Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

If you could set up a debate between any two figures on any subject––and could be guaranteed that tens of millions of Americans would watch––what proposition would you want debated and who would argue each side?

The podcast host Joe Rogan made news this week by offering the vaccine scientist Peter Hotez $100,000 to be donated to a charity of his choosing if he participated in a no-time-limit debate with the vaccine skeptic (and 2024 presidential candidate) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Hotez has appeared on Rogan’s podcast before, and says he would be happy to return and to talk one-on-one with the host about vaccines, but he declined to participate in a debate, likening such an event to a Jerry Springer episode. MSNBC’s Medhi Hasan, the author of the best-selling book Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking, endorsed that decision, arguing that “experts” should not debate “cranks” and analogizing the situation to a historian of World War II debating a Holocaust denier.

The economist Tyler Cowen came down in a similar place in The Washington Post:

As a general rule, one should not debate publicly with conspiracy theorists. Some conspiracies may be true and should not be dismissed out of hand. But any discussion needs to start by demanding the best available documented evidence, and then subjecting it to rigorous scrutiny. This is very often impossible to do in a public debate, where the unverified anecdote is elevated and methodological issues are obscured or unexamined. Furthermore, it takes more time to rebut a charge than to level it, and in the meantime the rebutter has no choice but to repeat some of the other side’s talking points.

So when someone demands a public debate on an issue, be suspicious. Why can’t the supposed truth be established by other means? Is it really helpful to throw so many scientific questions into the boiling cauldron of our delightful but chaotic culture of public debate?

At The Daily Beast, Ben Burgis took a contrary position:

If a large chunk of the public is in the grip of mistaken ideas about these issues, part of the job of experts is to wade in and correct those ideas. Sometimes that means getting your hands dirty by engaging directly with people you might not like or respect.

Not every scientist is going to be a gifted scientific communicator, of course. Some people who do amazing work in their labs are barely capable of explaining to their relatives what it is that they do for a living. But that actually makes it more important that people like Hotez, who combine scientific expertise with a flair for communicating to the public, not shun debates with influential anti-vaxxers. Someone’s got to do it—and if not them, who? …

Hasan says that historians of World War II shouldn’t debate Holocaust deniers. Fair enough. As things stand, Holocaust denial is a fringe position, so there’s no particular reason for real historians to have to engage with it. But imagine a world where Holocaust denial was so popular that state legislatures around the country were debating proposals to remove any mention of the Holocaust from the World War II chapters of textbooks. In a world like that, I would want historians—or at least those historians with the requisite skills in communicating to a general audience—to debate the deniers every chance they got to expose their terrible arguments and educate anyone who was still educable.

It's far from an exact analogy, but anti-vaccine views are already too popular for there to be any point in holding out hope, in June 2023, that these views will go away if scientists refuse to “elevate” anti-vaxxers by talking to them. “Just trust us and don’t ask for details” is clearly not a winning strategy.

I am sympathetic to both of these arguments. Debates are not always worthwhile, but they are presently underrated, in my view, so long as certain preconditions can be negotiated. What specifically is the proposition being debated? And what is the format? (Written debates are most underrated. I am not interested in who has quicker recall or is a better speaker. I want the considered views of two people subjecting each other’s positions to scrutiny.)  

My advice to Hotez: Rogan back-footed you with that $100,000 offer, generating publicity for his show and causing some observers to imagine that you’re afraid to defend your ideas. Learn from his tactics. Reply that your reluctance to debate stems from your belief that RFK Jr.’s statements about vaccines are riddled with basic factual inaccuracies that would be difficult to litigate in real time, but that your reluctance is surmountable: If Rogan agrees to spend the money hiring a reputable firm to fact check all of RFK Jr.’s past statements on vaccines prior to the debate, and if Rogan issues corrections to his audience for any false statements RFK Jr. utters on his podcast, then you’ll come on for a debate, which will be subject to the same fact-checking process. Make reasonable truth-seeking requests. If they are granted, follow through and debate in service of the truth-seeking you negotiated for. That is how to back-foot RFK Jr. here.

The Lab-Leak Theory

After noting that a lot of what we now know about the work done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology comes from independent researchers, Zeynep Tufekci urges more transparency from public institutions:

So far, some of the details about the Wuhan scientists who were sickened, including their names, have come from news reports citing unnamed sources, so some skepticism is required. But why hasn’t the Biden administration confirmed or denied these details?

Even though President Biden signed a law in March requiring the declassification of information about Covid-19’s origins by this past Sunday, his administration has yet to release that information. It needs to quickly declassify as much as possible of what it knows about the pandemic’s origins. In addition, the National Institutes of Health, which reportedly funded some of the research in China under scrutiny, need to be forthcoming too, rather than waiting for more leaks or laws forcing its hand.When people lose trust in institutions, misinformation appears more credible. The antidote is more transparency and accountability.

A Sea of Trouble

In National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke argues that the plight of those aboard the Titan submersible is a reminder of humanity’s stature relative to nature:

We are clever, we human beings, but, in the grand scheme of things, we are small and procumbent before Nature’s God. The work that is being done by our rescue teams is remarkable, and worthy of our prayers and our applause. And yet each time I refresh my browser for more news of its progress, I am struck by a feeling of profound technological inadequacy. Most of the surface of our planet is covered with an element against which we are helpless. We cannot breathe in it; we cannot see through it; we cannot communicate when it is in the way. If it is warm and calm enough, we can swim along its surface, but, if we sink just a little beneath the waves, it will instantly crush us to death. Our machines pale in comparison to its power and size. At an air show, those enormous P-3 airplanes that are now circling the coast of Newfoundland seem miraculous. Above the vast expanse of the Atlantic, they resemble bluebottles. The search area, which has expanded since Monday, is now twice the size of Connecticut. The vehicle that is being sought is 22 feet long — a little over the size of a giraffe. Moments such as these put the world into perspective.

Should PornHub Have to Verify the Age of Visitors?

Last year, Louisiana passed a law mandating that adult websites require age verification. As part of a First Amendment challenge to the law, Elizabeth Henson, a military veteran and the spouse of an active-duty service member, submitted a declaration arguing against the requirement.

Her argument:

While pornography might be a luxury for some, it’s become an essential means for me (and many military spouses like me) to alleviate the mental strain and tension experienced during the prolonged periods of separation from my husband when he is deployed. Deployments can lead to loss of human comfort and intimacy, and a great way to ease the difficulty of this separation and meet our natural physical urges is through pornography—whether viewed alone or, especially, together as a shared experience. Similar to a dinner-and-a-movie date night, mutual masturbation while watching the same sexy video together has worked to alleviate our tension and keep us close as a couple during these difficult times apart.

Upon arriving in Louisiana, I learned that my ability to access pornography in this state would be significantly jeopardized. I do not have a Louisiana ID—meaning that I cannot use LA Wallet as proof-of-age online. Because age-verifying via vendor interaction with LA Wallet appears to be the chosen method for most complying pornography sites, I am left without access to this material ...

Even if there were a logistically simple way to prove my age and obtain unrestricted access to non-obscene content on the internet, I would be too concerned for my privacy and troubled by the government overreach to comply. Just this past week, Louisiana’s Office of Motor Vehicles was one of many government entities and major businesses to be affected by a massive data breach of third-party data transfer service MOVEit. Breaches of this sort seem to be increasing in regularity and severity, and I have no reason to expect that my sensitive information will remain secure with other vendors going forward. Although I am comfortable admitting here that I (along with millions of other adults) view pornography, I am deeply wary of providing my identity to any entity that will effectively open the gate to adult content on the internet just to then follow me around once I’m inside. I can think of few greater intrusions upon the liberty that I served this country to protect.

“Colleges Should Compete on Free Speech”

That’s the argument Edward Yingling and Stuart Taylor Jr. advance at Real Clear Politics:

The University of Chicago and Purdue have a history of promoting free speech. The University of North Carolina and Vanderbilt have recently demonstrated a strong commitment to free speech by adopting institutional neutrality. While some colleges are now focusing more on free speech, they should go further and develop a strong reputation for promoting free speech values.

Why wouldn’t students want to attend great colleges that have cultures of free speech and academic freedom rather than Princeton, Stanford, Yale, or Harvard, where the culture stifles the free exchange of ideas? Why wouldn’t parents want their children to choose schools where students are not afraid to say what they think? Why wouldn’t more faculty want to teach at schools where academic freedom flourishes? Why wouldn’t employers want to recruit at schools where students are taught how to think for themselves, rather than to bow to orthodoxy? Why would alumni want to continue to give to schools that no longer support the core values they were created to promote? ...

As parents, students, faculty, and employers increasingly look to colleges’ records on free speech and academic freedom, more resources will become available to meet the demand. The annual FIRE free speech report will become more influential, and other measurements and reviews of colleges’ records on free speech and academic freedom will be developed.

Is the Culture War Upstream of Politics?

Kat Rosenfield is alarmed by the prospect of Donald Trump winning another term and argues in The Boston Globe that progressive overreach in the culture wars is making that outcome more likely:

The reactionary bent of our current political discourse has led progressives to adopt various positions that most people simply don’t find persuasive and that many would be reluctant to vote for. Organizing third-graders into racially segregated affinity groups, deriding things like literacy and punctuality as “white supremacy culture,” enabling the social transitioning by teachers of gender-questioning children without their parents’ knowledge: These things make normal people nervous, and you can only shut them down with shrieks of “racist,” “fascist,” or “transphobe” so many times before those words lose their power.

It is also probably not a coincidence that this penchant for rhetorical overreach on the left comes alongside a loss of trust in virtually every institution in which liberals currently wield power, from academia to media, public health to public schools. And while that loss of faith may be mainly manifesting right now as mere skepticism of certain progressive orthodoxies, it’s unlikely to end there. Indeed, the latest Gallup poll suggests that given a binary option—as we are in the voting booth—the stridency of our current moment will eventually be met with backlash, in the form of a population-level shift toward conservatism. This is how it unfolds: First you lose trust. Then you lose elections.

For more about the body of work on white-supremacy culture referenced in the article above, I recommend this analysis by Matthew Yglesias at Slow Boring and The Intercept’s interview with Tema Okun.

Provocation of the Week

Are we sufficiently ambitious in the subjects we debate? Samuel Kimbriel doesn’t think so. In a recent essay and a debate defending it, he acknowledges that there is risk in questioning the foundations of society and taking positions on how it ought to be, but argues that we should do so anyway.

He writes:

Whether you call it decay or decadence, the general feeling is that the experiment America has been running is flawed somewhere, and we are finding it very difficult to figure out where.

The left, where I largely operate, has been split on this question. One view is that the central areas of expertise that helped steward the American dream—economics, political science, Rawls style political philosophy, natural science—are basically sound. The burden of blame falls largely on those who have started to be alienated from these paradigms. The other faction on the left—which encompasses a variety of groups from Black Lives Matter to Bernie supporters—tend to think that there is something legitimate in the critiques of the status quo ante, and that we need space to consider those concerns honestly.

My own view is that our issues around both democracy and decadence stem from an understandable—but ultimately flawed—attempt to sidestep the intrinsic risk of thinking … In being entirely honest about what we do and do not know, and what we do and do not value—we are opening ourselves up to debate not merely where it’s comfortable (on data regarding inflation) but where it is more difficult (is economic growth a good theory of life?). I’m defending the space for these latter questions because we are already answering them and should do so honestly, but also because  these are matters about which many more people—not just those who went to graduate school—have a stake and feel the question with force. As I have argued elsewhere, any democracy worthy of the name has to open debate about ends, not just means.

That’s all for today––see you next week.

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The vape shops seem to be multiplying. You’ve almost certainly noticed them, if only because most are difficult to miss, decked as they tend to be in rainbow colors and neon signs. You might have emerged from pandemic isolation to find a new one next to your local smoothie shop, or maybe one has sprouted in a long-vacant storefront you always wished would turn into something you actually need.

The national trend line is strong: Since 2018, the number of vape shops in the country has increased by an average of almost 20 percent annually, according to one estimate. The retail vape market isn’t growing by leaps and bounds everywhere, says Timothy Donahue, the managing editor of Vapor Voice, an industry trade and advocacy publication. In Alabama, for example, a law restricting where vape shops can be located has made it hard to open new ones. But such laws are the exception instead of the rule. For now, vape shops appear to be a winning business model in most places. Their neon signs glow across cities, suburbs, exurbs, and rural small towns alike, even when many other kinds of retail stores are struggling to stay afloat in the same places.

But what exactly is the business model? Colloquially, vape shop is a catchall term that can be applied to a cohort of similar retailers: those that sell only vaporizers and their related nicotine or cannabis products; those that lead with hemp-derived products like CBD in forms vapeable and non; and those that might have been called “smoke shops” a decade ago, which stock things such as loose-leaf tobacco and hookah supplies in addition to new lines of vapes, oils, and gummies. In places where recreational cannabis sales are legal, vape shop is a term that might be used to describe some actual licensed dispensaries, though mainly those are just called, well, dispensaries. Vape shops are, first and foremost, specialty stores, even though they all seem to specialize in something slightly different.

Some of the factors in these shops’ success are pretty clear. For those that do it, selling cannabis products, legally or illegally, is not an unremunerative pursuit. And vaping nicotine exploded in popularity at the end of the 2010s, especially among young people. Even so, the broad flourishing of these stores can nonetheless challenge credulity. Vape shops have spread across the American retail landscape with a bizarre swiftness, seemingly unbeholden to the same vagaries of inflation, customer demand, and local real estate that bind every other kind of storefront small business in the country. How do they stay in business if they generally don’t seem swamped with customers? Why can so many of them make the numbers work when so many other kinds of small retailers struggled during the pandemic? What are they up to?

I have spent much of the past few years pondering those exact questions as vape shops grew seemingly unbidden in the expensive Brooklyn retail real estate around me. I asked neighbors, friends, and people who owned other local businesses for their theories, and nobody had any compelling ideas, except that the shops were all selling weed. (More on that in a second.) For the past few months, I’ve been trying to figure out the answer myself and have encountered mostly dead ends: Not many academics study the phenomenon, and those I contacted declined to speak with me. One cited a wariness about alienating the subjects of his research. Local vape-shop owners clammed up as scrutiny over their sales practices increased. People who manage retail rentals, broker commercial leases, or analyze commercial-real-estate data declined to speculate on the phenomenon or didn’t acknowledge my inquiries at all.

I think I’ve figured it out anyway.

First, the elephant in the room: Yes, some of these shops are doing a fantastic business in under-the-table or dubiously legal cannabis, especially in places where new laws have reduced penalties for unlicensed sales or created some legal confusion over exactly what merchants are allowed to carry. New York City is a prime example of this phenomenon. Vape shops have become common even in luxury shopping districts with sky-high rents. Mitchell Moss, an urban-planning professor at NYU, credits the shops’ quick proliferation in large part to what he described to me as the state’s “unmitigated disaster” of a legalization process. Recreational cannabis use has been legal in New York for more than two years, and penalties for its illegal sale (which is now more of a regulatory issue than a drug-trafficking one) have been drastically reduced, but the state did not get around to licensing a single recreational dispensary until late last year. In the interim, demand for cannabis pushed its sale to an expanding gray market that operates largely through the city’s now-expansive constellation of vape shops, some of which have the stuff clearly visible behind the counter.

It’s impossible to say what proportion of America’s vape shops fund their business through revenue from contraband product, but I couldn’t find anyone who thought it was all or almost all of them, even in places where illegal retail sales now commonly result in a fine instead of a criminal charge. Instead, the easiest thing to explain about the proliferation of vape shops is the ready availability of the storefronts themselves. Landlords who lease to vape shops have long run some risk of provoking ire in the surrounding community or spooking prospective tenants for adjacent spaces, but the pandemic forced some of the country’s commercial landlords to get less picky. During 2020 and 2021, retail vacancies rose significantly. According to Andrew Csicsila, who leads the North American consumer-products practice at the consulting firm AlixPartners, this effect was especially pronounced in storefronts with a very small footprint, the kind that might have previously housed a cellphone dealer. These spaces tend to turn over quickly because of their size, Csicsila told me, and suddenly the new prospective tenants who would have usually cycled into the vacancies all but disappeared.

[Read: You will miss Bed Bath & Beyond]

This was vape shops’ golden opportunity. Not only had vaping surged in popularity in the years leading up to the pandemic, but vape shops themselves have turned out to be wonderfully suited to the limitations of small storefronts. Shops can fail in small spaces because there’s just not enough room for products and services that bring in enough customers, generate enough revenue, and provide enough gross margin to, at the very least, cover expenses. One reason that supermarkets, for example, are so big is that they make up for the food business’s notoriously thin margins by dealing in very high volumes, with huge corporate-wholesale purchases and tens of thousands of sometimes-bulky products in every store.

Vape shops solve the problem in the opposite way. Their start-up costs are low; their margins are high. All they need to get up and running is their inventory, some shelving units and display cases, and a guy or two behind the counter. (Whether they also need a big neon sign outside making some kind of stoner pun is up to the individual business owner, but it does seem to get factored into quite a few vape-shop budgets.) They deal in tiny, expensive objects, many of which need to be repurchased regularly: vials or cartridges of vape liquid, disposable e-cigarettes, rolling papers, tubs of CBD gummies, pouches of shisha. According to both Csicsila and Donahue, a retailer might buy a vial of e-liquid for as little as a couple of dollars from a wholesaler, and, depending on their market, that same vial could be priced anywhere from $10 to $30 in a vape shop. Wholesale prices for vapes and other equipment, they said, allow for similarly generous premiums.

Vape shops have one other advantage: Many of the high-margin products you’ll now find in a typical vape shop didn’t even exist five years ago, when a change in federal law threw open the floodgates for legal commercialization of many of the chemical compounds found in hemp. The constantly expanding menagerie of vape-shop products—CBD! Delta-8 THC!—can be pretty confusing for new or casual users. Some convenience stores and corner shops now carry a handful of the most basic vape and cannabinoid products, but Donahue said that their selections are limited. By contrast, Moss, the urban-planning professor, likened vape shops to old-school pharmacies: You come in, you tell the proprietor what your problem is or what effect you’re trying to create, and they talk you through your options and how to use your new purchases. When so much of a consumer-product market is largely inscrutable to its potential customer base, specialty shops with knowledgeable staff are how new products catch on.

Fahd Shoaib, the manager at Aurora Smoke Shop in Lovejoy, Georgia, south of Atlanta, told me that he and his cousin, who owns the store, spend a lot of their time at work answering questions. They are the business’s only two employees, and when they opened Aurora in March 2022, he said, they quickly found customers, even though they don’t advertise and don’t even have their name listed on the shopping-center marquee that’s visible to passing drivers on busy Tara Boulevard. The storefront is tucked between a Subway sandwich shop and a 24-hour laundromat, which provides plenty of foot traffic, Shoaib said, and his cousin picked their location because the surrounding area, way out in the suburbs, was not yet saturated with similar businesses.

The cousins sell both nicotine-vapor and legal cannabinoid-vapor products, as well as tobacco and supplies for hookah, which has experienced a less widely acknowledged burst of popularity in recent years, alongside vaping. They don’t stock cigarettes, except for Newports, which Shaoib said are the brand that customers ask for most frequently. Cigarettes are still the most popular nicotine products in the country among adults, but Shoaib told me he and his cousin consider the Newports more of a courtesy to their regulars than a real profit opportunity. The margins on cigarettes are far lower than they are on much of the rest of their inventory.

After Shoaib and I spoke, I noticed that relatively few vape shops in New York carry cigarettes. Their exclusion is telling, a clear hint at the grander context of how—and why—the vape market has spawned so many small businesses so quickly. The vapor industry is, in short, one of relatively few unconsolidated consumer-product markets in America. There is no Coca-Cola or ConAgra or Walmart of vapes. There is still Big Tobacco, yes, and there is still Juul, whose e-cigarettes the FDA is trying to banish from the country. But Juul’s once-dominant market share has declined sharply, thanks to the legal blowback and increased competition from the makers of disposable vapes, such as Elfbar. The nicotine-vape market is in the process of consolidating, Donahue told me, but compared with the market for combustible cigarettes, it’s still highly variable and competitive. He described the market for the other types of products that vape shops commonly carry as “fragmented.” Shoaib mentioned that one of the most important parts of his job is keeping up good relationships with the store’s distributors, precisely because so many small suppliers are bringing new products to market and the store benefits from guidance on what to stock.

Who’s not getting into the vapor business is arguably even more important to understanding the vape-shop phenomenon than who is. Many national big-box and grocery chains publicly disavowed the nicotine-vapor market before the pandemic, fearing association with a rise in vaping among teenagers and a rash of lung issues that later seemed to be connected to black-market THC vapes. Walmart, Target, Kroger, Walgreens, and CVS, for example, don’t carry any vapor products at all, and convenience stores that sell cigarettes are poorly equipped to compete with vape shops. Vapor products can also be difficult to sell online—some states forbid internet nicotine sales entirely, and in those that don’t, a combination of federal law and corporate policy means that USPS, UPS, and FedEx all refuse to ship parcels containing them. Some online sellers get around these restrictions by mislabeling shipments, but the rules generally discourage big, mainstream internet retailers from getting into the business. Cannabinoid products, because of their sometimes still-murky legality, among other reasons, have yet to really catch on among well-established corporate producers or retailers.

[Read: The death of the smart shopper]

For now, this squeamishness leaves the wholesale and retail markets feeding the vape-shop boom mostly to the little guys. In that way, it’s a reversal of the big trends in American retail dating back more than 40 years. When there’s no Walmart or Amazon around to pressure suppliers into sweetheart wholesale deals and undercut much smaller competitors on price, people buy things from local businesses. When a type of product has yet to be standardized through commoditization, lots of suppliers can make many different things and thrive simultaneously, and their variety spurs people to go to specialty shops, ask questions, and get recommendations. We are, of course, talking about vape shops here—these are not necessarily the most beneficial or widely needed types of local businesses that could be sprouting up in America’s unused retail space. But they provide something of an object lesson in the conditions under which a particular type of small, locally owned retailer can flourish, and, by extension, a lesson in why so many others have failed since the dawn of the big-box chain store.

The continued success of mom-and-pop vape shops is hardly guaranteed. Some of their products might be regulated out of existence at some point, and the market for whatever remains is likely to become more consolidated over time, just as we’re now seeing for nicotine. It’s not difficult to imagine the same thing happening with vape shops themselves, even if the traditional retail behemoths continue to abstain. Some operators will be more efficient than others, and they’ll expand and buy up competition; maybe, at some point, private equity or venture capital, which doesn’t have the responsibility to public perception that retail giants still do, will step in to speed that process and reap the financial rewards.

If vape shops as we know them do decline, in other words, it would likely mean not that we’ve won a public-health war against nicotine or cannabis but that the market for those products has simply become more efficient and more centralized, in the same way it has for virtually everything else Americans buy. In the meantime, small entrepreneurs are getting in where they can while the business is still good and the market’s math still lets people without enormous financial resources wring a good living out of some of America’s most inhospitable storefronts. Shoaib, when we talked, was considering expanding the family business and opening a vape shop of his own.

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Are we moving too fast for America’s national pastime? Hanna Rosin asks staff writer Mark Leibovich whether the changes MLB is making to the game could help him fall in love with baseball all over again.

Interested in the changes baseball’s making? Read Mark’s article on how Moneyball broke baseball — and how the same people who broke it are back, trying to save it.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Hanna Rosin: Okay, first question: Can you just list for me some rituals that baseball players do?

Mark Leibovich: Um, you know, spitting into their hands and rubbing their hands together, staring into space, slapping their chest, Velcro-ing and un-Velcro-ing their batting gloves, tipping their hat, balancing their hat, looking to the right field grandstand, looking to the left field grandstand, crossing themselves.

They invent new ones all the time. It’s completely dynamic. A pitcher might tug at his cap and wiggle his leg when going into a motion.

Rosin: Do people lick their bats?

Leibovich: Apparently Yasiel Puig does.

Rosin: Eww.

Leibovich: Yeah. But no, I think that’s a pretty rare thing. And sounds unsanitary too.

Rosin: And what do these rituals have to do with baseball?

Leibovich: Nothing, except that they have been there forever—and players have always had rituals. Oh, this is a big part of the problem in baseball. This is why the people in charge have moved to make it faster.

Rosin: That is my friend Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic who gets all the best assignments.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

Leibovich: See, if you had known me 30, 25 years ago, you would’ve totally seen me be into a baseball game. But baseball just left me.

Rosin: I’ve known Mark for enough years to see all the fan gear faded. Red Sox hat, Red Sox T-shirts with holes in them. Red Sox socks. I’ve even seen a picture of little Mark at the game with his dad.

Leibovich: Oh my God. The first spring-training game—like, my friends and I would rush home from school to listen to the game on the radio.

Rosin: His love of this game…it was deep.

Leibovich: Every year, my birthday party was all my friends coming, and we would play a game of pickup baseball at the intersection near the little cul-de-sac I grew up on.

But it’s not necessarily like little 7-year-old Mark here. Mean, if you had seen me, I guess I would’ve been in my late 30s. They had these scintillating couple of playoff series where the Red Sox finally came back. I mean, you know, those are some intense sports-watching things.

I mean, this was the culture of my youth, and that is just gone.

Rosin: And is it gone? Because life is just so fast now.

Leibovich: I think that’s part of it. I think baseball has gotten much slower. I mean, games literally took, you know, two and a half hours when I was a kid. Now, you know, as of last year they took three hours, 10 minutes or so.

Rosin: So it’s the two things moving in opposite directions. It’s like: Just as we were speeding up and getting faster, baseball just got slower.

Leibovich: You have these two things moving in opposite directions—baseball getting slower, and our brains getting faster and our attention spans shrinking.

And all of this was moving in a direction antithetical to enjoying baseball.

Rosin: It’s funny;. when you put it that starkly, it actually makes me a little sad. Like we just have no room for anything slow in our busy lives anymore.

Leibovich: Yes. I mean, it’s funny ’cause we have these conversations, and it’s like, “Oh, baseball is to blame. It’s these self-indulgent ritual-doers who are Velcro-ing and un-Velcro-ing their batting gloves all day.” Maybe this is just our problem. I mean, there are a lot of slow, reflective things we don’t do anymore.

Rosin: So, Mark: When you set out to write about baseball, you thought that the sport was dying. And then, it did something to save itself...maybe. What did baseball do?

Leibovich: They have initiated a set of rules [in Major League Baseball]. One, and most importantly, to make the game go faster. And two: certain rules to make there be more action and offense. Less waiting around in baseball; more fun to watch.

Rosin: Got it. So just like: faster everything. More exciting.

Rosin: What’s one thing they did?

Leibovich: Well, the big thing is a pitch clock.

A pitch clock is a new tool that has appeared in every major-league ballpark this year. In which there’s this big clock in the outfield and also behind home plate—

Rosin: —like a literal clock.

Leibovich: A literal clock. It counts down from 15 seconds.

A pitcher now has 15 seconds to pitch the ball, or 20 seconds if there’s someone on base. And the batter has to be in the box ready to hit by the eight-second mark. So there are only eight seconds left. The batter has to be ready.

Rosin: And what else did they do?

__

Bigger bases

Leibovich: One of the things they did was they made the bases bigger, which, you know, people can understand. It’s a bigger base now. What that does is it encourages stolen bases. It makes running bases a safer thing, ’cause you have more of a safe haven to grab onto, or slide into.

They’re reducing pickoff throws, which took forever. And things like that. So they’re encouraging more offense.

Rosin: This isn’t technical baseball language, but it does feel like a real vibe shift.

Leibovich: It very much is. And it’s hard to explain, but when you’re actually watching a game, there is urgency.

Urgency: It is not a word that anyone would ever associate with baseball in recent years.

Now, you sit and you watch—and people are not screwing around. And you sort of internalize that as a viewer or a listener, and you say, “Wait a minute; things are happening faster. I better pay closer attention. I better not check my phone as closely.”

And so the whole vibe is, yes, maybe less relaxing. But ultimately more satisfying, because more is happening, and it’s happening faster.

Rosin: And why did they make all these changes?

Leibovich: Well, part of it is just: Baseball was falling further and further behind things like football and basketball and other sports that are a lot more compelling.

They go much faster and, frankly, are more national spectacles. Like everyone gathers to watch the Super Bowl.

So I actually went to a World Series game last fall between the Phillies and the Astros. And I drove up to Philadelphia. And, you know, it was a World Series game, and it was a no-hitter. The Astros pitchers—four of them—combined to no-hit the Phillies. This was historic, or theoretically it was historic.

No one really noticed. No one remembers it. And this is a World Series game—the likes of which are routinely being outrated on TV by early-season NFL games.

I mean, as our culture speeds up, as brains speed up—you know, cell phones and computers and attention spans. Just the whole culture has sped up. Baseball has slowed down.

And finally, they sort of decided to, all at once, just get very tough and say, “Okay, there is now a clock in baseball.” Lo and behold, it has already shaved 25, maybe 30 minutes off of games in the first couple of months in this season.

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Theo Epstein

Rosin: So. Who is the main architect of speeding baseball up?

Leibovich: There are a few of them. But probably the best known is a guy named Theo Epstein, who is this legendary figure in baseball.

He was the youngest general manager in history. He was named general manager of the Boston Red Sox at age 28. He is known for bringing the first World Series championship to Boston in 86 years. He then left the Red Sox and went to the Chicago Cubs—who had an even longer World Series drought—and he delivered after 108 years.

So he sort of has this legend attached to him. And he left the Cubs a couple of years ago, and he joined Major League Baseball as a consultant.

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Moneyball

Rosin: Isn’t Theo Epstein associated with the whole “Moneyball revolution” in baseball?

Leibovich: Yes. He did not pioneer it. Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s is given credit for that. But Theo Epstein is known as the chief disciple who applied some of these new theories in baseball and actually won World Series with it for the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs.

Rosin: Tell me if this is right. This is what I understand about Moneyball. Okay. I read the book; I saw the movie. So Moneyball was a revolution that, as I recall, was supposed to modernize baseball. Like, instead of tracking one set of statistics about players, they tracked a different set of statistics about players. Which turned out to be the actual critical factors in winning a game, and allowed teams with fewer resources to beat rich, fancy teams.

But also what I understood about Moneyball was that it was supposed to have fixed baseball.

So didn’t we fix baseball?

Leibovich: You know, very interesting terminology here, and we’re gonna try to make it not complicated. It fixed baseball for teams trying to win baseball games—i.e., the Oakland A’s, right? Who have less resources and did more with less.

The innovations we’re seeing now? It’s not about winning baseball games. Because the commissioner of baseball [Rob Manfred] and now Theo Epstein, his consultant—they work for all of baseball. They work for the fans; they work for the interests of entertainment.

So it has nothing to do with a competitive advantage between the Oakland A’s and the New York Yankees. It has everything to do with the entertainment attention span of someone watching a Disney movie or playing a video game or watching the Super Bowl or something like that.

Rosin: Moneyball fixed one set of problems, but then created another set of problems.

Leibovich: Well, they created a blueprint for teams to do better with less resources—but it was a terrible thing to watch. I mean, it created more walks, more strikeouts, slower action. So yeah: I mean, it solved one problem. It created any number of problems if you are a consumer of entertainment.

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Mental-Skills Coaching

Rosin: You know, I get why they need to move faster. One of the things that you wrote about from the slow era, which I really appreciate, was this mental-skills coaching. I was surprised and maybe happily surprised to learn that they teach baseball players how to meditate in real time while they’re on the field.

Leibovich: In a sense, yes. I mean, that’s been part of the 21st-century revolution in baseball, and in the service of giving baseball players and teams a slightly better competitive advantage. They have taught mental skills, imaging, little mini-meditations, visualizations, things that you do. Because sports, especially baseball, is a big mind game, right?

You need to put yourself in a very relaxed state, or a state that puts you in a good position to succeed.

Rosin: That seems so nice and enlightened, and that’s what we tell our children to do when they’re stressed out. That’s what we tell everyone. Like, we’re all supposed to slow down and meditate.

Leibovich: Yeah; it might be nice. But it also gets introduced into the culture, which by and large introduces more time and dawdling into the culture of baseball. So David Ortiz, Nomar Garciaparra, Robinson Canó: They have these rituals where they take their deep breaths, and they clap, and they sort of see the field.

And then the owner of the Seattle Mariners told me this: He was teaching his son’s Little League team, and all of a sudden half the Little League team is trying to imitate Robinson Canóby stepping out during the at-bat and doing his little ritual. And so: “Sorry, we gotta wait for Jimmy over here to do his little Robinson Canó–like ritual.”

And then John Stanton, the owner of the Mariners, said to me, “Look, we have just taught an entire generation of kids that it’s okay to pace around the mound for however long and waste all this time.”

And I guarantee you, it would be a lot more interesting to watch Johnny try to dunk like LeBron James or kick a soccer ball like Messi or something than it is Johnny from Seattle trying to imitate Robinson Canó between the 2-and-1 and 2-and-2 pitch.

And so, again, in a very crude way: The pitch clock sort of disrupts all of that all at once.

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Juan Soto

Rosin: You know what: We haven’t talked about how the players feel about all of this.

Leibovich: Hmm.

Rosin: You talked to Padres star player Juan Soto about the pitch clock. Let’s listen to that.

Leibovich: Do you think the clock is a good thing? Like, did the times of the baseball games used to bother you? Or did you ever get impatient, sort of waiting for pitches to come and stuff, just watching a game when you’re playing in it?

Juan Soto: I feel like if you enjoy the games, you gotta give them time to think. And to see, look around and look at everything. I mean: I know for fans sometimes it gets boring. But for baseball players, they will never get bored.

Leibovich: So you were never bored at a baseball game.

Soto: No, never. Never. It’s never too long. It’s never too short. I’m just enjoying the game.

Rosin: What was your impression of what he was saying there?

Leibovich: He was saying like, “Look; this is my life. This is my job. This is what I love to do. I don’t care if you’re bored.” I mean, I’ve had many, many people I interviewed for this story say that a million different ways. Like: “I can’t worry about whether you’re entertained or not. You know, I’m gonna get fired if I lose this many games. Or if my batting average dips below  2.0, whatever.”

No one was saying, “Oh look—the ratings from last night’s game were higher than the night before. Oh, ticket sales are up around baseball. We are being more entertaining.” No one cares about that, huh? Nor should they.

Rosin: So, the players feel one way—and we, the fans, feel another. So I guess that’s why Padres star Manny Machado, in his very first pitch-clock game, was like, “No, thank you.”

After the break: Can Mark learn to love baseball again?

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Rosin: You’ve been to a pitch-clock game.

Leibovich: The first pitch-clock game.

Rosin: Ooh!

Leibovich: Well, the first spring-training pitch-clock game.

Rosin: You were in a box, sitting with all these guys, right?

Leibovich: It wasn’t a box. It was actually a couple of rows up from the field in a spring-training game, with, basically, the orchestrators of this from Major League Baseball. One of them was Theo Epstein. Another guy was Morgan Sword, who is basically the director of on-field operations for Major League Baseball, who has been putting this all in place.

Rosin: And what were you guys talking about?

Leibovich: Well, mostly we were watching the game. I mean, this is like the first day of school for Morgan and Theo. This is this thing they had been envisioning and trying to put in place for months, and even years. And this was the first game in which it was actually happening

Rosin: And were they nervous, like on edge? What was the vibe?

Leibovich: Morgan was extremely nervous. He was a basket case, and usually he’s pretty chill. So yeah, that was pretty glaring.

Rosin: Why was he a basket case?

Leibovich: He was a basket case because he had been thinking about everything that could possibly go wrong. First of all, he’s being scrutinized. Everyone in baseball is watching to see how this first pitch-clock game is gonna go off. But he’s also spent so much time talking to umpires, talking to players, talking to managers, talking to game officials, talking to clock operators. You know, it’s basically starting up a whole cabinet department within baseball that didn’t exist before.

And so obviously on Day One, you’re gonna be nervous.

—

Leibovich: So what’s your experience as a fan been during this interregnum for you? What about your son?

Theo Epstein: Yeah. I mean, my son—my 15-year-old—I can’t help but notice his lack of desire to sit through a three-and-a-half-hour game, really.

Rosin: So who is that?

Leibovich: That was Theo Epstein. He was telling me about what his personal experience is as a baseball fan during this time when he is not affiliated with the team.

Rosin: And he’s saying his son is bored? Like, can’t watch baseball anymore?

Leibovich: Yeah.

Epstein: And especially during the pandemic, I noticed so much of his life existed through gaming. Interacting and doing commerce and everything else, like all through the computer. And Fortnite—it’s like a 10-, 15-minute game. Obviously, it’s a bit of a cliché that the Gen Z generation grew up on their phones.

Leibovich: Yeah. The patience. it’s not a cliché; it’s brain chemistry. It’s real. It is very real.

Rosin: So it’s not just about our attention span. I guess what he is panicking about is that he’s got these sons who should be baseball fans, but they can barely pay attention for more than 10 seconds.

So it makes you feel like the future of the sport is not—

Rosin: Yeah. So this is a multitiered problem, right? So not only are older former fans’ brains adapting to a faster life and moving away from baseball; there’s also this new generation that doesn’t even see what the fuss is about to begin with, and aren’t exactly reading Moneyball and reading George Will columns and watching Field of Dreams to see what the fuss is about.

Rosin: Yes. It’s actually pretty cool that you were present at the creation of new baseball—the new era of baseball.

Leibovich: I’m glad. I’m glad you appreciate this. Because this was a momentous day. And of course it was also a very mundane day, but yeah: It felt momentous.

Rosin: Right. The first-ever game in the new era of baseball. Like, was it more fun? Did you like it? Did time move faster?

Leibovich: So the game was very crisp. It was 3 to 2; I think Seattle won. Basically, all these executives, they were rooting not for the Mariners or the Padres. They were rooting for this game to be very, very fast. ’Cause they knew everyone was looking at this as like, Oh, this is the new baseball. We want it to work.

And yeah, it was very enjoyable.

I was very glad that the game took less than two hours and 30 minutes. I know Theo Epstein was; he wanted to go take a nap. The person to my right wanted to catch a flight back to New York or wherever he was going.

Rosin: So people were living their lives. I gotta catch a flight, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. And it fit into their busy lives.

Leibovich: Much more so.

Rosin: Hmm. I can’t really tell if you, Mark Leibovich, were into the game. Like, you know when you’re into a game.

Leibovich: Yeah.

Rosin: Like, I’ve seen you be into a football game.

Leibovich: Yeah. Have you ever seen me be into a baseball game?

Rosin: No.

Leibovich: See, if you had known me 30, 25 years ago, you would’ve totally seen me be into a baseball game. But baseball just left me.

Rosin: You used the word enjoyable? Enjoyable is like a dead word. Were you into the game? Personally, I prefer just fast games; I like watching basketball, I like watching soccer. I want to maybe get on board with faster baseball.

Leibovich: Yes.

Rosin: And so I guess I’m wondering where you are. Like, are you on board with faster baseball? Like when you were there, were you like, Ah, this is gonna work?

Leibovich: Yeah. I saw a minor-league game a few years ago that had a clock, and I was like, Yeah, this is it. This is totally it. I was watching an NBA playoff game with my wife and my daughter Nell, who said, “You know, there’s something really nice about a game that you know is gonna last two hours and 20 minutes.” There’s a clock on the NBA game. And if you’re a soccer fan, it’s gonna take two hours. The commissioner of baseball himself, Rob Manfred, said to me, “Look, what in your life do you really want to do for more than two and a half hours at a shot?” Even people sitting up in the front office, or the commissioner of baseball, would be like: Wow, do we really have to watch this for more than two and a half hours?

Rosin: Yeah. Like the people who are supposed to be…

Leibovich: Management, managers, commissioners. Things like that.

Rosin: I guess I just have to accept that this is where we are now.

Like, we are just not people who have patience for a three-hour pastime. We just don’t have it.

Leibovich: Right. But here’s the thing: Games literally did not take three hours in 1969. They took much less, like two and a half hours. Or probably less than that. I don’t know; maybe people then would have had less patience. But again, these two things are moving in opposite directions.

Rosin: Let’s say we shaved enough time off baseball that it lasted the same amount of time as it did when you were a kid.

Leibovich: Right.

Rosin: Do you think you could ever feel about baseball the same way you felt when you were a kid? Do you actually feel like you could feel the same way?

Leibovich: I mean, look: Can you feel the same way about something as a 50-something-year-old as you did when you were 7 or 8?

I mean, you have a much less mature brain when you’re a kid, for better or for worse. You see the world much more clearly, much more innocently. With much less sense of proportion, and so forth. So, I don’t know, and maybe my fandom growing up is shaped by nostalgia. Now that I think about it and talk about it, I would think so—because right now I associate it with good times for my youth.

Rosin: So it feels like where we are this summer is that we—the fans—really want baseball to change. The players are somewhat resistant. The rules are in place. Do you think that this will save baseball?

Leibovich: I think it will help baseball. I think early results are that it has helped baseball.

If you go by the actual shrinking time of games, if you go by the ratings and the ticket sales and so forth, the first few months of the season have been very encouraging. The larger point is, you know: Is this putting a Band-Aid on a larger sort of existential problem that baseball is ultimately not going to be able to deal with?

Rosin: All right. So now that you’re done with your reporting, and there are no legends inviting you to sit in their boxes with them and talk to Juan Soto, are you gonna go to any games?

Leibovich: Yeah. I mean, again, a lot of it comes down to…

Rosin: Was that like “Yeah,” or was that like “Yes”?

Leibovich: Yes. And I’ll tell you what probably the decider will be. I mean, I’m parochial. I care about my team, the Red Sox. The Red Sox were not supposed to be good this year. They’re kind of mediocre, but they’re an entertaining team, and I have cared about them. So I have watched. If they completely implode, I’ll probably stop watching. So like Juan Soto and him wanting good numbers, I want my team to do well. And I will probably drop off. But if I do go to a game this year, I’m thrilled that it’s not gonna go past 11 o’clock.

Rosin: Right. So it’s love, but it’s conditional love.

Leibovich: Totally.

Rosin: Like, they’ve won you back, but conditionally.

Leibovich: Hundred percent.

Rosin: I think where I’m at is: I still would rather see a Washington Spirit game. But if somebody, say a child—anybody’s child—asks me to go to a game, I won’t recoil in horror. I’ll be like, “Yeah, okay, sure. I’ll try it.”

Leibovich: Here’s what I’ll say to you. And it’s very intimate. But I’m gonna invite you to a game. We both live in Washington, and so we’re gonna go. And whoever wants to join us can join us. And hopefully, the recoiling in horror will not transpire. And if it does, we can just leave.

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Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by A.C. Valdez. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Our fact-checker is Michelle Ciarrocca. Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez. Our podcast team includes Jocelyn Frank, Becca Rashid, Ethan Brooks, Kevin Townsend, Theo Balcomb, and Vann Newkirk. I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back with a new episode every Thursday.

If you like it, tell some Red Sox fans or some Yankees fans; whatever. Tell all the fans.