[ed. American terrorists... making their nut and enjoying authority (incognito, of course.) (South Park).]
Monday, August 11, 2025
Lore of the World: Field Notes for a Child's Codex: Part 2
When you become a new parent, you must re-explain the world, and therefore see it afresh yourself.
A child starts with only ancestral memories of archetypes: mother, air, warmth, danger. But none of the specifics. For them, life is like beginning to read some grand fantasy trilogy, one filled with lore and histories and intricate maps.
Yet the lore of our world is far grander, because everything here is real. Stars are real. Money is real. Brazil is real. And it is a parent’s job to tell the lore of this world, and help the child fill up their codex of reality one entry at a time.
Below are a few of the thousands of entries they must make.
Walmart
Walmart was, growing up, where I didn’t want to be. Whatever life had in store for me, I wanted it to be the opposite of Walmart. Let’s not dissemble: Walmart is, canonically, “lower class.” And so I saw, in Walmart, one possible future for myself. I wanted desperately to not be lower class, to not have to attend boring public school, to get out of my small town. My nightmare was ending up working at a place like Walmart (my father ended up at a similar big-box store). It seemed to me, at least back then, that all of human misery was compressed in that store; not just in the crassness of its capitalistic machinations, but in the very people who shop there. Inevitably, among the aisles some figure would be hunched over in horrific ailment, and I, playing the role of a young Siddhartha seeing the sick and dying for the first time, would recoil and flee to the parking lot in a wave of overwhelming pity. But it was a self-righteous pity, in the end. A pity almost cruel. I would leave Walmart wondering: Why is everyone living their lives half-awake? Why am I the only one who wants something more? Who sees suffering clearly?
Teenagers are funny.
Now, as a new parent, Walmart is a cathedral. It has high ceilings, lots to look at, is always open, and is cheap. Lightsabers (or “laser swords,” for copyright purposes) are stuffed in boxes for the taking. Pick out a blue one, a green one, a red one. We’ll turn off the lights at home and battle in the dark. And the overall shopping experience of Walmart is undeniably kid-friendly. You can run down the aisles. You can sway in the cart. Stakes are low at Walmart. Everyone says hi to you and your sister. They smile at you. They interact. While sometimes patrons and even employees may appear, well, somewhat strange, even bearing the cross of visible ailments, they are scary and friendly. If I visit Walmart now, I leave wondering why this is. Because in comparison, I’ve noticed that at stores more canonically “upper class,” you kids turn invisible. No one laughs at your antics. No one shouts hello. No one talks to you, or asks you questions. At Whole Foods, people don’t notice you. At Stop & Shop, they do. Your visibility, it appears, is inversely proportional to the price tags on the clothes worn around you. Which, by the logical force of modus ponens, means you are most visible at, your very existence most registered at, of all places, Walmart.
Cicadas
The surprise of this summer has been learning we share our property with what biologists call Cicada Brood XIV, who burst forth en masse every 17 years to swarm Cape Cod. Nowhere else in the world do members of this “Bourbon Brood” exist, with their long black bodies and cartoonishly red eyes. Only here, in the eastern half of the US. Writing these words, I can hear their dull and ceaseless motorcycle whine in the woods.
The neighbors we never knew we had, the first 17 years of a cicada’s life are spent underground as a colorless nymph, suckling nutrients from the roots of trees. These vampires (since they live on sap, vampires is what they are, at least to plants) are among the longest living insects. Luckily, they do not bite or sting, and carry no communicable diseases. It’s all sheer biomass. In a fit of paradoxical vitality, they’ve dug up from underneath, like sappers invading a castle, leaving behind coin-sized holes in the ground. If you put a stick in one of these coin slots, it will be swallowed, and its disappearance is accompanied by a dizzying sense that even a humble yard can contain foreign worlds untouched by human hands.
After digging out of their grave, where they live, to reach the world above, where they die, cicadas next molt, then spend a while adjusting to their new winged bodies before taking to the woods to mate. Unfortunately, our house is in the woods. Nor is there escape elsewhere—drive anywhere and cicadas hit your windshield, sometimes rapid-fire; never smearing, they instead careen off almost politely, like an aerial game of bumper cars.
We just have to make it a few more weeks. After laying their eggs on the boughs of trees (so vast are these clusters it breaks the branches) the nymphs drop. The hatched babies squirm into the dirt, and the 17-year-cycle repeats. But right now the saga’s ending seems far away, as their molted carapaces cling by the dozens to our plants and window frames and shed, like hollow miniatures. Even discarded, they grip.
“It’s like leaving behind their clothes,” I tell your sister.
“Their clothes,” she says, in her tiny pipsqueak voice.
We observe the cicadas in the yard. They do not do much. They hang, rest, wait. They offer no resistance to being swept away by broom or shoe tip. Even their flights are lazy and ponderous and unskilled. And ultimately, this is what is eerie about cicadas. Yes, they represent the pullulating irrepressible life force, but you can barely call any individual alive. They are life removed from consciousness. Much like a patient for whom irreparable brain damage has left only a cauliflower of functional gray matter left, they are here, but not here. Other bugs will avoid humans, or even just collisions with inanimate objects. Not the cicada. Their stupidity makes their existence even more a nightmare for your mother, who goes armed into the yard with a yellow flyswatter. She knows they cannot hurt her, but has a phobia of moths, due to their mindless flight. Cicadas are even worse in that regard. Much bigger, too. She tries, mightily, to not pass down her phobia. She forces herself to walk slowly, gritting her teeth. Or, on seeing one sunning on the arm of her lawn chair, she pretends there is something urgent needed inside. But I see her through the window, and when alone, she dashes. She dashes to the car or to the shed, and she dashes onto the porch to get an errant toy, waving about her head that yellow flyswatter, eyes squinted so she can’t see the horrors around her.
I, meanwhile, am working on desensitization. Especially with your sister, who has, with the mind-reading abilities she’s renowned for, picked up that something fishy is going on, and screeches when a cicada comes too near. I sense, though, she enjoys the thrill.
“Hello Cicadaaaaaasss!” I get her to croon with me. She waves at their zombie eyes. When she goes inside, shutting the screen door behind her, she says an unreturned goodbye to them.
Despite its idiocy, the cicada possesses a strange mathematical intelligence. Why 17-year cycles? Because 17 is prime. Divisible by no other cycle, it ensures no predator can track them generation to generation. Their evolutionary strategy is to overwhelm, unexpectedly, in a surprise attack. And this gambit of “You can’t eat us all!” is clearly working. The birds here are becoming comically fat, with potbellies; in their lucky bounty, they’ve developed into gourmands who only eat the heads.
Individual cicadas are too dumb to have developed such a smart tactic, so it is evolution who is the mathematician here. But unlike we humans, who can manipulate numbers abstractly, without mortal danger, evolution must always add, subtract, multiply, and divide, solely with lives. Cicadas en masse are a type of bio-numeracy, and each brood is collectively a Sieve of Eratosthenes, sacrificing trillions to arrive at an agreed-upon prime number. In this, the cicada may be, as far as we know, the most horrific way to do math in the entire universe.
Being an embodied temporal calculation, the cicada invasion has forced upon us a new awareness of time itself. I have found your mother crying from this. She says every day now she thinks about the inherent question they pose: What will our lives be like, when the cicadas return?
Against our will the Bourbon Brood has scheduled something in our calendar, 17 years out, shifting the future from abstract to concrete. When the cicadas return, you will be turning 21. Your sister, 19. Myself, already 55. Your mother, 54. Your grandparents will, very possibly, all be dead. This phase of life will have finished. And to mark its end, the cicadas will crawl up through the dirt, triumphant in their true ownership, and the empty nest of our home will buzz again with these long-living, subterranean-dwelling, prime-calculating, calendar-setting, goddamn vampires.
Stubbornness
God, you’re stubborn. You are so stubborn. Stubborn about which water bottle to drink from, stubborn about doing all the fairground rides twice, stubborn about going up slides before going down them, pushing buttons on elevators, being the first to go upstairs, deciding what snack to eat, wearing long-sleeved shirts in summer, wanting to hold hands, wanting not to hold hands; in general, you’re stubborn about all events, and especially about what order they should happen in. You’re stubborn about doing things beyond your ability, only to get angry when you inevitably fail. You’re stubborn in wanting the laws of physics to work the way you personally think they should. You’re stubborn in how much you love, in how determined and fierce your attachment can be.
This is true of many young children, of course, but you seem an archetypal expression of it. Even your losing battles are rarely true losses. You propose some compromise where you can snatch, from the jaws of defeat, a sliver of a draw. Arguments with you are like trading rhetorical pieces in a chess match. While you can eventually accept wearing rain boots because it’s pouring out, that acceptance hinges on putting them on in the most inconvenient spot imaginable.
So when I get frustrated—and yes, I do get frustrated—I remind myself that “stubborn” is a synonym for “willful.” Whatever human will is, you possess it in spades. You want the world to be a certain way, and you’ll do everything in your power to make it so. Luckily, most of your designs are a kind of benevolent dictatorship. And at root, I believe your willfulness comes from loving the world so much, and wanting to, like all creatures vital with life force, act in it, and so bend it to your purposes.
What I don’t think is that this willfulness is because we, as parents, are so especially lenient. Because we’re not. No, your stubbornness has felt baked in from the beginning.
This might be impossible to explain to you now, in all its details, but in the future you’ll be ready to understand that I really do mean “the beginning.” As in the literal moment of conception. Or the moment before the moment, when you were still split into halves: egg and sperm. There is much prudery around the topic, as you’ll learn, and because of its secrecy people conceptualize the entire process as fundamentally simple, like this: Egg exists (fanning itself coquettishly). Sperm swims hard (muscular and sweaty). Sperm reaches egg. Penetrates and is enveloped. The end. But this is a radical simplification of the true biology, which, like all biology, is actually about selection.
Selection is omnipresent, occurring across scales and systems. For example, the elegance of your DNA is because so many variants of individuals were generated, and of these, only some small number proved fit in the environment (your ancestors). The rest were winnowed away by natural selection. So too, at another scale, your body’s immune system internally works via what’s called “clonal selection.” Many different immune cells with all sorts of configurations are generated at low numbers, waiting as a pool of variability in your bloodstream. In the presence of an invading pathogen, the few immune cells that match (bind to) the pathogen are selected to be cloned in vast numbers, creating an army. And, at another scale and in a different way, human conception works via selection too. Even though scientists understand less about how conception selection works (these remain mysterious and primal things), the evidence indicates the process is full of it.
First, from the perspective of the sperm, they are entered into a win-or-die race inside an acidic maze with three hundred million competitors. If the pH or mucus blockades don’t get them, the fallopian tubes are a labyrinth of currents stirred by cilia. It’s a mortal race in all ways, for the woman’s body has its own protectors: white blood cells, which register the sperm as foreign and other. Non-self. So they patrol and destroy them. Imagining this, I oscillate between the silly and the serious. I picture the white blood cells patrolling like stormtroopers, and meanwhile the sperm (wearing massive helmets) attempt to rush past them. But in reality, what is this like? Did that early half of you see, ahead, some pair of competing brothers getting horrifically eaten, and smartly went the other way? What does a sperm see, exactly? We know they can sense the environment, for of the hundreds of sperm who make it close enough to potentially fertilize the egg, all must enter into a kind of dance with it, responding to the egg’s guidance cues in the form of temperature and chemical gradients (the technical jargon is “sperm chemotaxis”). We know from experiments that eggs single out sperm non-randomly, attracting the ones they like most. But for what reasons, or based on what standards, we don’t know. Regardless of why, the egg zealously protects its choice. Once a particular sperm is allowed to penetrate its outer layer, the egg transforms into a literal battle station, blasting out zinc ions at any approaching runners-up to avoid double inseminations.
Then, on the other side, there’s selection too. For which egg? Women are born with about a million of what are called “follicles.” These follicles all grow candidate eggs, called “oocytes,” but, past puberty, only a single oocyte each month is chosen to be released by the winner and become the waiting egg. In this, the ovary itself is basically a combination of biobank and proving grounds. So the bank depletes over time. Menopause is, basically, when the supply has run out. But where do they all go? Most follicles die in an initial background winnowing, a first round of selection, wherein those not developing properly are destroyed. The majority perish there. Only the strongest and most functional go on to the next stage. Each month, around 20 of these follicles enter a tournament with their sisters to see which of them ovulates, and so releases the winning egg. This competition is enigmatic, and can only be described as a kind of hormonal growth war. The winner must mature faster, but also emit chemicals to suppress the others, starving them. The losers atrophy and die. No wonder it’s hard for siblings to always get along.
Things like this explain why, the older I get, the more I am attracted to one of the first philosophies, by Empedocles. All things are either Love or Strife. Or both.
From that ancient perspective, I can’t help but feel your stubbornness is why you’re here at all. That it’s an imprint left over, etched onto your cells. I suspect you won all those mortal races and competitions, succeeded through all that strife, simply because from the beginning, in some proto-way, you wanted to be here. Out of all that potentiality, willfulness made you a reality.
Can someone be so stubborn they create themselves?
Yet the lore of our world is far grander, because everything here is real. Stars are real. Money is real. Brazil is real. And it is a parent’s job to tell the lore of this world, and help the child fill up their codex of reality one entry at a time.
Below are a few of the thousands of entries they must make.
Walmart
Walmart was, growing up, where I didn’t want to be. Whatever life had in store for me, I wanted it to be the opposite of Walmart. Let’s not dissemble: Walmart is, canonically, “lower class.” And so I saw, in Walmart, one possible future for myself. I wanted desperately to not be lower class, to not have to attend boring public school, to get out of my small town. My nightmare was ending up working at a place like Walmart (my father ended up at a similar big-box store). It seemed to me, at least back then, that all of human misery was compressed in that store; not just in the crassness of its capitalistic machinations, but in the very people who shop there. Inevitably, among the aisles some figure would be hunched over in horrific ailment, and I, playing the role of a young Siddhartha seeing the sick and dying for the first time, would recoil and flee to the parking lot in a wave of overwhelming pity. But it was a self-righteous pity, in the end. A pity almost cruel. I would leave Walmart wondering: Why is everyone living their lives half-awake? Why am I the only one who wants something more? Who sees suffering clearly?
Teenagers are funny.
Now, as a new parent, Walmart is a cathedral. It has high ceilings, lots to look at, is always open, and is cheap. Lightsabers (or “laser swords,” for copyright purposes) are stuffed in boxes for the taking. Pick out a blue one, a green one, a red one. We’ll turn off the lights at home and battle in the dark. And the overall shopping experience of Walmart is undeniably kid-friendly. You can run down the aisles. You can sway in the cart. Stakes are low at Walmart. Everyone says hi to you and your sister. They smile at you. They interact. While sometimes patrons and even employees may appear, well, somewhat strange, even bearing the cross of visible ailments, they are scary and friendly. If I visit Walmart now, I leave wondering why this is. Because in comparison, I’ve noticed that at stores more canonically “upper class,” you kids turn invisible. No one laughs at your antics. No one shouts hello. No one talks to you, or asks you questions. At Whole Foods, people don’t notice you. At Stop & Shop, they do. Your visibility, it appears, is inversely proportional to the price tags on the clothes worn around you. Which, by the logical force of modus ponens, means you are most visible at, your very existence most registered at, of all places, Walmart.
Cicadas
The surprise of this summer has been learning we share our property with what biologists call Cicada Brood XIV, who burst forth en masse every 17 years to swarm Cape Cod. Nowhere else in the world do members of this “Bourbon Brood” exist, with their long black bodies and cartoonishly red eyes. Only here, in the eastern half of the US. Writing these words, I can hear their dull and ceaseless motorcycle whine in the woods.
The neighbors we never knew we had, the first 17 years of a cicada’s life are spent underground as a colorless nymph, suckling nutrients from the roots of trees. These vampires (since they live on sap, vampires is what they are, at least to plants) are among the longest living insects. Luckily, they do not bite or sting, and carry no communicable diseases. It’s all sheer biomass. In a fit of paradoxical vitality, they’ve dug up from underneath, like sappers invading a castle, leaving behind coin-sized holes in the ground. If you put a stick in one of these coin slots, it will be swallowed, and its disappearance is accompanied by a dizzying sense that even a humble yard can contain foreign worlds untouched by human hands.
After digging out of their grave, where they live, to reach the world above, where they die, cicadas next molt, then spend a while adjusting to their new winged bodies before taking to the woods to mate. Unfortunately, our house is in the woods. Nor is there escape elsewhere—drive anywhere and cicadas hit your windshield, sometimes rapid-fire; never smearing, they instead careen off almost politely, like an aerial game of bumper cars.
We just have to make it a few more weeks. After laying their eggs on the boughs of trees (so vast are these clusters it breaks the branches) the nymphs drop. The hatched babies squirm into the dirt, and the 17-year-cycle repeats. But right now the saga’s ending seems far away, as their molted carapaces cling by the dozens to our plants and window frames and shed, like hollow miniatures. Even discarded, they grip.
“It’s like leaving behind their clothes,” I tell your sister.
“Their clothes,” she says, in her tiny pipsqueak voice.
We observe the cicadas in the yard. They do not do much. They hang, rest, wait. They offer no resistance to being swept away by broom or shoe tip. Even their flights are lazy and ponderous and unskilled. And ultimately, this is what is eerie about cicadas. Yes, they represent the pullulating irrepressible life force, but you can barely call any individual alive. They are life removed from consciousness. Much like a patient for whom irreparable brain damage has left only a cauliflower of functional gray matter left, they are here, but not here. Other bugs will avoid humans, or even just collisions with inanimate objects. Not the cicada. Their stupidity makes their existence even more a nightmare for your mother, who goes armed into the yard with a yellow flyswatter. She knows they cannot hurt her, but has a phobia of moths, due to their mindless flight. Cicadas are even worse in that regard. Much bigger, too. She tries, mightily, to not pass down her phobia. She forces herself to walk slowly, gritting her teeth. Or, on seeing one sunning on the arm of her lawn chair, she pretends there is something urgent needed inside. But I see her through the window, and when alone, she dashes. She dashes to the car or to the shed, and she dashes onto the porch to get an errant toy, waving about her head that yellow flyswatter, eyes squinted so she can’t see the horrors around her.
I, meanwhile, am working on desensitization. Especially with your sister, who has, with the mind-reading abilities she’s renowned for, picked up that something fishy is going on, and screeches when a cicada comes too near. I sense, though, she enjoys the thrill.
“Hello Cicadaaaaaasss!” I get her to croon with me. She waves at their zombie eyes. When she goes inside, shutting the screen door behind her, she says an unreturned goodbye to them.
Despite its idiocy, the cicada possesses a strange mathematical intelligence. Why 17-year cycles? Because 17 is prime. Divisible by no other cycle, it ensures no predator can track them generation to generation. Their evolutionary strategy is to overwhelm, unexpectedly, in a surprise attack. And this gambit of “You can’t eat us all!” is clearly working. The birds here are becoming comically fat, with potbellies; in their lucky bounty, they’ve developed into gourmands who only eat the heads.
Individual cicadas are too dumb to have developed such a smart tactic, so it is evolution who is the mathematician here. But unlike we humans, who can manipulate numbers abstractly, without mortal danger, evolution must always add, subtract, multiply, and divide, solely with lives. Cicadas en masse are a type of bio-numeracy, and each brood is collectively a Sieve of Eratosthenes, sacrificing trillions to arrive at an agreed-upon prime number. In this, the cicada may be, as far as we know, the most horrific way to do math in the entire universe.
Being an embodied temporal calculation, the cicada invasion has forced upon us a new awareness of time itself. I have found your mother crying from this. She says every day now she thinks about the inherent question they pose: What will our lives be like, when the cicadas return?
Against our will the Bourbon Brood has scheduled something in our calendar, 17 years out, shifting the future from abstract to concrete. When the cicadas return, you will be turning 21. Your sister, 19. Myself, already 55. Your mother, 54. Your grandparents will, very possibly, all be dead. This phase of life will have finished. And to mark its end, the cicadas will crawl up through the dirt, triumphant in their true ownership, and the empty nest of our home will buzz again with these long-living, subterranean-dwelling, prime-calculating, calendar-setting, goddamn vampires.
Stubbornness
God, you’re stubborn. You are so stubborn. Stubborn about which water bottle to drink from, stubborn about doing all the fairground rides twice, stubborn about going up slides before going down them, pushing buttons on elevators, being the first to go upstairs, deciding what snack to eat, wearing long-sleeved shirts in summer, wanting to hold hands, wanting not to hold hands; in general, you’re stubborn about all events, and especially about what order they should happen in. You’re stubborn about doing things beyond your ability, only to get angry when you inevitably fail. You’re stubborn in wanting the laws of physics to work the way you personally think they should. You’re stubborn in how much you love, in how determined and fierce your attachment can be.
This is true of many young children, of course, but you seem an archetypal expression of it. Even your losing battles are rarely true losses. You propose some compromise where you can snatch, from the jaws of defeat, a sliver of a draw. Arguments with you are like trading rhetorical pieces in a chess match. While you can eventually accept wearing rain boots because it’s pouring out, that acceptance hinges on putting them on in the most inconvenient spot imaginable.
So when I get frustrated—and yes, I do get frustrated—I remind myself that “stubborn” is a synonym for “willful.” Whatever human will is, you possess it in spades. You want the world to be a certain way, and you’ll do everything in your power to make it so. Luckily, most of your designs are a kind of benevolent dictatorship. And at root, I believe your willfulness comes from loving the world so much, and wanting to, like all creatures vital with life force, act in it, and so bend it to your purposes.
What I don’t think is that this willfulness is because we, as parents, are so especially lenient. Because we’re not. No, your stubbornness has felt baked in from the beginning.
This might be impossible to explain to you now, in all its details, but in the future you’ll be ready to understand that I really do mean “the beginning.” As in the literal moment of conception. Or the moment before the moment, when you were still split into halves: egg and sperm. There is much prudery around the topic, as you’ll learn, and because of its secrecy people conceptualize the entire process as fundamentally simple, like this: Egg exists (fanning itself coquettishly). Sperm swims hard (muscular and sweaty). Sperm reaches egg. Penetrates and is enveloped. The end. But this is a radical simplification of the true biology, which, like all biology, is actually about selection.
Selection is omnipresent, occurring across scales and systems. For example, the elegance of your DNA is because so many variants of individuals were generated, and of these, only some small number proved fit in the environment (your ancestors). The rest were winnowed away by natural selection. So too, at another scale, your body’s immune system internally works via what’s called “clonal selection.” Many different immune cells with all sorts of configurations are generated at low numbers, waiting as a pool of variability in your bloodstream. In the presence of an invading pathogen, the few immune cells that match (bind to) the pathogen are selected to be cloned in vast numbers, creating an army. And, at another scale and in a different way, human conception works via selection too. Even though scientists understand less about how conception selection works (these remain mysterious and primal things), the evidence indicates the process is full of it.
First, from the perspective of the sperm, they are entered into a win-or-die race inside an acidic maze with three hundred million competitors. If the pH or mucus blockades don’t get them, the fallopian tubes are a labyrinth of currents stirred by cilia. It’s a mortal race in all ways, for the woman’s body has its own protectors: white blood cells, which register the sperm as foreign and other. Non-self. So they patrol and destroy them. Imagining this, I oscillate between the silly and the serious. I picture the white blood cells patrolling like stormtroopers, and meanwhile the sperm (wearing massive helmets) attempt to rush past them. But in reality, what is this like? Did that early half of you see, ahead, some pair of competing brothers getting horrifically eaten, and smartly went the other way? What does a sperm see, exactly? We know they can sense the environment, for of the hundreds of sperm who make it close enough to potentially fertilize the egg, all must enter into a kind of dance with it, responding to the egg’s guidance cues in the form of temperature and chemical gradients (the technical jargon is “sperm chemotaxis”). We know from experiments that eggs single out sperm non-randomly, attracting the ones they like most. But for what reasons, or based on what standards, we don’t know. Regardless of why, the egg zealously protects its choice. Once a particular sperm is allowed to penetrate its outer layer, the egg transforms into a literal battle station, blasting out zinc ions at any approaching runners-up to avoid double inseminations.
Then, on the other side, there’s selection too. For which egg? Women are born with about a million of what are called “follicles.” These follicles all grow candidate eggs, called “oocytes,” but, past puberty, only a single oocyte each month is chosen to be released by the winner and become the waiting egg. In this, the ovary itself is basically a combination of biobank and proving grounds. So the bank depletes over time. Menopause is, basically, when the supply has run out. But where do they all go? Most follicles die in an initial background winnowing, a first round of selection, wherein those not developing properly are destroyed. The majority perish there. Only the strongest and most functional go on to the next stage. Each month, around 20 of these follicles enter a tournament with their sisters to see which of them ovulates, and so releases the winning egg. This competition is enigmatic, and can only be described as a kind of hormonal growth war. The winner must mature faster, but also emit chemicals to suppress the others, starving them. The losers atrophy and die. No wonder it’s hard for siblings to always get along.
Things like this explain why, the older I get, the more I am attracted to one of the first philosophies, by Empedocles. All things are either Love or Strife. Or both.
From that ancient perspective, I can’t help but feel your stubbornness is why you’re here at all. That it’s an imprint left over, etched onto your cells. I suspect you won all those mortal races and competitions, succeeded through all that strife, simply because from the beginning, in some proto-way, you wanted to be here. Out of all that potentiality, willfulness made you a reality.
Can someone be so stubborn they create themselves?
by Erik Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective | Read more:
Image: Alexander Naughton
[ed. Lovely. I can see my grandaughter might already have my stubborn gene. Hope it does her more good!]
Short-Term Thinking Is Destroying America
In the disquieting new film “Eddington,” the director, Ari Aster, captures the American tendency to live obsessively in the present. As a Covid-era New Mexico town tears itself apart over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter and conspiracy theories, a faceless conglomerate constructs a data center nearby — a physical manifestation of our tech-dominated future. It’s an unsubtle message: Short-term compulsions blind us to the forces remaking our lives.
In the chaos depicted, Donald Trump is both offscreen and omnipresent. Over the decade that he has dominated our politics, he has been both a cause and a symptom of the unraveling of our society. His rise depended upon the marriage of unbridled capitalism and unregulated technology, which allowed social media to systematically demolish our attention spans and experience of shared reality. And he embodied a culture in which money is ennobling, human beings are brands, and the capacity to be shamed is weakness.
In the chaos depicted, Donald Trump is both offscreen and omnipresent. Over the decade that he has dominated our politics, he has been both a cause and a symptom of the unraveling of our society. His rise depended upon the marriage of unbridled capitalism and unregulated technology, which allowed social media to systematically demolish our attention spans and experience of shared reality. And he embodied a culture in which money is ennobling, human beings are brands, and the capacity to be shamed is weakness.
Today, his takeover of our national psyche appears complete. As “Eddington” excruciatingly reminds us, the comparatively moderate first Trump administration ended in a catastrophically mismanaged pandemic, mass protests and a violent insurrection. The fact that he returned to power even after those calamities seemed to confirm his instinct that America has become an enterprise with a limitless margin for error, a place where individuals — like superpowers — can avoid the consequences of their actions. “Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic political comeback,” he said in his Inaugural Address. “But as you see today, here I am.”
Here I am. The implicit message? When we looked at Mr. Trump onstage, we saw ourselves.
Unsurprisingly, the second Trump administration has binged on short-term “wins” at the expense of the future. It has created trillions of dollars in prospective debt, bullied every country on earth, deregulated the spread of A.I. and denied the scientific reality of global warming. It has ignored the math that doesn’t add up, the wars that don’t end on Trump deadlines, the C.E.O.s forecasting what could amount to huge job losses if A.I. transforms our economy and the catastrophic floods, which are harbingers of a changing climate. Mr. Trump declares victory. The camera focuses on the next shiny object. Negative consequences can be obfuscated today, blamed on others tomorrow.
Democrats are also trapped in this short-termism. Opposition to each action Mr. Trump takes may be morally and practically necessary, but it also reinforces his dominance over events. Every day brings a new battle, generating outrage that overwhelms their capacity to present a coherent alternative. The party spends more time defending what is being lost than imagining what will take its place. The public stares down at phones instead of looking to any horizon.
We are all living in the disorienting present, swept along by currents we don’t control. The distractions abound. The data centers get built. And we forget the inconvenience of reality itself: Mr. Trump may be able to escape the consequences of his actions; the rest of us cannot.
This crisis of short-termism has been building for a long time.
In the decades after World War II, the Cold War was a disciplining force. Competition with the Soviets compelled both parties to support — or at least accept — initiatives as diverse as the national security state, basic research, higher education, international development and civil rights. Despite partisan differences, there was a long-term consensus around the nation’s purpose.
With the end of the Cold War, politics descended into partisan political combat over seemingly small things — from manufactured scandals to culture wars. This spiral was suspended, briefly, to launch the war on terror — the last major bipartisan effort to remake government to serve a long-term objective, in this case a dubious one: waging a forever war abroad while securitizing much of American life at home.
By the time Barack Obama took office, a destabilizing asymmetry had taken hold. Democrats acquiesced to the war on terror, and Republicans never accepted the legitimacy of reforms like Obamacare or a clean-energy transition. Citizens United v. F.E.C. led to a flood of money in politics, incentivizing the constant courting of donors more intent on preventing government action than encouraging it. The courts were increasingly politicized. The internet-driven fracturing of media rewarded spectacle and conspiracy theory in place of context and cooperation. Since 2010, the only venue for major legislation has been large tax and spending bills that brought vertiginous swings through the first Trump and the Biden administrations.
The second Trump administration has fully normalized the ethos of short-termism. Mr. Trump does have an overarching promise about the future. But it is rooted in what he is destroying, not what he is building. By dismantling the administrative state, starving the government of funds, deregulating the economy, unraveling the international order, punishing countries with arbitrary tariffs and whitening the nation through mass deportations, he will reverse the globalization that has shaped our lives and the government that was built during the Cold War. On the other side of this destruction, he says, a new “golden age” awaits.
Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from Silicon Valley, worries that Democrats fail to understand the resonance of this vision. “We see all the destruction,” he told me, “but what we’re not seeing is that for the Trump voter, this is a strategy of reclaiming greatness.”
Precisely because this is correct as a political diagnosis, Democrats must convey how Mr. Trump’s approach is more of a pyramid scheme than a plan. Cuts to research will starve innovation. Tariffs are likely to drive trade to China. Tax cuts will almost certainly widen inequality. Mass deportations predictably divide communities and drive down productivity. The absence of international order risks more war. Deregulation removes our ability to address climate change and A.I. Mr. Trump is trying one last time to squeeze some juice out of a declining empire while passing the costs on to future generations. Beyond the daily outrages, that is the reality that Democrats must contend with.
“The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci wrote in another era of destruction, “and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” We may be fated to live in such a time. But what new world will be born after this time? (...)
During the Kennedy-Johnson era, a youthful president and his successor forged a vision expansive enough to encompass desegregation, a stronger social safety net, investments in education, the creation of U.S.A.I.D. and the Peace Corps and the ascent of the space program. It was undercut by political violence and the moral and practical costs of Vietnam, yet it shaped our society so comprehensively that Republicans are still seeking to reverse it. Those advances depended not just on action by government, but also the transformative participation of the civil rights movement, business and labor, universities and a media and popular culture that did not shy from politics or capitulate to reactionary forces. It was a whole-of-society fight for the future.
Today, change similarly depends upon leaning into discomfort instead of avoiding division or offering false reassurance. Democrats must match the sense of crisis many Americans feel. Mr. Khanna summarized concerns that plague far too many Americans: “I don’t see myself in this future” and “What’s going to happen to my kids?” That existential crisis was the reason Mr. Trump was returned to power; his opposition needs to meet it.
This is not about skipping ahead to the fine points of policy proposals; it’s about a coherent vision. Instead of simply defending legacy programs, we should be considering what our social safety net is for. We should attack wealth inequality as an objective and propose solutions for deploying A.I. while protecting the dignity of human work and the vitality of our children. We need to envision a new immigration system, a clean-energy transition that lowers costs for consumers and a federal government that can once again attract young people to meet national challenges. Think of what a new Department of Education or development agency could do. We can no longer cling to a dying postwar era; we need to negotiate a new international order.
[ed. Good summary. I wonder though how much of this is just a manifestation of deeper forces at work. For example, we seem unable to control technology even if it eventually kills us. If something can be built and is potentially profitable in some way, it'll get built. It's inevitable. Capitalism, socialism, religion, authoritarianism, etc. are all deep animating forces that, in different ways, reflect fundamental aspects of human nature and human striving, the undercurrents (forces) of which will always be present, and probably always in some tension. The key should be finding as near an optimal balance as possible - surfing these currents for best solutions, so to speak. But, for sure no one size fits all for everyone.]
Here I am. The implicit message? When we looked at Mr. Trump onstage, we saw ourselves.
Unsurprisingly, the second Trump administration has binged on short-term “wins” at the expense of the future. It has created trillions of dollars in prospective debt, bullied every country on earth, deregulated the spread of A.I. and denied the scientific reality of global warming. It has ignored the math that doesn’t add up, the wars that don’t end on Trump deadlines, the C.E.O.s forecasting what could amount to huge job losses if A.I. transforms our economy and the catastrophic floods, which are harbingers of a changing climate. Mr. Trump declares victory. The camera focuses on the next shiny object. Negative consequences can be obfuscated today, blamed on others tomorrow.
Democrats are also trapped in this short-termism. Opposition to each action Mr. Trump takes may be morally and practically necessary, but it also reinforces his dominance over events. Every day brings a new battle, generating outrage that overwhelms their capacity to present a coherent alternative. The party spends more time defending what is being lost than imagining what will take its place. The public stares down at phones instead of looking to any horizon.
We are all living in the disorienting present, swept along by currents we don’t control. The distractions abound. The data centers get built. And we forget the inconvenience of reality itself: Mr. Trump may be able to escape the consequences of his actions; the rest of us cannot.
This crisis of short-termism has been building for a long time.
In the decades after World War II, the Cold War was a disciplining force. Competition with the Soviets compelled both parties to support — or at least accept — initiatives as diverse as the national security state, basic research, higher education, international development and civil rights. Despite partisan differences, there was a long-term consensus around the nation’s purpose.
With the end of the Cold War, politics descended into partisan political combat over seemingly small things — from manufactured scandals to culture wars. This spiral was suspended, briefly, to launch the war on terror — the last major bipartisan effort to remake government to serve a long-term objective, in this case a dubious one: waging a forever war abroad while securitizing much of American life at home.
By the time Barack Obama took office, a destabilizing asymmetry had taken hold. Democrats acquiesced to the war on terror, and Republicans never accepted the legitimacy of reforms like Obamacare or a clean-energy transition. Citizens United v. F.E.C. led to a flood of money in politics, incentivizing the constant courting of donors more intent on preventing government action than encouraging it. The courts were increasingly politicized. The internet-driven fracturing of media rewarded spectacle and conspiracy theory in place of context and cooperation. Since 2010, the only venue for major legislation has been large tax and spending bills that brought vertiginous swings through the first Trump and the Biden administrations.
The second Trump administration has fully normalized the ethos of short-termism. Mr. Trump does have an overarching promise about the future. But it is rooted in what he is destroying, not what he is building. By dismantling the administrative state, starving the government of funds, deregulating the economy, unraveling the international order, punishing countries with arbitrary tariffs and whitening the nation through mass deportations, he will reverse the globalization that has shaped our lives and the government that was built during the Cold War. On the other side of this destruction, he says, a new “golden age” awaits.
Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from Silicon Valley, worries that Democrats fail to understand the resonance of this vision. “We see all the destruction,” he told me, “but what we’re not seeing is that for the Trump voter, this is a strategy of reclaiming greatness.”
Precisely because this is correct as a political diagnosis, Democrats must convey how Mr. Trump’s approach is more of a pyramid scheme than a plan. Cuts to research will starve innovation. Tariffs are likely to drive trade to China. Tax cuts will almost certainly widen inequality. Mass deportations predictably divide communities and drive down productivity. The absence of international order risks more war. Deregulation removes our ability to address climate change and A.I. Mr. Trump is trying one last time to squeeze some juice out of a declining empire while passing the costs on to future generations. Beyond the daily outrages, that is the reality that Democrats must contend with.
“The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci wrote in another era of destruction, “and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” We may be fated to live in such a time. But what new world will be born after this time? (...)
During the Kennedy-Johnson era, a youthful president and his successor forged a vision expansive enough to encompass desegregation, a stronger social safety net, investments in education, the creation of U.S.A.I.D. and the Peace Corps and the ascent of the space program. It was undercut by political violence and the moral and practical costs of Vietnam, yet it shaped our society so comprehensively that Republicans are still seeking to reverse it. Those advances depended not just on action by government, but also the transformative participation of the civil rights movement, business and labor, universities and a media and popular culture that did not shy from politics or capitulate to reactionary forces. It was a whole-of-society fight for the future.
Today, change similarly depends upon leaning into discomfort instead of avoiding division or offering false reassurance. Democrats must match the sense of crisis many Americans feel. Mr. Khanna summarized concerns that plague far too many Americans: “I don’t see myself in this future” and “What’s going to happen to my kids?” That existential crisis was the reason Mr. Trump was returned to power; his opposition needs to meet it.
This is not about skipping ahead to the fine points of policy proposals; it’s about a coherent vision. Instead of simply defending legacy programs, we should be considering what our social safety net is for. We should attack wealth inequality as an objective and propose solutions for deploying A.I. while protecting the dignity of human work and the vitality of our children. We need to envision a new immigration system, a clean-energy transition that lowers costs for consumers and a federal government that can once again attract young people to meet national challenges. Think of what a new Department of Education or development agency could do. We can no longer cling to a dying postwar era; we need to negotiate a new international order.
by Ben Rhodes, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Lauren Peters-Collaer[ed. Good summary. I wonder though how much of this is just a manifestation of deeper forces at work. For example, we seem unable to control technology even if it eventually kills us. If something can be built and is potentially profitable in some way, it'll get built. It's inevitable. Capitalism, socialism, religion, authoritarianism, etc. are all deep animating forces that, in different ways, reflect fundamental aspects of human nature and human striving, the undercurrents (forces) of which will always be present, and probably always in some tension. The key should be finding as near an optimal balance as possible - surfing these currents for best solutions, so to speak. But, for sure no one size fits all for everyone.]
[ed. Whenever a discussion trends toward DEI, I tell folks I'm a great supporter, having lived it all my life. In Hawaii, where I grew up, we call it the "Aloha Spirit" - a sense of compassion, respect, love, interconnectedness, and unity among all individuals, regardless of race or background. You know, the whole multi-cultural, melting pot thing. Jeez, what a hell hole.]
Retire These Words
If ever an era and a locution were mismatched, it’s ours and “thought leader.” Thinking is in conspicuously short supply these days. Leaders are even scarcer.
But “thought leader” warrants erasure independent of the age. It’s pretentious. You show me someone who claims to be — or happily accepts designation as — a “thought leader,” and I’ll show you an insufferably smug sage. Scratch that: I’ll show you a self-enamored fool. No genuinely insightful person would deem it attractive or effective to wear such a gaudy garland of omniscience.
Not that “public intellectual,” a common “thought leader” synonym, is any better. It too is enveloped in an air of preciousness and cursed by its aura of self-congratulation. Here’s a good compass: If you cannot use a title or descriptor to introduce yourself without sounding like a pompous punchline in an old Woody Allen movie — “I’m Jonathan, and I’ve been a public intellectual for three decades now” — you need new language for your occupation.
Which isn’t really or solely about leading thought or intellectualizing publicly anyway. If you’re sharing your ideas in a classroom, you’re a teacher or instructor or professor or such. If you’re doing so on a page, you’re a writer, an author, maybe a researcher. On a stage? You’re a public speaker. On television? Well, that’s in the eye of the beholder and depends largely on the substantiveness and affect of the beheld. You’re a journalist or a news anchor or an entertainer — but please, please not a pundit. That’s another mushy, needless label rightly replaced by a more specific term or terms.
Besides, it makes no sense to speak of a “public intellectual” when there’s no “private intellectual,” just as “thought leader” lacks the antonym “thought follower,” which would refer to … what? Someone in a cult? All but a few Republican members of Congress since Trump took over their party?
Are those two categories redundant?
That’s a leading question. And just a thought.
But “thought leader” warrants erasure independent of the age. It’s pretentious. You show me someone who claims to be — or happily accepts designation as — a “thought leader,” and I’ll show you an insufferably smug sage. Scratch that: I’ll show you a self-enamored fool. No genuinely insightful person would deem it attractive or effective to wear such a gaudy garland of omniscience.
Which isn’t really or solely about leading thought or intellectualizing publicly anyway. If you’re sharing your ideas in a classroom, you’re a teacher or instructor or professor or such. If you’re doing so on a page, you’re a writer, an author, maybe a researcher. On a stage? You’re a public speaker. On television? Well, that’s in the eye of the beholder and depends largely on the substantiveness and affect of the beheld. You’re a journalist or a news anchor or an entertainer — but please, please not a pundit. That’s another mushy, needless label rightly replaced by a more specific term or terms.
Besides, it makes no sense to speak of a “public intellectual” when there’s no “private intellectual,” just as “thought leader” lacks the antonym “thought follower,” which would refer to … what? Someone in a cult? All but a few Republican members of Congress since Trump took over their party?
Are those two categories redundant?
That’s a leading question. And just a thought.
***
Also this: George F. Will bemoaned the ubiquity and vagueness of a four-letter word: “Having no fixed meaning, ‘vibe’ cannot be used incorrectly. So, it resembles the phrase ‘social justice,’ which includes a noun and a modifier that does not intelligibly modify the noun.” Will added: “Shakespeare used 28,827 different words without resorting to ‘vibe.’ He could have written that Lear gave off a bad vibe while raging on the heath, and that Falstaff’s vibe was fun. But the Bard did as well as he could with the limited resources of the Elizabethan English he had.” by Frank Bruni, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Shakespeare/Getty
Disruptor 16: Carbon Robotics
Seattle-based Carbon Robotics offers an AI-powered laser weeder that attaches to farmers’ tractors and looks like a space-age combine, except that it weeds instead of harvests.
Supplied with a database of 40 million images, the AI-powered agtech system shoots lasers as it passes over rows of crops, with machine learning enabling it to recognize weeds and kill them at their base using a laser, replacing the need for both manual labor and herbicides. The company says it has destroyed more than 15 billion weeds on more than 100 crops.
Carbon Robotics says its approach to weeding increases yields, quality and consistency, and helps preserve topsoil. The latter is a growing global concern, as experts estimate most of the world’s topsoil has been degraded to the point that its agriculturally usable life is measured in decades. (...)
Cost of agtech upgrades, and unproven technology compared to conventional farming approaches, is an issue. Laser weeder costs can run over $1 million, based on public reports, but farmers that have used the technology have endorsed it.
Recently, Carbon Robotics debuted the LaserWeeder G2, a smaller, less expensive version of its technology, though still a significant investment for many farmers in a business that’s made inherently risky due to weather and the volatility of global commodities markets. (...)
Carbon Robotics is growing its manufacturing in eastern Washington State, with a recent 70% headcount increase to about 200, and it ultimately has plans to grow its tech applications beyond farming. “The real driver is having AI systems doing things in the real world. Will Carbon Robotics always be in the ag industry? We’ll probably do things well outside it,” said Mikesell in an interview with GeekWire.
by Elizabeth MacBride, CNBC | Read more:
Image: Igor Gnedo, Antonina Lepore & Adrianne Paerels
[ed. Weedtech. From CNBC's Disruptor 50 list. Number one is, of course, Anduril (drones, surveillance, other AI-enabled weaponry - defense tech sector). We're screwed.]
Supplied with a database of 40 million images, the AI-powered agtech system shoots lasers as it passes over rows of crops, with machine learning enabling it to recognize weeds and kill them at their base using a laser, replacing the need for both manual labor and herbicides. The company says it has destroyed more than 15 billion weeds on more than 100 crops.
Cost of agtech upgrades, and unproven technology compared to conventional farming approaches, is an issue. Laser weeder costs can run over $1 million, based on public reports, but farmers that have used the technology have endorsed it.
Recently, Carbon Robotics debuted the LaserWeeder G2, a smaller, less expensive version of its technology, though still a significant investment for many farmers in a business that’s made inherently risky due to weather and the volatility of global commodities markets. (...)
Carbon Robotics is growing its manufacturing in eastern Washington State, with a recent 70% headcount increase to about 200, and it ultimately has plans to grow its tech applications beyond farming. “The real driver is having AI systems doing things in the real world. Will Carbon Robotics always be in the ag industry? We’ll probably do things well outside it,” said Mikesell in an interview with GeekWire.
by Elizabeth MacBride, CNBC | Read more:
Image: Igor Gnedo, Antonina Lepore & Adrianne Paerels
[ed. Weedtech. From CNBC's Disruptor 50 list. Number one is, of course, Anduril (drones, surveillance, other AI-enabled weaponry - defense tech sector). We're screwed.]
Sunday, August 10, 2025
Are Pro Golfers Getting Angrier?
A recent major champion stands on the third tee at Riviera Country Club. It’s the second round of one of golf’s marquee events, and he hits a poor drive, the kind of shot at the wrong moment that just sets you off. He can’t stand it. He smashes his driver into the nearby cart path, so hard the driver head explodes. Shrapnel flies into the crowd. One large chunk shoots just by a spectator and continues into a nearby fairway. Chaos.
The spectator and her husband shout at the player. So do other gallery members. He mumbles an apology.
The PGA Tour finds out. It sends a letter of inquiry to the player. He doesn’t respond for at least two weeks, is hit with a hefty fine and must pen a letter of apology to the spectators he nearly hit. It’s an embarrassing public moment for both the player and the tour.
Amidst the last few months of viral golf explosions, unconvincing apologies and a dramatic banishment from one of golf’s most iconic venues, you might be assuming this is a story from the summer of 2025. You might be wondering if it was Wyndham Clark, or Rory McIlroy, or perhaps Tyrrell Hatton.
This is the summer that golf outrage became a thing. But if you ask anybody around golf the past half century, they’ll tell you the only difference between now and then is that everybody is making a big deal of it.
“This story has been going on since the time of professional sports,” says Billy Andrade, age 61 and a four-time PGA Tour winner. “This isn’t anything new.”
Why is it so much bigger now? Cameras. Social media. Outrage culture. Pick one. The fact it used to be a luxury to get an entire tournament round on TV, but nowadays between Golf Channel, ESPN+, Peacock, NBC and CBS, you can theoretically watch every minute of a round from the first group to the last. It’s all right there for us to see, and in turn it’s all right there for somebody to record and post a clip online to get clicks and attention.
But is any of this actually any worse than before?
Tommy Bolt, a 1958 U.S. Open winner, is more famous for his on-course antics than the golf itself. They called him “Terrible Tommy,” constantly throwing clubs into the water or cursing up a storm. Tour officials created new rules because of his behavior. One time, he cursed so much that officials informed him of a $100 fine for each expletive. As the old story goes, Bolt pulled out his wallet, grabbed $500, and turned to each official to say, “F— you, f— you, f— you, f— you and f— you” while handing each of them a $100 bill.
“It thrills crowds to see a guy suffer. That’s why I threw clubs so often,” Bolt once told Golf Digest. “They love to see golf get the better of someone, and I was only too happy to oblige them. At first I threw clubs because I was angry. After a while it became showmanship, plain and simple.”
Brandel Chamblee recalls playing with a golfer who once hooked his drive into the water. Chamblee and the rest of the group started walking, only to turn around when they heard a slight hissing noise. The man had unzipped his pants and begun urinating on his driver.
“If any of these were nowadays, now everybody is a journalist, and these all would have gone viral and people would have thought tour pros were a bunch of babies,” Chamblee said.
Steve Pate and Thomas Pieters have both broken clubs around the back of their neck. Woody Austin banged his putter against his head over and over until it bent. John Huston played the final two holes of a U.S. Open qualifier with a hastily-made tourniquet, after the shaft of a tossed club ricocheted back and stabbed him in the arm.
Two-time U.S. Open winner Curtis Strange was so mad during a 1982 tournament at Doral that as he walked behind his caddie Gene Kelley, he impulsively kicked the bottom of the bag Kelley was carrying. Both went flying to the ground. Kelley needed surgery to fuse two vertebrae and later sued Strange; They settled out of court.
Jose Maria Olazabal punched a wall at the 1989 U.S. Open, breaking his hand and forcing himself to withdraw.
Oh, and smashing tee markers?
“The place you want to do it is the Hawaiian Open with actual real pineapples,” Andrade said.
So many golfers lay claim to smashing those pineapples at Waialae Country Club in Honolulu at the event now called the Sony Open. Corey Pavin. Brad Faxon. Craig Stadler. Calcavecchia. Imagine the sight of Stadler, known as The Walrus with his big, droopy, mustache, thinking it was plastic as he smashed the pineapple and instead covered himself in pineapple pulp. Calcavecchia remembers hitting one and spraying the poor marshal nearby.
Most of these stories, if they didn’t end up involving lawsuits or fines, were simply told after the fact, locker room and barroom tales passed around between golfers. Most golf writers around in those days simply didn’t write about them, not because they were covering for golfers or scared to. It just wasn’t news. It’s something that happens on golf courses all the time.
Chamblee has become something of golf’s moral voice over his decades as a Golf Channel analyst, a smart, insightful former pro who enjoys pontificating on larger issues in the game. So, yes, he was on the broadcasts as criticism mounted this summer over McIlroy, Clark and the rest. He says he didn’t want to criticize any of those actions too heavily, because he knew he had done the same things, if not worse. The difference was he wasn’t the kind of star who always had cameras on him, so most went unnoticed.
Chamblee does concede it is happening more often. And it definitely happens more often with the biggest stars. He has a multi-point theory for why that is.
• One: More documentation. The mere fact there are so many people with phones, so many people watching at home and rushing to clip anything they can to get it online to go viral. Simply, there are more eyeballs.
• Two: Easier equipment replacement. Golfers used to sometimes go their entire careers with the same driver. There was a mystique to finding the perfect shaft that worked for you. You’d think twice about breaking any club, because it might take you years to ever have your equipment that dialed. Nowadays, golfers can walk over to the equipment truck and order up a new driver like it’s a food truck burrito stand.
• Three: Money. In both ways. A $100,000 fine for Calcavecchia was deflating. That was a fifth of his total earnings most years. Now, these stars are worth tens of millions, if not more. No fine can even put a dent in their life. But it works both ways. They are also playing for so much money that the tensions can escalate.
• Four: Tiger Woods.
The spectator and her husband shout at the player. So do other gallery members. He mumbles an apology.
The PGA Tour finds out. It sends a letter of inquiry to the player. He doesn’t respond for at least two weeks, is hit with a hefty fine and must pen a letter of apology to the spectators he nearly hit. It’s an embarrassing public moment for both the player and the tour.
Nope. This was 1992. And it was the 1989 Open Championship winner Mark Calcavecchia.
The great Bobby Jones, the winner of the Grand Slam and creator of Augusta National, a man who tore up his scorecard at the 1921 Open Championship and walked off in anger during the third round, once said, “I would forgive almost any behavior in a man when he has a golf club in his hand.”
That’s the topic at hand this summer, because suddenly golf-adjacent temper tantrums are jumping the shark from funny little anecdotes to viral, controversial talking points. It’s the summer McIlroy, two months after the crowning achievement of his career, threw clubs and smashed a tee marker at the U.S. Open. A week later, five-time major winner Brooks Koepka was caught doing the same.
Wyndham Clark, two years removed from a U.S. Open win that thrust him into stardom, has done the most damage, quite literally. His driver’s biggest impact at the PGA Championship was the hole it left in a T-Mobile sign, which just happens to be one of his sponsors, and who tried to save him by turning it into an activation. He was not so lucky at the U.S. Open, where he destroyed a locker and was asked by Oakmont Country Club to not return until, among other things, he undergoes anger management therapy. (...)
The great Bobby Jones, the winner of the Grand Slam and creator of Augusta National, a man who tore up his scorecard at the 1921 Open Championship and walked off in anger during the third round, once said, “I would forgive almost any behavior in a man when he has a golf club in his hand.”
That’s the topic at hand this summer, because suddenly golf-adjacent temper tantrums are jumping the shark from funny little anecdotes to viral, controversial talking points. It’s the summer McIlroy, two months after the crowning achievement of his career, threw clubs and smashed a tee marker at the U.S. Open. A week later, five-time major winner Brooks Koepka was caught doing the same.
Wyndham Clark, two years removed from a U.S. Open win that thrust him into stardom, has done the most damage, quite literally. His driver’s biggest impact at the PGA Championship was the hole it left in a T-Mobile sign, which just happens to be one of his sponsors, and who tried to save him by turning it into an activation. He was not so lucky at the U.S. Open, where he destroyed a locker and was asked by Oakmont Country Club to not return until, among other things, he undergoes anger management therapy. (...)
This is the summer that golf outrage became a thing. But if you ask anybody around golf the past half century, they’ll tell you the only difference between now and then is that everybody is making a big deal of it.
“This story has been going on since the time of professional sports,” says Billy Andrade, age 61 and a four-time PGA Tour winner. “This isn’t anything new.”
Why is it so much bigger now? Cameras. Social media. Outrage culture. Pick one. The fact it used to be a luxury to get an entire tournament round on TV, but nowadays between Golf Channel, ESPN+, Peacock, NBC and CBS, you can theoretically watch every minute of a round from the first group to the last. It’s all right there for us to see, and in turn it’s all right there for somebody to record and post a clip online to get clicks and attention.
But is any of this actually any worse than before?
Tommy Bolt, a 1958 U.S. Open winner, is more famous for his on-course antics than the golf itself. They called him “Terrible Tommy,” constantly throwing clubs into the water or cursing up a storm. Tour officials created new rules because of his behavior. One time, he cursed so much that officials informed him of a $100 fine for each expletive. As the old story goes, Bolt pulled out his wallet, grabbed $500, and turned to each official to say, “F— you, f— you, f— you, f— you and f— you” while handing each of them a $100 bill.
“It thrills crowds to see a guy suffer. That’s why I threw clubs so often,” Bolt once told Golf Digest. “They love to see golf get the better of someone, and I was only too happy to oblige them. At first I threw clubs because I was angry. After a while it became showmanship, plain and simple.”
Brandel Chamblee recalls playing with a golfer who once hooked his drive into the water. Chamblee and the rest of the group started walking, only to turn around when they heard a slight hissing noise. The man had unzipped his pants and begun urinating on his driver.
“If any of these were nowadays, now everybody is a journalist, and these all would have gone viral and people would have thought tour pros were a bunch of babies,” Chamblee said.
Steve Pate and Thomas Pieters have both broken clubs around the back of their neck. Woody Austin banged his putter against his head over and over until it bent. John Huston played the final two holes of a U.S. Open qualifier with a hastily-made tourniquet, after the shaft of a tossed club ricocheted back and stabbed him in the arm.
Two-time U.S. Open winner Curtis Strange was so mad during a 1982 tournament at Doral that as he walked behind his caddie Gene Kelley, he impulsively kicked the bottom of the bag Kelley was carrying. Both went flying to the ground. Kelley needed surgery to fuse two vertebrae and later sued Strange; They settled out of court.
Jose Maria Olazabal punched a wall at the 1989 U.S. Open, breaking his hand and forcing himself to withdraw.
Oh, and smashing tee markers?
“The place you want to do it is the Hawaiian Open with actual real pineapples,” Andrade said.
So many golfers lay claim to smashing those pineapples at Waialae Country Club in Honolulu at the event now called the Sony Open. Corey Pavin. Brad Faxon. Craig Stadler. Calcavecchia. Imagine the sight of Stadler, known as The Walrus with his big, droopy, mustache, thinking it was plastic as he smashed the pineapple and instead covered himself in pineapple pulp. Calcavecchia remembers hitting one and spraying the poor marshal nearby.
Most of these stories, if they didn’t end up involving lawsuits or fines, were simply told after the fact, locker room and barroom tales passed around between golfers. Most golf writers around in those days simply didn’t write about them, not because they were covering for golfers or scared to. It just wasn’t news. It’s something that happens on golf courses all the time.
Chamblee has become something of golf’s moral voice over his decades as a Golf Channel analyst, a smart, insightful former pro who enjoys pontificating on larger issues in the game. So, yes, he was on the broadcasts as criticism mounted this summer over McIlroy, Clark and the rest. He says he didn’t want to criticize any of those actions too heavily, because he knew he had done the same things, if not worse. The difference was he wasn’t the kind of star who always had cameras on him, so most went unnoticed.
Chamblee does concede it is happening more often. And it definitely happens more often with the biggest stars. He has a multi-point theory for why that is.
• One: More documentation. The mere fact there are so many people with phones, so many people watching at home and rushing to clip anything they can to get it online to go viral. Simply, there are more eyeballs.
• Two: Easier equipment replacement. Golfers used to sometimes go their entire careers with the same driver. There was a mystique to finding the perfect shaft that worked for you. You’d think twice about breaking any club, because it might take you years to ever have your equipment that dialed. Nowadays, golfers can walk over to the equipment truck and order up a new driver like it’s a food truck burrito stand.
• Three: Money. In both ways. A $100,000 fine for Calcavecchia was deflating. That was a fifth of his total earnings most years. Now, these stars are worth tens of millions, if not more. No fine can even put a dent in their life. But it works both ways. They are also playing for so much money that the tensions can escalate.
• Four: Tiger Woods.
by Brody Miller, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Kelsea Petersen/The Athletic; Andy Lyons, Simon Bruty/Getty[ed. Sorry, this is bs. No excuses.]
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