Culture

A new bombshell has fallen on the sports-media villa: Dana White cloaked in the glory of a whopping seven-year, $7.7 billion media-rights deal with Paramount to stream all UFC fights on Paramount+ in the United States and select simulcast events on CBS. For the love of everyone’s wallets, goodbye Pay Per View and hello to a new right-wing cultural shift in mainstream sports coverage.  Why is this new deal so relevant? Since the UFC’s inception in 1993, mixed martial arts existed as its own niche category. Critics openly said it wasn’t a real sport. They lampooned the more brutal style of MMA as less skilled and artistic than boxing, once a more revered American pastime.

Back in March, Donald Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History.” Its aim was to counter the “revisionist movement” in our cultural institutions that sought “to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”   Exhibit number one was the Smithsonian Institution, the sprawling agglomeration of museums, libraries, historical landmarks and assorted educational centers in and around Washington DC with affiliate institutions in 47 states.  Founded in 1846, the Smithsonian was the culmination of an earlier movement, supported by such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, to “promote science and the useful arts.

​​President Trump announced a major vibe shift on Truth Social today, declaring that he, like any other sane red-white-and-blue blooded American, finds Sydney Sweeney sexy, especially because she toes the party line. “Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the “HOTTEST” ad out there,” he posted. “It’s for American Eagle, and the jeans are “flying off the shelves.” Go get ‘em, Sydney!” Why Trump put “flying off the shelves” is a question only for advanced semioticians, but the White House’s stance is clear on this cultural hot point: Sydney Sweeney good, left-wing “Nazi” denunciations of Sydney Sweeney bad.  But Trump wasn’t done. He turned his Sydney Sweeney boosterism into a full-blown cultural critique.

Hulk Hogan, who died today at 71, will be sorely missed. But in July 1996, arguably the most famous and beloved pro wrestler of all time was standing in a ring as fans booed and threw trash at him. He had just turned into a bad guy for the first time ever.  This was the second time Hogan would take professional wrestling to unprecedented heights.  Nearly 30 years ago, Hogan formed the villainous “New World Order” (NWO) for Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling (WCW). Because of Hogan’s group, WCW would beat the former top wrestling company, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) for 83 straight weeks in the TV ratings.  No other company had ever beaten WWE in the ratings.

Ever since roughly 2010, politics on both sides of the Atlantic has been dominated in large part by the ‘Great Awokening’, a sudden upsurge among graduate professionals of a kind of radical identitarian politics usually called ‘wokeness’. It has come to define most of the left while the right has reactively defined itself by its opposition. This radical politics appears to be detached from economics and material concerns (a point made forcefully by old-fashioned socialists in places like Jacobin magazine). However, the rise of cultural radicalism among both public and private sector managers has a material cause. That cause is elite overproduction.

“People who have kids do need to have 3 kids to make up for those who have 0 or 1 kid or [the] population will collapse,” Elon Musk recently wrote on X, in response to a post by the influencer Mario Nawfal warning that “if things continue as they are, humans have their days numbered.” This is increasingly the tenor of the right-wing discourse around declining birth rates: it is not enough to feel serious concern about the consequences of fewer humans coming into existence—about schools and colleges shuttering, about pensions running out of funds, about the intangible loss that comes with fewer children, fewer siblings, fewer friends, fewer souls.

One of the first pieces exhibited in Superfine: Tailoring Black Style – The Met’s annual spring Costume Institute exhibition – is a small and faded tan wool livery coat, most likely created by Brooks Brothers, the oldest apparel brand in continuous operation in the States. On its website the New York-based Brooks Brothers proudly claims that since it was founded in 1818 it has dressed no less than “39 presidents, along with industry leaders and cultural innovators.” What it doesn’t say it that it also dressed southern slaves. The mid-19th century tan coat was worn by a black enslaved child, just before the Civil War, at a time when household servants reflected their owner’s status.

Both of my parents are Jewish, as were theirs, going as far back as anybody remembers – probably to Abraham. As with many secular, Jewish-American families, God was practically non-existent in our house, though we still observed holidays like Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Passover. There came a point, however, when I had to ask why we partook in any of these traditions if God, who commanded their observance, wasn’t real. I figured that the Greeks had Zeus, the Romans had Jupiter, the Norse had Odin, and now we have God. This one will pass, too.In college, I studied progressive politics and devoured the writings of Marx and Engels, forming a firm foundation for my socialist beliefs.

The narratives we tell ourselves about the past are hardly set in stone. It’s in this ambiguity where Tancredi Di Carcaci finds inspiration. Through his practice, the British artist contemplates, and sometimes perpetuates, the blurring of straightforward histories, especially that of art, as traditionally passed down. His sculptures – a mix of ceramic works and assemblages combining cast bronze, ceramic and hunks of marble and stone sourced from Siena, Egypt and elsewhere – have aesthetic and thematic roots spanning the Renaissance, neoclassical revival, Romantic painting and 20th-century modernism.“For me, with art, I don't try and restrict myself.

In the 1950s, witch hunts were stoked by pamphlets identifying supposed communists in the media. Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo fell victim to this vicious whispering campaign. He was blacklisted by Hollywood and only given full credit for his work after his death. Today, witch hunts happen on Twitter – with the speed and ferocity of lightning. Kevin Spacey was struck by just such a bolt when he was accused of various sexual assaults on social media and then formally accused in courts in the US and UK – where he was cleared. And now, in trying to recover his life and his reputation after being scorched by the #MeToo movement, the double Oscar-winner has recognized that there is nothing new about his experience.

On paper, last weekend shouldn’t have been any great shakes for movie theater attendance. Audiences were offered, respectively, the second weekend of an African American-targeted horror picture; the fourth weekend of a video game spin-off; the re-release of the final George Lucas Star Wars picture, Revenge of the Sith, which has somehow turned 20 this year; and the major new release of the week, the sequel to the Ben Affleck vehicle The Accountant, which was only modestly successful upon its original release in 2016. None of these should have been particularly notable, and the weekend might have been expected to be another grim disappointment.  Well, this has not happened.

The Met Gala, hosted by the almighty Anna Wintour, will see the world’s most fashionable float up the red carpet on May 5 in New York City. The throngs of designers, models, influencers and celebrities who manage to get the golden-ticket invitation must dress in a style inspired by the theme “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” This theme is inspired from Monica Miller’s 2009 book, “Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity.” Dandyism, we’re told, has its origins in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in the 18th century when slaves were dressed up in an extravagant fashion to please their master’s aesthetic.

For too long derision of the Disney Adult has gone on unchecked. The world has been all too eager to sneer at the oblivious saccharine happiness of the woman – for it is always a woman – who dares to freely enjoy the most magical place on earth. It's easy to place the blame for the ills of modernity on this mouse-ear-bedecked scapegoat, for she embodies all the cringing mannerisms of the aging millennial, from their too-insistent sincerity to their generational refusal to put away childish things long after childhood has passed them by. Despite sharing their normative age and sex, I too have always counted myself among the haters, defining myself against type. “Not like other girls,” I said. “Not like other millennials.” Until this week.

When Tucker Carlson claimed to have been “physically mauled” by a demon in his sleep late last year, it was something of a bellwether: a sign that America’s cultural Right, now in the ascendancy, has persuaded itself to take a symbolic stand against the Enlightenment and the scientific worldview. Looking back on the 2010s and early 2020s, much of the American right now sees an era of secular hubris. The problems of the previous 15 years were put down to a naive faith in human reason; which was then confronted by dark and atavistic forces it couldn’t assimilate. The result had been all sorts of premodern terrors come again: plague, war, popular mania, social order overthrown.  The answer would have to be some sort of return of the spiritual.