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Jimmy Buffett, the chiller laureate of Key West, died on Friday at 76. His legacy goes well beyond music: He also parlayed the power of his loyal community into a business empire.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

How American democracy fell so far behind How telling people to die became normal A DeSantis speech too dangerous to teach in Florida You already got into Yale. Now prepare to be rejected.

A Distinctly American Figure

If you have never spent a lunch hour in Times Square at the Margaritaville restaurant, or a cocktail hour at the 5 o’Clock Somewhere bar upstairs, allow me to paint a picture: An enormous shiny flip-flop greets you at the door of the restaurant cum bar cum resort tower. A massive replica of the Statue of Liberty holding a margarita glass pokes through the floor of the restaurant. Should you choose to ascend, a long elevator ride delivers you to the top-floor bar, which features turquoise furniture, tequila drinks on offer, and a beautiful view of Manhattan. Some elements of Margaritaville are kitschy, and some are charming. But above all, when you’re there, you don’t forget for one second that you are in a Margaritaville.

Jimmy Buffett, the troubadour and celebrant of a good-times lifestyle, deserves to be remembered for more than just his music (fun though it may be). Buffett also parlayed his name recognition into a business empire that, starting with the first Margaritaville in Key West, Florida, swelled to include resorts, restaurants, food, and merchandise; Buffett became a billionaire later in life. He was beloved by his many fans, known as Parrot Heads, and he leveraged that fan base into a loyal community of customers. Beyond the Parrot Heads, he also reached hungry and thirsty visitors of all stripes: Some 20 million people visit Margaritaville-branded establishments annually.

In recent years, a variety of brands have become obsessed with building community. Tech start-ups in particular have glommed on to it as a marketing buzzword. If people feel connected to a brand, the thinking goes, they will buy more stuff. Buffett was an early master of this art: He was selling goods and services, but he was also offering a sense of belonging. And though it has become de rigueur for celebrities to peddle branded products, be it skin care or tequila, Buffett has been translating pop-culture recognition into product sales for decades.

Buffett was a multi-hyphenate before it was cool. He first became known as a musician, with his beach hit “Margaritaville” in 1977 and, the next year, his cheeky “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” He was also an author: Starting in 1989, both his fiction and nonfiction books topped the New York Times best-seller lists (a distinction he shares with an elite smattering of writers, including Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Dr. Seuss). He had a Broadway show. Margaritaville sold frozen shrimp, blenders, margarita mixes, and a lifestyle. The New York Times reported that Margaritaville Enterprises, a corporation with ties to more than 100 restaurants and hotels, brought in $2.2 billion in gross annual revenue last year, largely through licensing and branding deals. Though Margaritaville Resort Times Square recently began Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, Margaritaville Enterprises is reportedly still investing in new properties.

For a man who made his name on visions of relaxation, Buffett got things done. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 2018, “Mr. Buffett is still the lone occupant in the Venn diagram of People Who Outearn Bruce Springsteen and People Who Are Mistaken for Men of Leisure.” Though a 23andMe test reportedly confirmed that Jimmy was not related to Warren Buffett, the two men became friends, and the latter offered business advice to the former; Jimmy called him “Uncle Warren.” (The Oracle of Omaha is also an investor in Margaritaville Enterprises through subsidiaries of Berkshire Hathaway.)

Jimmy Buffett even created literal Margaritaville communities: Last year, Nick Paumgarten wrote a long dispatch in The New Yorker recounting his time visiting Latitude Margaritaville, a “55 and better” active-living community in Florida. Paumgarten notes the sense of belonging that Latitude Margaritaville provides its older residents—even if it comes with a heavy dose of hedonism. “If it’s isolation that ails us—our suburban remove, our reliance on cars, our dwindling circles of friends, our lack of congregation and integration and mutual understanding, of the kind described by Robert Putnam in ‘Bowling Alone,’” Paumgarten writes, “then the solution, especially for those tilting into their lonelier elderly years, would seem to be fellowship, activity, fun. In the Margaritaville calculus, the benefits of good company outweigh the deleterious effects of alcohol.” (As it happened, Paumgarten’s article was published the day before my first visit to the Times Square location next to my then-office; the sweet—and also thoroughly capitalist—context about Buffett’s empire enhanced what was already a novel experience.)

Buffett’s Florida development, Paumgarten wrote, “came off both as an escape from America and as the most quintessentially American setting of all.” And Buffett himself was a distinctly American figure—a canny self-mythologizer who brought people joy and made very good money along the way. I hope you all will embrace your license to chill in his honor. As they might say at Margaritaville: Fins up. It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.

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Today’s News

All the defendants in the election-interference case in Fulton County, Georgia, have now pleaded not guilty. Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys national chairman, was sentenced to 22 years in prison, after being convicted for seditious conspiracy in the January 6, 2021, attack. Senator Mitch McConnell released a letter from Congress’s attending physician stating that evaluations ruled out a stroke or seizure, after McConnell visibly froze on camera on two recent occasions.

Evening

Vivian Maier / Howard Greenberg Gallery

The Novel That Helped Me Understand American Culture

By Rafaela Bassili

Growing up in São Paulo, Brazil, I spent many of my waking hours reading American young-adult books, rigorously studying the mechanics of American teenage life. These books weren’t always beautifully written, but I loved them all the same, the way another kid might have loved dinosaurs: I was compelled by their exoticism; their observations about proms, parking lots, and malls; their descriptions of what girls in the U.S. ate and how they lived. None of it had anything to do with me, so I was surprised when, at 16, I saw myself in Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and a thinly veiled avatar for Plath herself. Plath’s acerbic prose paralyzed me with envy; her novel unlocked a sorrowful and rage-filled side to a language I had only experienced as functional and rigid.

With a diligent thirst for knowledge, I began to understand Plath’s reputation as an archetypal mid-century American girl. The legend of Plath is inextricable from the visual mythology of postwar prosperity—white picket fences, images of John and Jackie Kennedy sailing—that developed alongside the baby boom.

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P.S.

Tom here, peeking in after reading Lora’s essay on Jimmy Buffett. Buffett’s last public appearance was just up the way from me here at a venue in Rhode Island, and when I heard he’d died, I was on my way to a nearby beach. I reminisced with my wife a bit as we drove to the shore about how I didn’t appreciate Buffett when I was growing up, mostly because “Margaritaville” was overplayed when I was a teenager. Also, I didn’t really get that whole Gulf and Western sound. My New England (I was raised near the mountains) doesn’t seem like Jimmy Buffett’s natural environment: The beach is far, the water’s cold, and the first snows come soon after the last beach day.

But when I moved to Rhode Island in my 20s, I spent my first summer at the beach and the Newport bars, where Buffett’s music was everywhere. One day, I heard “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” and it clicked. The beach wasn’t really the point. The palm trees and tropical nights and steel drums? Those were just the decor. That day in Newport, I realized that you didn’t need a beach to love Jimmy Buffett, whose music was so kind, so American, and so fun. The next day, I went to the local record store and bought my first Buffet CD. After that, no matter where I lived, I always had a beach and a friend.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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In the first season of Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, it took five episodes before anyone played a professional game of basketball. The HBO show, created by Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht, dramatizes the “Showtime” Los Angeles Lakers, a dominant team whose reign began with the drafting of Magic Johnson in 1979 and continued through the ’80s, expanding the NBA’s reach and transforming basketball into a television powerhouse to rival baseball and football in America. But its first season was only so interested in the actual on-court competition. Instead, the show trudged through locker-room rivalries, boardroom subplots, and the business machinations of the owner, Jerry Buss, before finally staging a tip-off halfway through, for Magic’s first Lakers game.

Season 2, which began airing last month on HBO’s rebranded Max service, is the complete opposite: a pedal-to-the-floor dash through four years of Laker history that wraps up an entire NBA season in its first episode. That’s partly because of the history it draws from—Magic Johnson’s first year with the Lakers was a dramatic series of twists and turns that ended in a championship, while his second was largely derailed by a knee injury. But it’s also weirdly emblematic of the strange stretch-and-snap formatting of so much streaming-exclusive television, wherein a plodding, overly methodical first season is followed by one that seems almost panicked, rushing to push out more plot lest its mercurial corporate overlords decree cancellation. For this new season of Winning Time, that format has created a particular sense of factual whiplash, trying to cram a hundred pounds of ’80s NBA facts into a 10-pound bag.  

When Winning Time launched, it was lauded as a potentially major new HBO drama—produced by Adam McKay (who shepherded Succession to great success at the network) and featuring a star-laden cast, including John C. Reilly (as Buss), Adrien Brody, Jason Segel, and Jason Clarke. The first season was the target of some criticism from the NBA community for its perceived inaccuracies, but it was enough of a hit to merit a renewal, with following seasons promising to further the Showtime Lakers’ sprawling narrative. Things that a casual basketball fan would remember from that era—such as Pat Riley’s managerial career or Magic Johnson’s rivalry with Boston Celtic Larry Bird—were barely touched on in Season 1, which helped it feel like a diverting appetizer to a hefty main event.

Only now the second season is stuffing its face, trying to throw in a little bit of everything as it marches the team from 1980 to 1984 over the course of seven episodes. That run, which is slated to conclude this month, will encompass a major coaching change, three NBA Finals appearances, and the true dawn of the Magic-Bird rivalry, which became the lynchpin of the league’s exciting ’80s. But the truncated story feels agitated; whereas the first season perhaps spent a little too much time on Buss’s mortgage application for the L.A. Forum, Winning Time is now a glitzy scroll down a Wikipedia page, lobbing important details at the viewer without much care for nuance.

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The show’s biggest assets remain Quincy Isaiah, who plays the exuberant Johnson, and Solomon Hughes as his taciturn counterpart, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. As the show’s toughest pieces of casting—they have to be physically credible and good at acting—both continue to succeed at embodying the athletes’ respective (and famously oppositional) energies without doing cartoonish impersonations. Sean Patrick Small, who plays Bird, is given a little more material as the player’s backstory is fleshed out this season, but he’s still largely there to wordlessly hit three-pointers while staring at Johnson like an assassin.

Bird was, to be clear, a cold-blooded, trash-talking hayseed legend, but what’s frustrating about Winning Time is that it doesn’t offer much more than that potted stereotype—something that’s true of almost every character around Johnson and Kareem. Jerry Buss, who continues his habit of narrating plot to the camera, remains a happy-go-lucky businessman who’s fond of brassy risks and pretty ladies. General Manager Jerry West (Clarke) is a bullheaded former star who can’t help but say “fuck” between every other word. Coach Paul Westhead (Segel) is a Shakespeare-quoting egghead with not enough empathy for his players, while his deputy, Pat Riley (Brody), is waiting in the wings for a job even the most lapsed NBA fan knows he’ll get. Though there’s some effort this year to elevate characters such as Jerry’s daughter, Jeanie (Hadley Robinson) and Johnson’s girlfriend, Cookie (Tamera Tomakili), they function largely as sounding boards and roadblocks; it’s an unavoidably male show bouncing a dozen puffed-up egos against one another.

A sense of inevitability runs through Winning Time’s second season, something the first season did manage to avoid. The 1979–80 Lakers took an odd, ramshackle journey to triumph, losing one coach to a bicycle accident midway through the season and Abdul-Jabbar to a sprained ankle in the NBA Finals. But the subsequent years have the momentum of a freight train, as great supporting actors surround Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar, and Riley is elevated to a head-coach spot he’d hold for the rest of the decade. Yes, there are some spicy behind-the-scenes tales of infighting and romantic drama (particularly involving Johnson), but it’s salacious filler for a well-trodden tale. The Lakers end the ’80s having won the most titles, with Johnson just edging Bird out in their generational rivalry. They become the new standards for enduring basketball excellence, at least until another superstar arrives to displace them.

That raises a larger question: Could any NBA narrative make for a continually compelling drama series? Obviously, the sport has seen its fair share of tumultuous roads to victory for megastars, such as the Lakers’ Shaq-Kobe pairing of the 2000s, LeBron James’s “Heatles” era in Miami, and the recent Steph Curry–led Warriors dynasty. But it all seems like better fodder for some juicy documentary many years down the line, when athletes might be comfortable enough to talk some real smack, as Michael Jordan and his teammates did on ESPN’s The Last Dance in 2020. Winning Time remains diverting in spurts, but it’s offering a telling lesson about sports narratives: The real thing is always going to be tough to substitute, no matter how many stars you can bring in off the bench.