Why Doesn’t Anyone Trust the Media?

Anatomy of a credibility crisis

The challenges facing the establishment media are more severe today than ever before. Trust in the press is at a record low, with only a quarter of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine expressing confidence in media organizations. Jobs in journalism, meanwhile, are declining faster than jobs in coal mining: since 2005, the United States has lost more than one third of its newspapers and nearly three quarters of its newspaper journalism positions. Furthermore, recent years have exposed significant professional failures—from the flawed coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic to inadequate reporting on President Biden’s cognitive health. All the while, audiences sift into ever-narrower silos: Substacks, podcasts, livestreams.

Perhaps most telling is the changing relationship between media and political power. There is a palpable sense of surrender in the air. In December, ABC News agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to settle a defamation suit he had filed against the network. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, later settled its own Trump lawsuit, also for $16 million, three weeks before securing Federal Communications Commission approval for its merger with Skydance Media. Trump has since filed a host of additional suits against media organizations, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and threatened the broadcast licenses of major networks.

All of this raises pressing questions: In an era of declining trust, industry collapse, and technological disruption, does the media, as we’ve historically understood it, have a future? What essential functions does professional journalism serve that cannot be replaced by other forms of information gathering and dissemination? And why, finally, do Americans view the media with such skepticism?

Harper’s Magazine invited four leading media observers to grapple with these questions and to consider how we got here in the first place, seeking neither to defend nor condemn wholesale, but to examine honestly what—if anything—we lose if traditional media continues on its current trajectory.

The following Harper’s Forum is based on a conversation that took place at the NoMo SoHo hotel, in New York City, on July 23, 2025. Harper’s Magazine editor Christopher Carroll served as moderator.

Participants:

JELANI COBB: Jelani Cobb is the dean of the Columbia Journalism School and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author, most recently, of Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here.

TAYLOR LORENZ: Taylor Lorenz is an independent journalist and the founder of User Mag, a Substack publication. She is the author of Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.

JACK SHAFER: Jack Shafer is a media critic who has written for Politico, Reuters, and Slate.
He previously edited Washington City Paper and SF Weekly.

MAX TANI: Max Tani is a reporter at Semafor covering media, politics, and technology.
He previously covered the White House for Politico.

1. Conspiracy, Culpability, Covid, and Collapse

Christopher Carroll: Why don’t we begin with the biggest question. A Gallup poll from last year showed that the media was the least trusted civic or political institution in the United States—among other things, Americans trust Congress more than they trust the media. What accounts for this? Why don’t we trust the media?

by Christopher Carroll, Jelani Cobb, Taylor Lorenz, Jack Schafer and Max Tani, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Collages by Mark Harris

College Football: Big Money, Big Troubles

College football programs could spend $200 million in buyouts. Spare us the money moaning.

If you watched college football on Saturday, you saw yet another set of misleading political ads urging you to call your local congressman and tell them to SAVE COLLEGE SPORTS! The latest ones give the impression that women’s and Olympic sports are in trouble because having to pay athletes a salary is going to bankrupt their schools.

On Sunday, Penn State announced it has fired 12th-year coach James Franklin, for whom they now owe a roughly $45 million buyout.

These schools aren’t broke. They’re just wildly irresponsible spenders.

And if they find a private equity firm to come rushing to their rescue, as the Big Ten is actively seeking, they’ll just find a way to light that money on fire, too.

We’re only halfway through the 2025 regular season, and it’s clear we’re headed to a full-on coaching carousel bloodletting. Stanford (Troy Taylor), UCLA (DeShaun Foster), Virginia Tech (Brent Pry), Oklahoma State (Mike Gundy), Arkansas (Sam Pittman), Oregon State (Trent Bray) and now Penn State have already sent their guys packing, and the likes of Florida (Billy Napier), Wisconsin (Luke Fickell) and several more will likely come.

By year’s end, the combined cost of those buyouts could well exceed $200 million. Let that sink in for a second. Supposed institutions of “higher learning” have managed to negotiate themselves into paying $200 million to people who will no longer be working for them.

Just how much is $200 million? Well, for one thing, it’s enough to pay for the scholarships of roughly 5,000 women’s and Olympic sports athletes.

You may be asking yourself: How do schools keep entering into these ridiculous, one-sided coaching contracts that cost more than the House settlement salary cap ($20.5 million) to extricate themselves from?

Well, consider the dynamics at play in those negotiations.

On one side of the table, we have an athletics director who spends 95 percent of their time on things like fundraising, marketing, facilities, answering fan emails about the long lines of concession stands, and so on. Once every four or five years, if that, they have to hire or renew a highly paid football coach, often in the span of 24 to 48 hours.

And on the other side, we have Jimmy Sexton. Or Trace Armstrong. Or another super-agent whose sole job is to negotiate lucrative coaching contracts. It’s a bigger mismatch than Penn State-UCLA … uh, Penn State-Northwestern … uh … you know what I mean.

Franklin’s extremely one-sided contract is a perfect example. (...)

Coaching salaries have been going up and up for decades, of course, but that 2021-22 cycle reached new heights in absurdity. In addition to Franklin’s windfall, USC gave Oklahoma’s Riley a 10-year, $110 million contract, and LSU gave Brian Kelly a 10-year, $95 million deal; and the most insane of all, Michigan State’s 10-year, $75 million deal for the since-fired Mel Tucker.

As of today, none of the four schools has gotten the return they were seeking. (...)

Now, according to USA Today’s coaching salary database published last week, none of the 30 highest-paid coaches in the country have a buyout of less than $20 million.

In the past, we might have just rolled our eyes, proclaimed, “You idiots!” and moved on. But the current college sports climate all but demands that there needs to be more accountability of the people making these deals.

by Stewart Mandel, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Alex Slitz/Getty

[ed. I don't follow college football much, but from what I do pick up it seems like the transfer portal, NIL, legitimized sports gambling, conference reorganizations, big media money, and who knows what else have really had an overall negative effect on the sport, resulting in an ugly mercenary ethic that's now common. See also: College football is absolutely unhinged right now. It’s exactly why we love it; and, Bill Belichick pledged an NFL approach at North Carolina. Program insiders call it dysfunctional (The Athletic). 

Then there's this: College football’s ‘shirtless dudes’ trend is all the rage. And could be curing male loneliness? Can't see the connection but imagine women sure as hell won't be sitting anywhere near these guys. Don't think that's going to help with the loneliness problem.]  

The Uncool: A Memoir

Who Is Cameron Crowe Kidding With the Title of His Memoir?

One of the greatest tricks cool people play on the rest of us is convincing us in their memoirs that they were and are profoundly uncool. Cameron Crowe comes right out with the pandering on his book’s cover: “The Uncool: A Memoir.”

The title refers to a scene in “Almost Famous” (2000), the tender film he wrote and directed. The headstrong rock critic Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is consoling the Crowe-like hero, a floppy-haired teenage rock journalist, over the telephone at a low moment. Bangs says, “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” It’s a good line. Call me anytime, Bangs adds: “I’m always home. I’m uncool.”

Never mind whether Lester Bangs was plausibly uncool. How about Crowe? Here’s a man who spent his adolescence in the 1970s careening around the United States for Rolling Stone magazine, a boy wonder in the intimate and extended company of David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Gram Parsons, the Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac, Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson, the Eagles, Todd Rundgren and Yes, about whom he was writing profiles and cover stories.

Occasionally, he’d fly home to see his mother, check out high school for a day or two, then blearily type up his road memories and interview notes. Sounds uncool to me.

The second act of Crowe’s career began when, in his early 20s, he went undercover for a year, posing as a high school student in San Diego, and wrote the experience up in a book called “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Crowe and the director Amy Heckerling turned it into a wide-awake 1982 movie that provided rocket fuel for Sean Penn, who played the perpetually stoned surfer Jeff Spicoli.

Crowe, who burned out young as a journalist, pivoted to film. He wrote and directed “Say Anything” (1989), with John Cusack, Ione Skye and a famous boombox; “Singles” (1992), a romantic early look at the Seattle grunge scene; and “Jerry Maguire” (1996), with Tom Cruise and Renée Zellweger, before winning an Oscar for his “Almost Famous” screenplay. All this while married to Nancy Wilson, the guitarist in Heart. No sane person would trade their allotment of experience for this man’s. Omnidirectionally uncool.

When you read Crowe’s memoir, though, you begin to see things from his unhip point of view. He had no interest in drink and drugs while on the road, though Gregg Allman tried to hook him up with a speedball. He seems to have mostly abstained from sex, too, though there’s something about his adoration in the presence of his rock heroes that makes it seem he’s losing his virginity every few pages.

His editors at Rolling Stone thought he was uncool, increasingly as time went on, because the acolyte in him overrode the journalist. He Forrest Gumped along. Bands liked having Crowe around because he was adorable and a bit servile; he’d often leave out the bits they wanted left out. (...)

Crowe thought rock writers were snobs. He moved in with Glenn Frey and Don Henley of the Eagles while profiling them, for example, and he was in the room when they wrote “One of These Nights” and “Lyin’ Eyes.” It bugged him to see them put down:

A collection of rock writers at a party would challenge each other on their musical taste, each one going further and further into the world of the obscure until they’d collectively decided that “Self Portrait” was Bob Dylan’s greatest album and the Eagles barely deserved a record contract.

He especially liked Frey, because his message to the world seemed to be: “Lead with your optimism.” This was Crowe’s mother’s ethos, as well, and it chimed with his own. It’s a worldview that has worked for him in his best movies, though he’s also made gooey flops. The world needs its Paul McCartneys as much as it needs its Lou Reeds. It makes sense that Reed only sneered when he met Crowe. (...)

The crucial thing to know about this book is that it overlaps almost exactly with the story Crowe tells in “Almost Famous.” If you remember the phrases “It’s all happening” and “Don’t take drugs,” or the young woman — a “Band-Aid” in the movie’s argot — who is offered for a case of Heineken, or the rock star who briefly kills an important story, or Crowe’s flight-attendant sister, or the group sex scene that seems like a series of flickering veils, or the L.A. hotel known as the Riot House, or Lester Bangs acting out in a glassed-in first-floor radio studio, it’s all here and more.

The book reads like a novelization of the movie, so much so that it makes you consider the nature of memory. I’m not suggesting Crowe is making things up in this memoir. I’m merely suggesting that the stories he wrote for the movie may have been so reverberant that they began to subtly bleed into his own.

The secret to the movie, one that most people miss, Crowe says, is the empty chair at the family’s dining-room table. It belonged to Crowe’s older sister, Cathy, who was troubled from birth and died by suicide at 19. This detail reminds you how relatively sanitized this book otherwise is. There is little that’s grainy or truly revelatory about his own life and loves. The book ends before his directing career has begun, thus leaving room for a sequel. Everything is a bit gauzy, soft-core.

God help me, I read this book quickly and enjoyed it anyway: The backstage details alone keep this kite afloat. It got to me in the same way “Almost Famous” always gets to me, despite the way that movie sets off my entire bank of incoming sentimentality detectors. If you can watch the “Tiny Dancer” scene without blinking back a tear, you’re a stronger person than me. 

by Dwight Garner, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Neal Preston

China OS vs. America OS

Xu Bing, installation view of Tianshu (Book From the Sky), 1987–1991, at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2018.

via:

[ed. See: China OS vs. America OS (Concurrent):]

"China and America are using different versions of operating systems. This OS can be understood as a combination of software and hardware. Du Lei pointed out that China has faster hardware updates, but has many problems on the software side. I think this metaphor is particularly fitting.

I'd like to start by having you both share your understanding of what constitutes China's OS versus America's OS. One interpretation is: America continues to rely on email and webpage systems for government services, while China has adopted the more efficient WeChat platform (where almost all civic services can be quickly completed). The hardware gap is striking: China's high-speed rail system represents the rapid flow of resources within its system, while America's infrastructure remains at a much older level. It's as if China has upgraded its hardware with several powerful chips, greatly accelerating data transmission, while America still operates at 20th-century speeds. (...)

China operates with high certainty about the future while maintaining a pessimistic outlook, which significantly shapes its decision-making processes. In contrast, American society tends to be optimistic about the future but lacks a definite vision for how that future should unfold.

Based on these different expectations about the future, the two countries produce completely different decision-making logic. For example, if China's expectations about the future are both definite and pessimistic, it would conclude: future resources are limited, great power competition is zero-sum. If I don't compete, resources will be taken by you; if I don't develop well, you will lead. This expectation about the future directly influences China's political, military, economic, and technological policies.

But if you're optimistic about the future, believing the future is abundant, thinking everyone can get a piece of the pie, then you won't be so urgent. You'll think this is a positive-sum game, the future can continue developing, everyone can find their suitable position, with enough resources to meet everyone's needs.

I think China and America don't have such fundamental differences, but their expectations about the future have huge disparities. This disparity ultimately leads to different decisions with far-reaching impacts."

Stanley Cup Madness: The Great Silent Majority of American Basicness

I first noticed the prevalence of the Stanley Quencher H2.0 FlowState™ tumbler last April when I wrote about #WaterTok. I’m still unclear what to make of #WaterTok, but I eventually settled on the idea that it’s several subcultures overlapping — weight-loss communities, Mormons, and those people who don’t like the “taste” of water. But in the majority of the #WaterTok videos I watched, people were using Stanley’s Quencher to carry around their liquid Jolly Ranchers. And the ubiquity of the cup has sort of haunted me ever since.

I grew up in the suburbs, but I don’t live there anymore. So every time the great silent majority of American basicness summons a new totem to gather around, I can’t help but try and make sense of it. Was this a car thing? A college football tailgate thing? An EDM thing? Cruise ships? Barstool Sports was of no help here, so I filed it away until this Christmas when it exploded across the web and forced me to finally figure out what the heck was going on. And it turns out, the Stanley cup’s transformation into a must-have last year is actually, in many ways, the story of everything now.

CNBC put together a great explainer on this. Stanley, a manly hundred-year-old brand primarily aimed at hikers and blue-collar workers, was rediscovered in 2019 by the bloggers behind a women’s lifestyle and shopping site called The Buy Guide. They told CNBC that even though the Quencher model of the cup was hard to find, no other cup on the market had what they were looking for. Which is a bizarrely passionate stance to take on a water bottle, but from their post about the cup, those attributes were: “Large enough to keep up with our busy days, a handle to carry it wherever we go, dishwasher safe, fits into our car cupholders, keeps ice cold for 12+ hours, and a straw.”

The Buy Guide team then sent a Quencher to Emily Maynard Johnson from The Bachelor after she had a baby because “there is no thirst like nursing mom thirst!” Johnson posted about it on Instagram and it started to gain some traction. The Buy Guide then connected with an employee at Stanley, bought 5,000 Quenchers from the company directly, set up a Shopify site, and sold them to their readers. According to The Buy Guide, they sold out in five days. All of these things are very normal things to do when you discover a cool bottle.

After mom internet started buzzing about the tumbler — a corner of the web that is to dropshipping what dads are to Amazon original streaming shows — Stanley hired Terence Reilly, the marketer credited for reinventing Crocs. Reading between the lines of what Reilly has said about his work at Stanley, it seems like his main strategy for both Crocs and the Quencher was capitalizing on internet buzz and growing it into otaku product worship. Or as Inc. phrased it in their feature on him, he uses a “scarcity model” to whip up interest. Cut to three years later, now we’re seeing mini-riots over limited edition Stanleys at Target.

My reference point for this kind of marketing is the Myspace era of music and fashion, when record companies and stores like Hot Topic and Spencer’s Gifts were using early social media to identify niche fandoms and convert them into mainstream hits. In this allegory, Target has become the Hot Topic of white women with disposable income. And their fingerless gloves and zipper pants are fun water bottles and that one perfume everyone in Manhattan is wearing right now.

I’m always a little wary about giving someone like Reilly credit for single-handedly jumpstarting a craze like this — and I am extremely aware that he is a male executive getting credit for something that was, and still is, actually driven by women content creators — but this is the second time he’s pulled this off. Which, to me, says he’s at least semi-aware of how to pick the right fandoms. He may not be actively involved in the horse race, but he clearly has an eye for betting on them. And, yes, the Stanley craze is very real.

It’s turned into a reported $750 million in revenue for Stanley and both Google Trends and TikTok’s Creative Center show massive growth in interest around the bottle between 2019 and now. With a lot of that growth happening this year. On TikTok, the hashtag #Stanley has been viewed a billion times since 2020 and more than half of that traffic happened in the last 120 days.

And with all viral phenomenon involving things women do, there are, of course, a lot of men on sites like Reddit and X adding to the discourse about the Quenchers with posts that essentially say, “why women like cups?” And if you’re curious how that content ecosystem operates, you can check out my video about it here. But I’m, personally, more interested in what the Stanley fandom says about how short-form video is evolving.

Over the last three years, most major video sites have attempted to beat TikTok at its own game. All this has done, however, is give more places for TikToks to get posted. And so, the primarily engine of TikTok engagement — participation, rather than sharing — has spread to places like Instagram, YouTube, and X. If the 2010s were all about sharing content, it seems undeniable that the 2020s are all about making content in tandem with others. An internet-wide flashmob of Ice Bucket Challenge videos that are all, increasingly, focused on selling products. Which isn’t an accident.

TikTok has spent years trying to bring Chinese-style social e-commerce to the US. In September, the app finally launched a tool to sell products directly. If you’re curious what all this looks like when you put it together, here’s one of the most unhinged Stanley cup videos I’ve seen so far. And, yes, before you ask, there are affiliates links on the user’s Amazon page for all of these. [ed. non-downloadable - read more]

by Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day | Read more:
Image: Stanley/via

[ed. Obviously old news by now (10 months!) but still something I wondered about at the time (and quickly forgot). How do these things go so viral? It'd be like L.L. Bean suddenly being on red carpets and fashion runways. There must be some hidden money-making scheme/agenda at work, right? Well, partly. See also: Dead Internet Theory (BGR).]

Six-Seven

It originated in a rap song, then featured in South Park, and is now the bane of schoolteachers in the US and UK as pupils shout it out at random. How did it become such a thing?

Name: Six-seven.

Age: Less than a year old.

Appearance: Everywhere.

What does six-seven signify? You know, just six-seven. Six-sevvuhnn!

Is it a code? No, it’s six-seven!

Is it a cool way to say someone is at sixes and sevens, ie in a state of disorder or confusion? It is definitely not that.

Then what does it mean? It’s just something the young people of today are saying. Or shouting.

You mean it’s fashionable to yell out two consecutive numbers? It’s more than fashionable – it’s a plague. Six-seven has become the bane of school teachers everywhere.

Why? Because it’s maddening. Imagine telling your students to turn to page 67, only for all of them to shout “six-seven!” at you.

No, I mean why are the children doing that? Even they don’t know why.

It must come from somewhere. Yes, but I should preface any explanation by saying: it’s a long story and it doesn’t matter.

I’ll be the judge of that. Fine. The phrase “six-seven”, in its modern sense, appears to originate with the Philadelphia rapper Skrilla’s 2024 track Doot Doot (6 7), in which it’s either a reference to police radio code, or 67th Street, or something else.

I see. But it really went viral when the song was repeatedly used to soundtrack video clips of the NBA basketball star LaMelo Ball, who is, as it happens, 6ft 7in.

OK, I think I get it. Trust me, you don’t. Somewhere along the line the phrase acquired an accompanying hand gesture: two upturned palms alternately rising and falling, like weighing scales.

In that case, perhaps it’s a reference to something being nothing special, ie a six or a seven on a scale from one to 10? Nice try, but no. The phrase has become such a phenomenon in the US that it was the basis for last week’s South Park episode, in which it sparks a moral panic.

And it’s now reached the classrooms of the UK? Apparently it has. Thus ends the story of six-seven.

You were right. That was long, and it didn’t matter. Not in the least. It’s a bit of meme slang that refers only to itself, advertising nothing beyond the average 13-year-old’s capacity for being annoying and a corresponding willingness to flog a dead horse.

What can be done about it? Some teachers have banned it, but others have incorporated six-seven into their teaching.

I suppose it will be over soon enough. Adults are talking about it, so it already is.

by Pass Notes, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Alarmy

[ed. I tested it out on my grandkids yesterday (ages 7 and 9) and they were both well aware of it, but as a 'thing', thought it was kind of lame already. But! As one commenter noted, if you multiply six and seven you get 42 - “the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything” in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. So there's that.]

Norman Greenbaum

Norman Greenbaum, singer, guitarist, songwriter

Spirit in the Sky started as an old blues riff I’d been playing since my college days in Boston, but I didn’t know what to do with it. After I moved to LA, a guy I knew came up with a way of putting a fuzzbox inside my Fender Telecaster, which created the distinctive sound on Spirit in the Sky.

I’d come across a greeting card with a picture of some Native Americans praying to the “spirit in the sky”. The phrase stuck in my head. One night I was watching country music on TV and the singer Porter Wagoner sang a gospel song, which gave me the idea to write religious lyrics. Although I came from a semi-religious Jewish family, I wasn’t religious, but found myself writing Christian lyrics such as “When I die and they lay me to rest, I’m going to the place that’s the best” and “Gotta have a friend in Jesus”. It came together very quickly. I survived a car crash and now give thanks to the spirit every day

Soon after that, I was playing the Troubadour club in LA when the Lovin’ Spoonful’s producer Erik Jacobsen walked in. He said he had a production deal with Warner Brothers and was interested in signing me. When we recorded Spirit in the Sky for my debut album, the finished mix sent shivers up my spine. Initially, Warner said a four-minute single containing lyrics about Jesus would never get played on pop radio, but eventually they relented. In 1969, it sold two million copies. But I couldn’t recreate the success.

In 1986, I was working as a cook when Dr and the Medics took it back to No 1 in the UK. Then Gareth Gates’s 2003 version meant it was No 1 in three different decades. It’s been in countless movies, including Apollo 13, Oceans 11 and Guardians of the Galaxy. I’m 82. A few years ago, I was a passenger in a car crash and spent three weeks in a coma. I feel like I was granted another life. So now every day, I pray and give thanks to the spirit in the sky.

Erik Jacobsen, producer

I saw Norman at a hootenanny at the Troubadour singing one song, School for Sweet Talk, but he said: “I’ve got a million songs I’d love to play for ya.” It turned out he’d had a minor hit called The Eggplant That Ate Chicago with a group called Dr West’s Medicine Show and Junk Band and had a whole raft of crazy songs about goats, chickens or a Chinese guy who ate some acid. I said: “Let’s make some records that somebody might like.”

I put him together with Norman Mayell, the drummer from San Francisco psychedelic group Sopwith Camel, and Doug Killmer, a bassist, who’d played a lot of black music. The Spirit in the Sky riff originated in an old John Lee Hooker tune called Boogie Chillen’ and set the tone for where the song went, but the rhythm track sounded too loose. I got Norman to bring his acoustic guitar in and we recorded two performances – each slightly different – and made it stereo. Then we brought in gospel singers the Stovall Singers and their church-type clapping became a key part of the groove. A guitarist called Russell DaShiell played a hell of a solo. By now, the track was sounding immense, but when I heard Norman’s little vocal, my heart sank. It just wasn’t heavy enough, so once again I recorded two performances and combined the two together. I thought: “Thank God!” It sounded amazing. (...)

The funny thing is that when we went in to record it, my engineer was sick but we went ahead anyway with just a handful of little mics, no headphones and no sound baffling. Every sound was coming in on every mic, but it sounded great. For years people asked: “How in the world did you get that sound?” I said: “I just pointed the amps right at the drums. I had no idea what I was doing.”

by Dave Simpson, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Henry Diltz/Corbis/Getty Images
[ed. I think Norman (Iron Butterfly and Jimi) did more to invent the term "heavy" back in the late-60s than anybody else - along with this new thing called a fuzz box. See also: The Uncool by Cameron Crowe - Inside Rock's Wildest Decade (Guardian).]

The Team That Makes Mariners Games More Fun

Inside the Mariners control room at T-Mobile Park on Friday afternoon, more than a dozen staff members operating cameras, video screens and soundboards were united by a single mission: Craft a unique, rallying gameday experience with the M’s backed against a wall.

The Mariners and their fans needed a comeback. After losing Games 3 and 4 of the American League Championship Series in Seattle this week, the chance to clinch a first-ever World Series berth at T-Mobile Park had slipped away. Now, headed into Game 5 against the Toronto Blue Jays, the control room was preparing for the last guaranteed baseball game in the Emerald City this season.

(The ALCS heads back to Ontario to finish out the series on Sunday for Game 6 and Monday for a winner-take-all Game 7, if necessary.) [ed. Necessary. Tonight's the night!]

So how do you get a sellout crowd of M’s fans onto their feet and cheering like there’s no tomorrow? And how do you keep folks excited and smiling for nine innings (or more) when the games can be so stressful that smartwatches send out cardio warnings?

“Ultimately it’s just knowing the fans, knowing the team and knowing your content,” said Nicholas Sybouts, coordinator of game entertainment for the Mariners.

Three hours before first pitch on Friday, Sybouts and Tyler Thompson, the Mariners’ director of game entertainment and experiential marketing, were poring over a thick stack of papers that detailed the schedule for the game. Not the baseball itself, mind you. Each minute of the game off the field is carefully orchestrated, from the ceremonial first pitch to the team’s famous salmon run and late-game rally videos.

Thompson said well-timed rally videos — featuring everything from breathing exercises to sea shanties and the fan-favorite Windows desktop crash screen — have been winning strategies for reviving the crowd this season at T-Mobile Park. A good idea can come from anywhere, Sybouts said. He and Thompson create a storyboard for each video before sending it to a team of motion graphic animators to bring the idea to life.

The team creates so many ideas, in fact, that they have filled up an entire binder that’s divided into subgroups that reflect the tone of the game.

“You don’t want to play a cute otter video when the team is down,” Sybouts said.

 

Half of the entries are highlighted green, which means they were added for the postseason. Control room operators Edward Cunningham and Zachary McHugh are in charge of queuing up each video onto the ballpark’s enormous video board.

“We’ve been rolling out some new ones,” Cunningham said. One of them, dubbed the “horror rally,” quotes a sound bite from the Texas Rangers broadcast booth, which called T-Mobile Park “a nightmare” for opposing teams.

Running the scoreboard is no walk in the park. The team reacts in real time and efficiently communicates with each other to line up videos that fit the tone of any given moment in a game.

“In baseball, anything can happen,” Cunningham said. “So, it kind of keeps us on our toes a lot.”

Throughout a season, about 2.5 million fans come through the ballpark, Sybouts said. Being able to serve sold-out crowds during the postseason has been special, said Sybouts, who was born in Yakima and is a lifelong Mariners fan.

“People are doing so much to be here,” he said. “They’re finding tickets, they’re taking time off work. So many people’s lives are invested in Mariners baseball right now, and it means the world that we could help create unforgettable experiences for them.” 

by Nicole Pasia, Seattle Times | Read more:
Images: Ivy Ceballo

[ed. Historic night tonight. Go Ms! Update: Not to be, unfortunately... oh well, still a great, great season, just two runs short. Toronto now gets to face this guy: Shohei Ohtani just played the greatest game in baseball history (WSJ):]

This is Beethoven at a piano. This is Shakespeare with a quill. This is Michael Jordan in the Finals. This is Tiger Woods in Sunday red.

This is too good to be true with no reason to doubt it. This is the beginning of every baseball conversation and the end of the debate: Shohei Ohtani is the best baseball player who has ever played the game, the most talented hitter and pitcher of an era in which data and nutrition have made an everyman’s sport a game for superhumans. And Friday night, when he helped his Los Angeles Dodgers win the pennant with a 5-1 victory over the Milwaukee Brewers in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, was his Mona Lisa.

[ed. See also: Words (and Stats) Struggle to Capture Shohei Ohtani’s GOAT Game (Ringer).]

For one night, we marveled anew at perhaps the most impressive player in baseball history, as he produced perhaps the most impressive postseason game in baseball history. And for one night, Ohtani seemed less like a means to the Dodgers’ success than the Dodgers seemed like a means to Ohtani’s.

Enshittification: Why Everything Sucks Now

We all feel it: Our once-happy digital spaces have become increasingly less user-friendly and more toxic, cluttered with extras nobody asked for and hardly anybody wants. There’s even a word for it: “enshittification,” named 2023 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. The term was coined by tech journalist/science fiction author Cory Doctorow, a longtime advocate of digital rights. Doctorow has spun his analysis of what’s been ailing the tech industry into an eminently readable new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It. (...)

People generally use “enshittification” colloquially to mean “the degradation in the quality and experience of online platforms over time.” Doctorow’s definition is more specific, encompassing “why an online service gets worse, how that worsening unfolds,” and how this process spreads to other online services, such that everything is getting worse all at once.

For Doctorow, enshittification is a disease with symptoms, a mechanism, and an epidemiology. It has infected everything from Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google, to Airbnb, dating apps, iPhones, and everything in between. “For me, the fact that there were a lot of platforms that were going through this at the same time is one of the most interesting and important factors in the critique,” he said. “It makes this a structural issue and not a series of individual issues.”

It starts with the creation of a new two-sided online product of high quality, initially offered at a loss to attract users—say, Facebook, to pick an obvious example. Once the users are hooked on the product, the vendor moves to the second stage: degrading the product in some way for the benefit of their business customers. This might include selling advertisements, scraping and/or selling user data, or tweaking algorithms to prioritize content the vendor wishes users to see rather than what those users actually want.

This locks in the business customers, who, in turn, invest heavily in that product, such as media companies that started Facebook pages to promote their published content. Once business customers are locked in, the vendor can degrade those services too—i.e., by de-emphasizing news and links away from Facebook—to maximize profits to shareholders. Voila! The product is now enshittified.

The four horsemen of the shitocalypse

Doctorow identifies four key factors that have played a role in ushering in an era that he has dubbed the “Enshittocene.” The first is competition (markets), in which companies are motivated to make good products at affordable prices, with good working conditions, because otherwise customers and workers will go to their competitors. The second is government regulation, such as antitrust laws that serve to keep corporate consolidation in check, or levying fines for dishonest practices, which makes it unprofitable to cheat.

The third is interoperability: the inherent flexibility of digital tools, which can play a useful adversarial role. “The fact that enshittification can always be reversed with a dis-enshittifiting counter-technology always acted as a brake on the worst impulses of tech companies,” Doctorow writes. Finally, there is labor power; in the case of the tech industry, highly skilled workers were scarce and thus had considerable leverage over employers.

All four factors, when functioning correctly, should serve as constraints to enshittification. However, “One by one each enshittification restraint was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittification impulse unchecked,” Doctorow writes. Any “cure” will require reversing those well-established trends.

But isn’t all this just the nature of capitalism? Doctorow thinks it’s not, arguing that the aforementioned weakening of traditional constraints has resulted in the usual profit-seeking behavior producing very different, enshittified outcomes. “Adam Smith has this famous passage in Wealth of Nations about how it’s not due to the generosity of the baker that we get our bread but to his own self-regard,” said Doctorow. “It’s the fear that you’ll get your bread somewhere else that makes him keep prices low and keep quality high. It’s the fear of his employees leaving that makes him pay them a fair wage. It is the constraints that causes firms to behave better. You don’t have to believe that everything should be a capitalist or a for-profit enterprise to acknowledge that that’s true.”

Our wide-ranging conversation below has been edited for length to highlight the main points of discussion.

Ars Technica: I was intrigued by your choice of framing device, discussing enshittification as a form of contagion.

Cory Doctorow: I’m on a constant search for different framing devices for these complex arguments. I have talked about enshittification in lots of different ways. That frame was one that resonated with people. I’ve been a blogger for a quarter of a century, and instead of keeping notes to myself, I make notes in public, and I write up what I think is important about something that has entered my mind, for better or for worse. The downside is that you’re constantly getting feedback that can be a little overwhelming. The upside is that you’re constantly getting feedback, and if you pay attention, it tells you where to go next, what to double down on.

Another way of organizing this is the Galaxy Brain meme, where the tiny brain is “Oh, this is because consumers shopped wrong.” The medium brain is “This is because VCs are greedy.” The larger brain is “This is because tech bosses are assholes.” But the biggest brain of all is “This is because policymakers created the policy environment where greed can ruin our lives.” There’s probably never going to be just one way to talk about this stuff that lands with everyone. So I like using a variety of approaches. I suck at being on message. I’m not going to do Enshittification for the Soul and Mornings with Enshittifying Maury. I am restless, and my Myers-Briggs type is ADHD, and I want to have a lot of different ways of talking about this stuff.

Ars Technica: One site that hasn’t (yet) succumbed is Wikipedia. What has protected Wikipedia thus far?

Cory Doctorow: Wikipedia is an amazing example of what we at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) call the public interest Internet. Internet Archive is another one. Most of these public interest Internet services start off as one person’s labor of love, and that person ends up being what we affectionately call the benevolent dictator for life. Very few of these projects have seen the benevolent dictator for life say, “Actually, this is too important for one person to run. I cannot be the keeper of the soul of this project. I am prone to self-deception and folly just like every other person. This needs to belong to its community.” Wikipedia is one of them. The founder, my friend Jimmy Wales, woke up one day and said, “No individual should run Wikipedia. It should be a communal effort.”

There’s a much more durable and thick constraint on the decisions of anyone at Wikipedia to do something bad. For example, Jimmy had this idea that you could use AI in Wikipedia to help people make entries and navigate Wikipedia’s policies, which are daunting. The community evaluated his arguments and decided—not in a reactionary way, but in a really thoughtful way—that this was wrong. Jimmy didn’t get his way. It didn’t rule out something in the future, but that’s not happening now. That’s pretty cool.

Wikipedia is not just governed by a board; it’s also structured as a nonprofit. That doesn’t mean that there’s no way it could go bad. But it’s a source of friction against enshittification. Wikipedia has its entire corpus irrevocably licensed as the most open it can be without actually being in the public domain. Even if someone were to capture Wikipedia, there’s limits on what they could do to it.

There’s also a labor constraint in Wikipedia in that there’s very little that the leadership can do without bringing along a critical mass of a large and diffuse body of volunteers. That cuts against the volunteers working in unison—they’re not represented by a union; it’s hard for them to push back with one voice. But because they’re so diffuse and because there’s no paychecks involved, it’s really hard for management to do bad things. So if there are two people vying for the job of running the Wikimedia Foundation and one of them has got nefarious plans and the other doesn’t, the nefarious plan person, if they’re smart, is going to give it up—because if they try to squeeze Wikipedia, the harder they squeeze, the more it will slip through their grasp.

So these are structural defenses against enshittification of Wikipedia. I don’t know that it was in the mechanism design—I think they just got lucky—but it is a template for how to run such a project. It does raise this question: How do you build the community? But if you have a community of volunteers around a project, it’s a model of how to turn that project over to that community.

Ars Technica: Your case studies naturally include the decay of social media, notably Facebook and the social media site formerly known as Twitter. How might newer social media platforms resist the spiral into “platform decay”?

Cory Doctorow: What you want is a foundation in which people on social media face few switching costs. If the social media is interoperable, if it’s federatable, then it’s much harder for management to make decisions that are antithetical to the interests of users. If they do, users can escape. And it sets up an internal dynamic within the firm, where the people who have good ideas don’t get shouted down by the people who have bad but more profitable ideas, because it makes those bad ideas unprofitable. It creates both short and long-term risks to the bottom line.

There has to be a structure that stops their investors from pressurizing them into doing bad things, that stops them from rationalizing their way into complying. I think there’s this pathology where you start a company, you convince 150 of your friends to risk their kids’ college fund and their mortgage working for you. You make millions of users really happy, and your investors come along and say, “You have to destroy the life of 5 percent of your users with some change.” And you’re like, “Well, I guess the right thing to do here is to sacrifice those 5 percent, keep the other 95 percent happy, and live to fight another day, because I’m a good guy. If I quit over this, they’ll just put a bad guy in who’ll wreck things. I keep those 150 people working. Not only that, I’m kind of a martyr because everyone thinks I’m a dick for doing this. No one understands that I have taken the tough decision.”

I think that’s a common pattern among people who, in fact, are quite ethical but are also capable of rationalizing their way into bad things. I am very capable of rationalizing my way into bad things. This is not an indictment of someone’s character. But it’s why, before you go on a diet, you throw away the Oreos. It’s why you bind yourself to what behavioral economists call “Ulysses pacts“: You tie yourself to the mast before you go into the sea of sirens, not because you’re weak but because you’re strong enough now to know that you’ll be weak in the future.

I have what I would call the epistemic humility to say that I don’t know what makes a good social media network, but I do know what makes it so that when they go bad, you’re not stuck there. You and I might want totally different things out of our social media experience, but I think that you should 100 percent have the right to go somewhere else without losing anything. The easier it is for you to go without losing something, the better it is for all of us.

My dream is a social media universe where knowing what network someone is using is just a weird curiosity. It’d be like knowing which cell phone carrier your friend is using when you give them a call. It should just not matter. There might be regional or technical reasons to use one network or another, but it shouldn’t matter to anyone other than the user what network they’re using. A social media platform where it’s always easier for users to leave is much more future-proof and much more effective than trying to design characteristics of good social media.

by Jennifer Ouellette and Cory Doctorow, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Julia Galdo and Cody Cloud (JUCO)/CC-BY 3.0
[ed. Do a search on this site for much more by Mr. Doctorow, including copyright and right-to-repair issues. Further on in this interview:]

***

When we had a functional antitrust system for the last four years, we saw a bunch of telecoms mergers stopped because once you start enforcing antitrust, it’s like eating Pringles. You just can’t stop. You embolden a lot of people to start thinking about market structure as a source of either good or bad policy. The real thing that happened with [former FCC chair] Lina Kahn doing all that merger scrutiny was that people just stopped planning mergers.

There are a lot of people who benefit from this. It’s not just tech workers or tech users; it’s not just media users. Hospital consolidation, pharmaceutical consolidation, has a lot of people who are very concerned about it. Mark Cuban is freaking out about pharmacy benefit manager consolidation and vertical integration with HMOs, as he should be. I don’t think that we’re just asking the anti-enshittification world to carry this weight.

Same with the other factors. The best progress we’ve seen on interoperability has been through right-to-repair. It hasn’t been through people who care about social media interoperability. One of the first really good state-level right-to-repair bills was the one that [Governor] Jared Polis signed in Colorado for powered wheelchairs. Those people have a story that is much more salient to normies.

"What do you mean you spent six months in bed because there’s only two powered wheelchair manufacturers and your chair broke and you weren’t allowed to get it fixed by a third party?” And they’ve slashed their repair department, so it takes six months for someone to show up and fix your chair. So you had bed sores and pneumonia because you couldn’t get your chair fixed. This is bullshit.

Everything Is Television

A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. Three examples:

1. You learn a lot about a company when its back is against the wall. This summer, we learned something important about Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. In an antitrust case with the Federal Trade Commission, Meta filed a legal brief on August 6, in which it made a startling claim. Meta cannot possibly be a social media monopoly, Meta said, because it is not really a social media company.

Only a small share of time spent on its social-networking platforms is truly “social” networking—that is, time spent checking in with friends and family. More than 80 percent of time spent on Facebook and more than 90 percent of time spent on Instagram is spent watching videos, the company reported. Most of that time is spent watching content from creators whom the user does not know. From the FTC filing:

Today, only a fraction of time spent on Meta’s services—7% on Instagram, 17% on Facebook—involves consuming content from online “friends” (“friend sharing”). A majority of time spent on both apps is watching videos, increasingly short-form videos that are “unconnected”—i.e., not from a friend or followed account—and recommended by AI-powered algorithms Meta developed as a direct competitive response to TikTok’s rise, which stalled Meta’s growth.

Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television.

2. When I read the Meta filing, I had been thinking about something very different: the future of my podcast, Plain English.

When podcasts got started, they were radio for the Internet. This really appealed to me when I started my show. I never watch the news on television, and I love listening to podcasts while I make coffee and go on walks, and I’d prefer to make the sort of media that I consume. Plus, as a host, I thought I wanted to have conversations focused on the substance of the words rather than on ancillary concerns about production value and lighting.

But the most successful podcasts these days are all becoming YouTube shows. Industry analysts say consumption of video podcasts is growing twenty times faster than audio-only ones, and more than half of the world’s top shows now release video versions. YouTube has quietly become the most popular platform for podcasts, and it’s not even close. On Spotify, the number of video podcasts has nearly tripled since 2023, and video podcasts are significantly outgrowing non-video podcasts. Does it really make sense to insist on an audio-only podcast in 2025? I do not think so. Reality is screaming loudly in my ear, and its message is clear: Podcasts are turning into television.

3. In the last few weeks, Meta introduced a product called Vibes, and OpenAI announced Sora. Both are AI social networks where users can watch endless videos generated by artificial intelligence. (For your amusement, or horror, or whatever, here is: Sam Altman stealing GPUs at Target to make more AI; the O.J. Simpson trial as an amusement park ride; and Stephen Hawking entering a professional wrestling ring.)

Some tech analysts predict that these tools will lead to an efflorescence of creativity. “Sora feels like enabling everyone to be a TikTok creator,” the investor and tech analyst MG Siegler wrote. But the internet’s history suggests that, if these products succeed, they will follow what Ben Thompson calls the 90/9/1 rule: 90 percent of users consume, 9 percent remix and distribute, and just 1 percent actually create. In fact, as Scott Galloway has reported, 94 percent of YouTube views come from 4 percent of videos, and 89 percent of TikTok views come from 5 percent of videos. Even the architects of artificial intelligence, who imagine themselves on the path to creating the last invention, are busy building another infinite sequence of video made by people we don’t know. Even AI wants to be television.

Too Much Flow

Whether the starting point is a student directory (Facebook), radio, or an AI image generator, the end point seems to be the same: a river of short-form video. In mathematics, the word “attractor” describes a state toward which a dynamic system tends to evolve. To take a classic example: Drop a marble into a bowl, and it will trace several loops around the bowl’s curves before settling to rest at the bottom. In the same way, water draining in a sink will ultimately form a spiral pattern around the drain. Complex systems often settle into recurring forms, if you give them enough time. Television seems to be the attractor of all media.

By “television,” I am referring to something bigger than broadcast TV, the cable bundle, or Netflix. In his 1974 book Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Raymond Williams wrote that “in all communications systems before [television], the essential items were discrete.” That is, a book is bound and finite, existing on its own terms. A play is performed in a particular theater at a set hour. Williams argued that television shifted culture from discrete and bounded products to a continuous, streaming sequence of images and sounds, which he called “flow.” When I say “everything is turning into television,” what I mean is that disparate forms of media and entertainment are converging on one thing: the continuous flow of episodic video.

By Williams’s definition, platforms like YouTube and TikTok are an even more perfect expression of television than old-fashioned television, itself. On NBC or HBO, one might tune in to watch a show that feels particular and essential. On TikTok, by contrast, nothing is essential. Any one piece of content on TikTok is incidental, even inessential. The platform’s allure is the infinitude promised by its algorithm. It is the flow, not the content, that is primary.

One implication of “everything is becoming television” is that there really is too much television—so much, in fact, that some TV is now made with the assumption that audiences are always already distracted and doing something else. Netflix producers reportedly instruct screenwriters to make plots as obvious as possible, to avoid confusing viewers who are half-watching—or quarter-watching, if that’s a thing now—while they scroll through their phones. (...)

Among Netflix’s 36,000 micro-genres, one is literally called “casual viewing.” The label is reportedly reserved for sitcoms, soap operas, or movies that, as the Hollywood Reporter recently described the 2024 Jennifer Lopez film Atlas, are “made to half-watch while doing laundry.”...  The whole point is that it’s supposed to just be there, glowing, while you do something else. Perhaps a great deal of television is not meant to absorb our attention, at all, but rather to dab away at it, to soak up tiny droplets of our sensory experience while our focus dances across other screens. You might even say that much television is not even made to be watched at all. It is made to flow. The play button is the point.

Lonely, Mean, and Dumb

… and why does this matter? Fine question. And, perhaps, this is a good place for a confession. I like television. I follow some spectacular YouTube channels. I am not on Instagram or TikTok, but most of the people I know and love are on one or both. My beef is not with the entire medium of moving images. My concern is what happens when the grammar of television rather suddenly conquers the entire media landscape.

In the last few weeks, I have been writing a lot about two big trends in American life that do not necessarily overlap. My work on the “Antisocial Century” traces the rise of solitude in American life and its effects on economics, politics, and society. My work on “the end of thinking” follows the decline of literacy and numeracy scores in the U.S. and the handoff from a culture of literacy to a culture of orality. Neither of these trends is exclusively caused by the logic of television colonizing all media. But both trends are significantly exacerbated by it. 

Television’s role in the rise of solitude cannot be overlooked. In Bowling Alone, the Harvard scholar Robert Putnam wrote that between 1965 and 1995, the typical adult gained six hours a week in leisure time. As I wrote, they could have used those additional 300 hours a year to learn a new skill, or participate in their community, or have more children. Instead, the typical American funneled almost all of this extra time into watching more TV. Television instantly changed America’s interior decorating, relationships, and communities: (...)

Digital media, empowered by the serum of algorithmic feeds, has become super-television: more images, more videos, more isolation. Home-alone time has surged as our devices have become more bottomless feeds of video content. Rather than escape the solitude crisis that Putnam described in the 1990s, we now seem to be more on our own. (Not to mention: meaner and stupider, too.)

It would be rash to blame our berserk political moment entirely on short-form video, but it would be careless to forget that some people really did try to warn us that this was coming. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman wrote that “each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.” Television speaks to us in a particular dialect, Postman argued. When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television’s values: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol. When everything is urgent, nothing is truly important. Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance. The result, Postman warned, is a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs, and learns instead to think in scenes. (...)

When literally everything becomes television, what disappears is not something so broad as intelligence (although that seems to be going, too) but something harder to put into words, and even harder to prove the value of. It’s something like inwardness. The capacity for solitude, for sustained attention, for meaning that penetrates inward rather than swipes away at the tip of a finger: These virtues feel out of step with a world where every medium is the same medium and everything in life converges to the value system of the same thing, which is television. 

by Derek Thompson |  Read more:

Image: Ajeet Mestry on Unsplash

[ed. See also: The Last Days Of Social Media (Noema).]

The Gospel According to South Park

Somehow, five years have passed since the COVID summer of 2020. My son had just “finished” fourth grade. His mother and I were distracted parents of him and his seven-year-old sister, both of us teetering from cabin fever. It felt like we were hanging on to our sanity, and our marriage, by a thread.

We held on to both, thankfully. Our kids seem to have recovered, too. But by this time that summer, it’s fair to say we had completely “lost contain” of our children. Even under normal conditions, we’ve favored a loose-reins approach to parenting, with a healthy dose of Lenore Skenazy-style “Free Range Parenting.” But that summer? I gave up entirely. I let my son watch TV. A lot of TV.

By the time school resumed, he had watched every episode of The Simpsons and every episode of South Park.

At the time, I felt more than a little guilty about letting a 10-year-old binge-watch two decades of South Park. It was a bit early, I thought, for him to be learning proper condom application techniques from Mr. Garrison. When I told friends later, the story always got a laugh – a kind of comic confession from a parent who’d fallen asleep at the wheel.

But as my son made his way through middle school and into high school, something changed. One night over dinner, we were talking about wars when I mentioned Saddam Hussein. My son chimed in casually – he knew exactly who Saddam was. I asked him how. His answer: “South Park.”

That kept happening. From Michael Jackson and Neverland Ranch, to Mormonism, to the NSA, to wokeism … my son was not only familiar with these topics, he was informed, funny, and incisively skeptical. I realized that this crash course from Butters and Cartman and Mr. Mackey had functioned like one of those downloads Neo gets in The Matrix; except that instead of instantly learning martial arts, my son had instantly become culturally literate. And, just as important, that literacy came wrapped in a sense of humor rooted in satire, absurdity, and a deep mistrust of power, regardless of party affiliation.

He jokes about Joe Biden’s senility and Trump’s grifting grossness. He refers to COVID-era masking as “chin diapers,” a phrase South Park coined while many adults were still double-masking alone in their cars. It struck me: my greatest parenting lapse had somehow turned into one of my best decisions.

Of course, it’s not just that South Park is anti-authority and unapologetically crude. So was Beavis and Butthead. The difference is that South Park is crafted. It endures not just because of what it says, but how it’s made – with discipline, speed, and storytelling intelligence.

South Park co-creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone are master storytellers. In a short video that should be required viewing for anyone who writes, they explain that if the beats, or scenes, of your story are best linked by the phrase “and then,” you’re doing it wrong. Instead, each scene should be connected by “therefore” or “but.” It’s deceptively simple, and it’s the single best explanation of narrative momentum I’ve ever seen. (Watch it here.)

Combine that storytelling mastery with a relentless work ethic that has allowed them to churn out weekly takes on almost every major current event of the last three decades, and you get the South Park that we know and (that most of us) love today. A generational institution that’s still funny.

And still winning.

Just days after closing a new five-year, $1.5 billion deal with Paramount+, South Park opened its 27th season with an episode titled “Sermon on the Mount,” which gleefully eviscerated both President Trump and Paramount+. What’s the point of having “fuck you money” if you never say “fuck you”? (...)

And the difference between South Park and the late-night crowd isn’t just about the comedy. It’s about the message. During COVID, while Colbert and others were fawning over Fauci, hawking Pfizer ads, and pushing for school closures, South Park was mocking all of it – the masks, the panic, the bureaucratic gaslighting. As a concept, “chin diapers” wasn’t just funny – it was accurate.

When comedy becomes propaganda, it stops being funny. Parker and Stone have never forgotten that the job is to make people laugh. That means skewering whoever is in power, without asking for permission.

Late night talk shows are dying, not entirely but primarily because the product is borderline unwatchable. But, despite the best efforts of the hall monitor, cancel culture crowd, satire – real, cutting, offensive, hilarious satire – is alive and well. My son, now in high school, is living proof. He is a great conversationalist, comfortable speaking with just about anyone of any age; in large part, thanks to a show I once felt guilty for letting him watch.

As it turns out, enrolling my son in summer school at South Park Elementary wasn’t a parenting blunder at all. And, of course, Parker and Stone had it right from the beginning.

by Jeremy Radcliffe, Epsilon Theory | Read more:
Image: South Park

[ed. They'll pick it all up from classmates anyway. I think my son was near that age, maybe about 12, when I took him to see Pulp Fiction.]

In Praise of the Faroe Islands

In praise of the Faroe Islands 

Due to its small size and limited variation, I wouldn’t say it’s the singular most beautiful nation on earth (I’d give that to New Zealand), but it’s certainly at the very top tier of the most beautiful places on earth. What stands out about the Faroe Islands’ beauty is that every single place you set foot will be beautiful. There is no real need to go to any specific destinations (there aren’t even national parks or “nature zones” in the Faroe Islands), as there is incredible beauty at every point. And no matter where you go, you will always be in nature, surrounded by a quiet that feels completely removed from the modern world. (...)

In many places, “culture” feels like an aesthetic layer—a set of foods, clothing styles, or historical anecdotes. But in the Faroes, it feels deeper, like a shared operating system. When you speak to any person there, it’s immediately clear they are all operating from the same framework—a worldview that is both deeply felt and meaningfully distinct from the rest of the world.

Conservative intellectuals on Twitter and Substack are constantly sketching out their ideal society: a high-trust community rooted in family (fertility rates are high), self-sufficiency, and continuity with the past. They dream of a life lived closer to the land, with a strong sense of personal responsibility. By almost any of their metrics, the Faroe Islands is the most successful conservative nation on earth. And yet, it is also a profoundly liberal place. It’s cosmopolitan and highly educated. There is a massive social safety net and great equality, a deep belief in the collective over the individual, and a culture where economic aspiration doesn’t dominate life. It is, in many ways, the idyllic left-wing society. The Faroe Islands seems to have achieved the goals of both political tribes simultaneously, without any of the ideological warfare.

What makes the Faroe Islands special in my opinion is not that it’s so nice, but that it’s so nice yet has no desire to optimize or make more efficient (or exploit) anything to become even “nicer.” This is unusual, as most successful places reached their status by climbing a cutthroat ladder, trading off nearly everything in pursuit of greater efficiency.

To give the simplest example: the Faroe Islands are a series of islands, some of which have fewer than 10 people living on them, and are otherwise quite isolated from each other. No worry—the Faroe Islands, with a “we are all one” ethos, have power and internet going to every corner of their nation, with subsidized helicopter rides and ferries to even the smallest islands to make sure life can feel connected for all Faroese people. More well known, the Faroe Islands have built impressive and incredibly expensive undersea tunnels connecting all of the major and proximate islands to each other.

They spend this money not to make the islands more productive or efficient, but simply because they believe all Faroese people should be connected. The infrastructure exists for solidarity, not optimization. A consultant would call the tunnels and helicopter subsidies a spectacular misallocation of capital. But this misses the point entirely—they’re treating infrastructure as as a kind of social infrastructure, not economic.

by Daniel Frank, not not Talmud |  Read more:

Images: Daniel Frank

[ed. At first I thought this was about the Falkland Islands (off the tip of South America). Then realized I didn't know where the Faroes were at all.]

Gen Z's College Radio Revival

It’s been a weird summer for the music industry.

The fewest new hits in U.S. history. No song of the summer. An AI artist just signed a $3M record deal. The biggest band on the charts? HUNTR/X, a fictional K-pop girl group from a Netflix movie. The vibes are off.

In September, a bombshell report from MIDiA Research crystallized the mood: “music discovery is at a generational crossroads,” it argues:

“Music discovery is traditionally associated with youth, but today’s 16-24-year-olds are less likely than 25-34-year-olds to have discovered an artist they love in the last year.”

Read that again: Younger consumers, typically the drivers of cultural trends, are less likely to discover new artists compared to 25-34 year-olds.

And even when they do discover artists, they are less likely to stream that artist’s music, according to the report.

If you stopped reading here, you might conclude young people just don’t care about music anymore.

However, one unexpected source of music discovery is quietly booming among Gen Z listeners: college radio.

College radio killed the TikTok star

I spoke to seven student general managers and surveyed 80+ DJs at stations across America: ACRN (Ohio University), WCBN (University of Michigan), WEGL (Auburn University), WHRW (Binghamton University), WRFL (University of Kentucky), WVBR (Cornell University), and WZBC (Boston College).

They told me student interest in college radio has dramatically increased in recent years. Stations that once struggled to fill airtime are now turning people away, shortening shows, alternating time slots, and running training programs just to keep up with the demand from aspiring student DJs.

For decades, college radio championed underground artists before they hit the mainstream. Against all odds—COVID shutdowns, FCC regulations, and the long decline of FM radio—college radio is thriving again. (...)

A wave of Gen Z demand

Ten years ago, WCBN (Michigan) was struggling to fill three-hour programming blocks, says GM Anja Sheppard. Today, it’s the “fullest schedule we’ve had in recent memory,” with shows reduced to one-hour due to “such demand from students to be on air.”

At WRFL (Kentucky), “we’ve had some of the most exponential growth this station has seen in its 37 year history,” says GM Aidan Greenwell. “We’ve gotten to the point where we simply don’t have enough time to allow everybody on the show schedule,” with 350 signups at the student interest fair this year, 100 shows on the schedule and around 120 people currently staffing the station. (...)

Demand for on-air slots is out-pacing “hours in the day” at WEGL (Auburn), GM Rae Nawrocki says. The station has grown from roughly 30 members four years ago to 120 students and 60 on-air shows today.

Some stations have so many aspiring student DJs, they have internships and apprenticeship programs for those waiting for their chance to go on-air: WHRW (Binghamton) has 150–200 active DJs and another 80 apprentices, WZBC (Boston College) counts 70 interns for its online stream in addition to 90 FM DJs.

What’s Driving the College Radio Renaissance?

1. Algorithm fatigue

Students consistently described radio as an authentic, community-driven refuge from the passive, isolated, algorithm-driven digital experiences that have defined their adolescence. “You can’t scroll on reels and run a radio station at the same time,” says Greenwell (WRFL) “You have to be in the present.”

In our survey of 80+ DJs, students under 25 years old named “friends/word of mouth” as their favorite way to discover music (69%), with TikTok (21%), YouTube (10%) or other social media (16%) relatively low-ranked.

When asked “Who is your favorite artist you discovered recently, and how did you discover them?”, open-ended responses were split almost evenly between friends/word of mouth (27%) and algorithmic/streaming discovery (26%), with smaller shares citing live shows, radio, online communities (Bandcamp, Reddit, RateYourMusic), or physical media.

• “I’m 21. I grew up in the age of algorithms. The way music is right now scares me because of the rise of AI. Not even AI made music (I hate it) but even just ‘Daily Mix, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5.’ It’s not made by someone. It’s made by an algorithm. I wish more of that stuff was person curated.”—Mari McLaughlin, WHRW (Binghamton)

• “What attracts a lot of people to college radio is the idea of putting somebody on. Showing them a new song they haven’t seen before, outside of the algorithmic nature of streaming.”—Aidan Greenwell, WRFL (Kentucky)

• “I’ve started learning a lot more about music from other people’s recommendations than I ever had before. These experiences are shaping me more than algorithms or Spotify.”—Anna Loy, WVBR (Cornell).

• “Diehard music lovers are shifting away from Spotify. The trend I am seeing is people want ownership and community instead of this vague green app.”—Rae Nawrocki (WEGL)

2. Analog Nostalgia

The resurgence of interest in physical media is a significant driver of Gen Z’s attraction to college radio.

Millennials embraced technology for its convenience and accessibility, which reduced the friction in media consumption. Gen Z, in response, is seeking out experiences that are more tangible, personal and inconvenient.

This manifests in a return to high-friction analog media like vinyl, flip phones, film cameras and radio. (...)

The physical libraries at many stations, with massive collections of vinyl and CDs, offer a tangible connection to music history that can’t be replicated online:

• “Our music directors have been writing comments on the records and CDs since the seventies. It’s funny to see how opinions change over time. It’s like an analog Internet comment section.”—Marcus Rothera, WZBC (Boston College)

• “WHRW has a massive physical music library. I’m pretty sure it’s one of the biggest on the east coast. We have somewhere in the ballpark of 8,000 CDs and vinyls in there.”—Mari McLaughlin, WHRW (Binghamton) 

3. Community, Creativity & Belonging

College radio stations serve as vital “third spaces” where students can find a community of like-minded people outside of classes and social media, said several GMs. Community was cited as a top reason for joining college radio (79%) by DJs under age 25 in the survey (second only to “creative outlet” at 94%). (...)

A Hopeful Counter-Model

Skeptics might point out that college radio audiences are small, but the real story isn’t who’s listening—it’s that so many young people want to DJ, dig into music history, share discoveries, and build community around music.

The revival of college radio isn’t a signal that FM is back; it’s proof that Gen Z still cares deeply about music, discovery, and culture.

In a moment when the wider industry is betting on algorithms, AI, and fleeting TikTok trends, these college radio DJs remind us that young people aren’t bored of music—they’re bored of the shallow, virality-obsessed way music is marketed to them.

by Emily White, emwhitenoise |  Read more:

Image: DJ Maya, WCBN (University of Michigan) Photo credit: Olivia Glinski (2025)

[ed. I wanted to be a jazz DJ in college but stumbled over FCC licensing requirements, and (in retrospect), how little I actually knew about jazz at the time... haha.]