisted the Very Reverend David Monteith, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, to much derision over that sacred space’s conversion into a party zone for 3,000 revelers in 2024.

Viral moments from either side of the American divide come so frequently these days that they are forgotten just as fast — but a few stick in our memory as signposts on the wandering, treacherous road we find ourselves on as people who have to share a country. The first is from Kristen Bell’s Instagram, featuring a star-studded cast at dinner at Jimmy Kimmel’s $8 million Idaho fly fishing lodge, featuring Jennifer Aniston, Jimmy Fallon, Courteney Cox, John Mulaney, Olivia Munn, Adam Scott, Jason Bateman, Shiri Appelby, Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid, Bell’s husband Dax Shepard and, of course, Jake Tapper. https://twitter.com/coledelbyck/status/1677334337245642753 “Excited to join your new cult,” the CNN anchor commented on Instagram.

In the mid-2000s, I was an avid fan of mixed martial arts. My friends and I would pool our money to order the pay-per-view events of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the combat sport’s largest promoter. One of the fixtures of UFC broadcasts was — and remains — the color commentary of Joe Rogan. Most people of that era would have been more likely to recognize Rogan as the host of Fear Factor, a hokey NBC gameshow in which contestants attempted to withstand such challenges as being covered in live insects or dropped into deep water while trapped in a car. But my buddies and I were more impressed with his UFC broadcast work. He was knowledgeable about the sport and infectiously enthusiastic, to the degree that we wondered whether he was coked out of his mind.