The Next Big Youth/High School Sport - Flag Football

 

Bloomberg - "Flag Football’s Boom Is Shaking Up Youth Sports"

"According to data from the National Federation of State High School Associations, more than 100,000 American high school girls played flag football at school during the 2025-26 academic year, which constitutes a 48% jump from the previous year and an increase of more than 550% from just five years ago. By the NFL’s numbers, approximately 800,000 girls from age 6 to 17 now compete in some capacity. In a 2025 report, Project Play, the Aspen Institute’s youth sports initiative, found that flag football was the only team sport that grew its overall participation among American kids from 2014 to 2024. The report’s authors put it bluntly: “In the decades to come, we may view youth sports as two eras — before flag football exploded and after.”"

Patrick Radden Keefe on Slammers

 

New Yorker - "The Car-Crash Conspiracy"

The rise and fall of monoculture

 

WSJ - "The Rise and Fall of the American Monoculture"

"Everyone my age remembers “Jurassic Park,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the early seasons of “The Simpsons.” My teenage son and his friends watch and listen and play different things, sometimes even when they’re in the same room. Whatever it one day means to have grown up in the 2020s, it won’t have much to do with pop culture."

...

"To understand how things have changed, consider the case of anime, the Japanese animation style that used to live in the remotest corners of video stores and is now one of the hottest businesses in Hollywood. There may not be a lot of anime fans, but they’re a passionate group who turn out to theaters for hits like “Demon Slayer” and all subscribe to Sony’s streaming service Crunchyroll, which caters specifically to them.

Anime fans were always willing to spend lots of money, it turns out. Before digital distribution, there wasn’t a way to market or deliver content specifically to them, so the business wasn’t viable.

Building a mass audience, meanwhile, is harder than ever, because Hollywood can no longer force content on the country by giving it the best time slot or the best position on the shelves of Best Buy."

The Kwakwaka'wakw Nation Roots Behind the Seahawks Logo

 

BBC - "NFL team's logo links Super Bowl fans to indigenous roots"

Related,

Scientific American - "Seattle heads back to the Super Bowl. What even is a seahawk anyway?"

The Re-Rise of Bathhouses

 

Bloomberg - "Why We’re All Trading Happy Hours for the Bathhouse
By Madison Darbyshire and Eleanor Thornber

Previously,
The Sauna Lifestyle of Northern Minnesota (Jan. 25)

Popularity of Running

 

Field Notes Mag - "Running is More Popular Than Ever. But Why Now? And Can It Stay Cool?"

The State and Principles of Wikipedia

 

The Verge - "Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring"
By Josh Dzieza

"Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects. Started nearly 25 years ago, the site was long mocked as a byword for the unreliability of information on the internet, yet today it is, without exaggeration, the digital world’s factual foundation. It’s what Google puts at the top of search results otherwise awash in ads and spam, what social platforms cite when they deign to correct conspiracy theories, and what AI companies scrape in their ongoing quest to get their models to stop regurgitating info-slurry — and consult with such frequency that they are straining the encyclopedia’s servers. Each day, it’s where approximately 70 million people turn for reliable information on everything from particle physics to rare Scottish sheep to the Erfurt latrine disaster of 1184, a testament both to Wikipedia’s success and to the total degradation of the rest of the internet as an information resource."

Global Migration According to Facebook Data

 

NYT - "To Understand Global Migration, You Have to See It First"

The Future of Moviegoing is Repertory (?)

 

The Ringer - "The Future of Film May Just Be Old Movies"

Related,

Indian Book Festivals

 

New York Times - "The Hot Place to Be Seen for Young Indians: Book Festivals"

The Sauna Lifestyle of Northern Minnesota

 

NY Times - "In Search of Sauna Nirvana Around Lake Superior"

"The hater’s guide to Deion Sanders"

 

Andscape - "The hater’s guide to Deion Sanders"
By Clinton Yates

Spike Lee and Brooklyn's Arsenal Supporters

 

Vanity Fair - "Taking Shots With Spike Lee and His Arsenal Fan Club: “It’s Always Electric When He Shows Up”"

Celebrities Used to Be People

 

GQ "Pulling Weeds" Newsletter by Chris Black:

"When I was growing up, “cool” was everything. The musicians, actors, writers, and talking heads we idolized and tried to imitate were outspoken, often on drugs, and sometimes straight-up bad people. I recognize that it was a simpler time before social media and stan culture. People of note could do as they pleased without much risk of blowback—but now, in our sanitized world, cool has become almost meaningless. Playing it safe is the top priority for some of our most prominent and influential artists.

Lately, my friend Lauren Sherman has been chronicling the discussion around the baffling outfits of Taylor Swift and her BFF Blake Lively in her Puck newsletter Line Sheet. Swift has never been a fashion icon. Not working with major designers is unheard of for someone of her stature. But I agree with the prevailing theory, advanced by Sherman and many others, that it is all done intentionally. Ultra high fashion and advanced-stylist-collab looks signify wealth and interfere with the illusion that the wearer is Just Like Us, stepping out each day in whatever’s clean and close at hand. And for an artist like Swift, that can’t happen. In the ecosystem of modern fame, the goal is to seem relatable and “real” no matter how rich and famous you get. To present as the same humble, approachable person you were before you started selling out stadium tours or doing big numbers on opening weekend. This August, Swift recalled her state of mind while writing the Folklore album during COVID, describing herself as “a lonely millennial woman covered in cat hair in the house, drinking a lot of white wine.” And maybe that’s exactly how it was, back then—but she was onstage playing her eighth Eras tour show at Wembley Stadium when she said it.

It seems unrealistic, but it seems to be working quite well. Swift is just one very obvious example. The major difference between fame as it existed once upon a time and the version of it that exists today is that the star has all the power. Ultimately, they control their channels, which have a gigantic reach and no editorial voice or standards save their own. They can post a scripted TikTok video where they have final cut privileges and reach a rapt audience. Thanks to the domination of influencers, fans just want (and demand) access, whether performative or not. After the initial discovery, I don’t think they care about style or sense of humor. Of course, GQ, The New Yorker, Gentlewoman, and Fantastic Man still do deep-dive longer profiles, but even if subconsciously, are they getting the same honesty that existed before cool died and social media was the bottom line? Growth isn't the goal once you reach the top of the heap. Maintaining that level of fame and success is the goal.

Cool means different things to different people, but to me, it’s about authenticity—which is very different from “relatability.” People who make great art that moves the masses are not like you and I. They have a point of view, laser focus, a pinch of delusion, and a level of execution that is required to make something great and be able to sell it. Being guarded, playing it safe, and always being concerned with controlling the narrative just isn’t compelling anymore. Charli XCX is thriving because she is truly herself, Oasis is going to have the biggest tour next year because they have never stopped being total pricks in the public eye, and Chappell Roan’s streams continue to skyrocket even though she’s stared down her front-facing camera and told her fans in no uncertain terms that she owes them nothing. The light is peeking through the cracks—hopefully, cool is back. "

The Death of the Minivan

 

The Atlantic - "The Death of the Minivan"
By Ian Bogost"

"Pickup was quick. In the first year after introducing them, Chrysler sold 210,000 Dodge Caravans and Plymouth Voyagers, its initial two models. Overall minivan sales reached 700,000 by the end of the decade, as the station wagon all but disappeared. But the new design also generated stigma: As the child of the station wagon and the service van, the minivan quickly came to represent the family you love but must support, and also transport. In a nation where cars stood in for power and freedom, the minivan would mean the opposite. As a vehicle, it symbolized the burdens of domestic life.

That stigma only grew with time. In 1996, Automobile magazine called this backlash “somewhat understandable,” given that the members of my generation, who were at that point young adults, had “spent their childhoods strapped into the backseat of one.” Perhaps it was childhood itself that seemed uncool, rather than the car that facilitated it. In any case, minivans would soon be obsolesced by sport utility vehicles. The earliest SUVs were more imposing than they are today: hard-riding trucks with 4×4 capabilities, such as the Chevrolet Suburban and the Jeep Wagoneer. These were as big as or even bigger than the plumber-kidnapper vans of the 1970s, and they got terrible gas mileage, cost a lot of money, and were hard to get in or out of, especially if you were very young or even slightly old. Yet the minivan’s identity had grown toxic, and for suburban parents, the SUV played into the fantasy of being somewhere else, or doing something better."

Related,
"Volkswagen ID Buzz Coming to U.S. by 2023" (Mar. 2021)

The Memeing of Life

 

GQ - "The Memeing of Life"
By Will Welch (Global Editorial Director)

Back in June, I was sitting at a dinner event next to a young writer friend. This was during that extraordinary moment in American politics when President Joe Biden was still on the Democratic ticket but facing mounting pressure to step aside.

The writer friend is wickedly smart, funny, and popular. Plugged-in. The kind of cutting-edge young person who's in all the cutting-edge group chats with all the other cutting-edge kids.

We were talking about the increasingly plausible possibility that Biden might drop out of the race.

"It's gotta be Kamala," my friend said. "I think she can do it." He paused. "And just imagine the memes."

Something about that statement hit my brain like a bolt of lightning. This young person was doing things at once: expressing an earnest and very serious political perspective and expressing a deliriously craven lust for LOLs.

You see, in 2024, the two need not be at odds.

In fact, for a political idea to connect, it very much has to meme.

For whatever reason, this exchange finally made me accept a hard and very modern truth: Right now, the meme is the primary mode of transmission, and the most important currency of our time.

The implications of this are far-reaching. They affect politics, business, news, fashion, every form of culture. Basically, all public-facing communication at scale.

Just a couple weeks after the conversation with the writer that galaxy-brain-memed my mind, I was having dinner with another friend, this time a musician.

He told me that his latest album had yielded disappointing results, and he'd just returned from a tour on which he'd lost money.

He was frustrated because, with the new album, he'd made a rich and complex work of art that he was unwilling and perhaps unable to reimagine as "content."

He resisted cutting his headphone masterpiece up into chunks and pushing it through the social media pipelines.

As a result, the album did not meme. Which means it did not travel. And it did not accrue currency.

Now, it's important to acknowledge here that the concept of the internet meme is some three decades old. But all this is very much new. To be honest, most people still haven't caught on.

Which is why the long-simmering conversation about Joe Biden's age didn't get serious until after the president's infamously disastrous debate with Trump, despite a whole genre of "Joe Biden freeze" memes that had been racking up views and LOLs (yes, memes are unsparingly cruel) for months.

Until the debate we weren't quite ready to think like my writer friend and accept that the freeze memes were showing us the truth and delivering the laughs at the same time.

Once you go galaxy-brain you start realizing that all the biggest cultural juggernauts of the last 12 months or so have been meme machines: Zach Bryan. Elon Musk. Dune: Part 2. The Drake-Kendrick beef.

And, of course, nobody memes as effortlessly and instinctively as Donald Trump himself—although Kamala Harris is a formidable meme machine herself, which suggests the Dems might be competitive in November after all.

Despite all the daily ridiculousness on TikTok, X, IG Reels, and all of our group chats, I don't think the grave importance of this election is lost on America's citizenry. Every news hit and campaign ad makes it extraordinarily clear that the future of the global economy, several wars, the climate, women's reproductive rights, fundamental LGBTQ issues, and much more are all on the ballot. Every day we hear—from both sides, for different reasons—that democracy itself is at stake. This one matters a lot.

Yet in 2024 each day's battle will be won or lost in the meme trenches, with dumb-funny user-generated social videos that make the internet laugh-cry. What a time to be alive.

Meanwhile, I have been grappling with what all this means for me personally, and for GQ. Honestly, on the personal side, at age 43, the thought of mastering CapCut so I can throw myself on the sword of the TikTok algorithm feels equal parts exhausting and demeaning.

But here in the relevance economy, you can't succeed if you're too cool to meme. Dignity is a forgotten virtue and clout is king.

As far as GQ goes, I think we're in good shape.

George Clooney and Brad Pitt have stayed at the center of culture for four decades now, and when we asked them to put on white suits, hop in Brad's pool, and mug for the camera they didn't hesitate.

I think it's a classic magazine cover. I also think it's a good meme. Right now, it's gotta be both to make a splash.

Bromakase

 

New York Times - "‘Bromakase’ Is the New Steakhouse"

BFF

 

Via @lotrology on Instagram. 

Swedish Fika for Americans

 

Wall Street Journal - "Sweden Has a Caffeinated Secret to Happiness at Work"

"Pronounced “fee-kah,” the Swedish culture of breaking for coffee involves much more than a schlep to Starbucks. It’s meant to be a deliberate pause to provide space and time for people to connect. Many Swedish companies build a mandatory fika into the workday, while the Embassy of Sweden in Washington holds one for staff weekly. IKEA, promoting its Upphetta coffee maker on the corporate website, extols the virtues of fika: “When we disconnect for a short period, our productivity increases significantly.”

“Fika is where we talk life, we talk everything but work itself,” said Micael Dahlen, professor of well-being, welfare and happiness at the Stockholm School of Economics. The ritual helps drive trivsel, he says, a term that means a combination of workplace enjoyment and thriving. The concept is so fundamental to Swedish workplaces that many companies in Sweden have trivsel committees, he said."

The Problem With Apple Watch Rings

 

The Atlantic - "The Apple Watch May Have a Calorie Problem"

"Diaz, the exercise physiologist, told me that, back when he wore a Fitbit, he’d find himself pacing his apartment in the evening trying to get his steps in. “I just didn’t like the relationship that I was forming with the device and with my life,” he said. He’s not saying that no one should use them, he clarified, but the problem with these devices is that they use external motivation, whereas “what the science tells us is that for long-term behavior change, internal motivation is far better.” Rather than being poked to move by a computer on their wrist, a person should find a way to get in exercise that they enjoy, because then they’ll be more likely to keep it up in the future.

To prove his point, Diaz asked me how I felt after finishing rock climbing or surfing. I gushed about the high. Closing Apple’s rings, or reaching 10,000 steps, might feel good. But it’s nothing like the joy that comes from moving your body simply because you want to."