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Mark

Bakhmut, Before It Vanished

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › international › archive › 2023 › 09 › bakhmut-memories-former-resident › 675458

“President Joe Biden has made a statement about the situation in Bakhmut”: If anyone had said this sentence to me two years ago, I would have laughed. Back then, most Ukrainians couldn’t have found Bakhmut on a map.

Now, when I tell people that I come from Bakhmut and permanently left it in February 2022, on the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, their faces change. They start talking to me as though we are standing at a graveside. The name of my home city suffices for this.

I carry my town inside me and mark it on Google Maps with a heart and the word home. Russia has physically erased it from the face of the Earth and made its name a byword for destruction, for street battles of a ferocity hardly seen since World War II.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien and Mykola Bielieskov: What the battle in Bakhmut has done for Ukraine]

Sometimes, I stare for hours at new photos of ruins published in local chat groups. I’m looking for the city I remember: I’ve walked this street hundreds of times on my way to school; my classmate lived in that building; my dentist worked in the neighboring one, where I had an appointment on February 24, 2022, that I never made. When I identify the neighborhood, I feel relief: I haven’t forgotten everything. My town is imprinted in me.

In peacetime, I gave tours of Bakhmut when friends visited from other cities. But I’ve never tried to do this virtually, to walk someone through a city that effectively no longer exists. Few buildings survive here, only ashes, and tons of broken concrete that people once considered their homes. No life remains, or almost none: Visible in drone footage are chestnut, apricot, and cherry trees that miraculously withstood the Russian onslaught, although Bakhmut itself did not.

Let me take you to my Bakhmut.

Bakhmut is small, roughly 40 square kilometers, and just a little more than an hour by bicycle from end to end. In the summer, the steppe gets hot, no matter the time of day. But by October, the leaves have turned and fallen in the light wind.

Stupkey, to the city’s north, sits on massive salt deposits that made Bakhmut a mining town for hundreds of years. Once, I came here with Mark van den Meizenberg, the scion of a Dutch family that established a salt mine called “Peter the Great” 140 years ago. We walked through tall grass until we came to a ravine and a salt lake, near the site of the old mine. Mark’s family lived here until the beginning of the First World War and the revolution, burying their dead in the local Dutch cemetery.

The Bolsheviks put an end to “Peter the Great,” and salt extraction soon moved to richer deposits in Soledar, just 10 kilometers away. I’ve ventured into those industrial salt mines about a dozen times, always finding new marvels: a subterranean church; intricate salt sculptures; galleries with ceilings soaring up to 30 meters, where symphony orchestras have played; a grand tree festooned with garlands; a therapeutic sanatorium; even a football pitch. I brought my friends to see these things—and to feel beneath our feet a seabed from 250 million years ago, whose salts have seasoned the meals of every Ukrainian household.

Once I went with a group that included a local artist, Masha Vyshedska, who brought her ukulele. We nestled into a secluded corner of an expansive gallery, under the soft glow of the lights we’d carried. Masha strummed, and I captured the moment on video. The salt walls reflected her towering shadow and returned echoes of her ukulele as the sound traveled through the underground caverns. So engrossed were we in the moment that we lost track of our group and nearly found ourselves stranded in the mine overnight. Now that enchanted space has slipped behind the front line, inaccessible.

Starting in April 2014, when Russia made its earlier play for eastern Ukraine, militants stormed a military base near Tsvetmet, an industrial area just south of Stupkey, five times, hoping to capture the 280 Ukrainian tanks there. The Russian-backed militants brought guns, grenade launchers, and tanks. Local activists smuggled supplies and essentials over the fence to the Ukrainian soldiers. The militants occupied parts of Bakhmut that spring, but by July, our special forces had repelled them.

I lived near the base at the time. Tsvetmet is mostly factories and private houses, but not long before the war, a much-loved recreational area had sprung up here, called the Alley of Roses for the hundreds of different-colored rose varieties that bloomed from spring to late fall. The park bordered on a lake where we picnicked and fed the ducks and swans.

I remember sitting in the hallway of my apartment building, listening to the rumble of tanks on the asphalt under my window and waiting for the sound of automatic fire to subside. My husband and I were expecting a child. When the streets quieted, I ventured out, just to make sure that the Ukrainian flag still flew over the base. It did, though the base lay in ruins, and when the sun rose, we took our cameras and set out to report. A Ukrainian soldier defending the post saw my look of despair and embraced me, assuring me that, thank God, everyone was alive and everything would be okay.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

My son, Tymofiy, was born in February 2015. The very next day, we felt the vibrations of Russian shells exploding on the outskirts of Bakhmut. A nurse told me to take the baby to the maternity hospital’s basement: “They’re going to shell again,” she said. There we huddled, seven frightened mothers and their infants, as well as silent men and staff members. A girl who had just given birth a few hours earlier was brought down on a stretcher. I started to panic, calling relatives and friends to say that we were being evacuated. I imagined fleeing with my son in my arms. But the rumor of renewed shelling was false, and soon we returned to our rooms.

Being afraid eventually becomes tiring. You start to respond skeptically to warnings of possible shelling, but the tension doesn’t dissipate, even when weeks go by without the sound of cannons and without new rumors that feed on your fear. The Ukrainian flag flying over the tank base always comforted me.  

Yan Dobronosov / Global Images Ukraine / Getty

When Tymofiy was small, we would take him to the local supermarket for ice cream before riding our bikes to the promenade along the Bakhmutka River. The park was another new one: Before the riverbed was cleaned and its banks strengthened, this place was neglected, overgrown with reeds. Now local fishermen climbed over the fence and sat by the water waiting for a catch, and children gathered on playgrounds with swings and basketball courts. Adults hid in the shade of young trees and took photos with green sculptures of dinosaurs, elephants, and bears.

The Bakhmutka gave its name to our city. Around it, in the wild fields, a fortification against Tatar raids from Crimea appeared first, and later, the Cossack saltworks. The fortress of Bakhmut shows up on maps starting in 1701. It sat behind a wooden wall, with straight streets leading to gates, a church, houses, and the saltworks.

In our local museum, a model of the fortress had pride of place. I liked to look at it as a child: The houses were made of matches, and you could see the river that divided the fortress in half. After 500 years, speeches and songs in Ukrainian once again refer to Bakhmut as a fortress—a place whose function is to stop the enemy and to protect.

Bakhmut’s central square has the usual things: a town hall, a fountain, shops and restaurants. But I can’t help lingering on the empty pedestals—granite podiums of history on which no one stands.

One plinth used to hold a statue of Lenin, typical for any Ukrainian city: tall, gray, ugly, constantly soiled by pigeons that left their white traces. Under that statue in 2014, a crowd gathered with Russian flags, agitating against the Revolution of Dignity that had just driven Viktor Yanukovych’s Russian-backed government from Kyiv.

I was an editor for a local website at the time, and I brought my camera to the square. I saw buses parked nearby with Russian plates; they had carried demonstrators over the border. But many in the crowd were also locals, and their presence pained me. One protester told me I was forbidden to film, but I kept on. Little did my colleagues and I know that our fellow journalists in an occupied city nearby would be abducted and held hostage for doing the same.

Just 100 meters away from Lenin, on another granite pedestal, stood Artem, a Bolshevik revolutionary who did nothing especially beneficial for Bakhmut, yet for some reason, the town bore his name during the Soviet era. Only in 2016 did Artemivsk become Bakhmut again. That year, cranes lifted the stone replicas of Artem and Lenin and transported them to an industrial zone for storage. But the residents of our town couldn’t agree on who or what should replace them, so the spots remained vacant.

Tymofiy, 4 years old, posed on Artem’s pedestal for a photo in 2019. I compared him to the project “Inhabiting Shadows,” by the artist Cynthia Gutierrez: She installed stairs that allowed anyone to climb the pedestal of a toppled Lenin in Kyiv. There, one could experience the flux of historical symbols, from ascension to decline, and then oblivion.

On summer evenings, my family liked to gather for dinner on my parents’ veranda, at their house not far from the city center. My parents had come to Ukraine as refugees from Armenia in 1989, fleeing the Nagorno-Karabakh war to start anew in Donbas. In the 1990s, the four of us lived in a single room, my parents working tirelessly to raise my sister and me. Thirty years on, they envisioned spending their twilight years in the modest house with the veranda. Their grandson came to see them there and played in the yard, under a large cherry tree.

That house and its veranda are gone. Missile strikes first obliterated the roof, then the courtyard. We learned this from satellite images. Our family had taken nothing from the house except documents. Everything my parents had built was destroyed.

South of the city, past the landfill where the city failed to build its waste-recycling plant, are the gypsum mines that, along with salt, made Bakhmut attractive to industrialists. Mikhail Kulishov, a local historian, used to give tours here even for children, taking care to hand out yellow helmets in case the rock crumbled.

[From the October 2022 issue: Ukrainians are defending values Americans claim to hold]

The gypsum galleries are alive with bats, which are a protected species in Ukraine. Parts are flooded and attract extreme cave divers. The story of the mines begins at the end of the 19th century, when a German engineer named Edmund Farke contracted with the government of Bakhmut to extract gypsum for alabaster factories. His gypsum works created an extensive cave system, part of which was later used to mature the local sparkling wine. Tourists would go there for tastings.

But for me, the gypsum caves were more of a place for mourning. During World War II, the Nazis used the mines to wall up 3,000 Bakhmut Jews alive. People gathered there yearly to remember the victims. During the Russian occupation of Bakhmut in 2023, the Wagner Group set up its headquarters in the tunnels of the winery.

On the southern edge of Bakhmut, in the year 2023, you'll see nothing but the ruins of my city, the skeletal remains of its burned-out buildings and bombarded streets. There are no longer any people here. For my part, I began our tour with insomnia, nights in Kyiv punctured by air-raid sirens announcing Russian drone and missile attacks. My work for the Ukrainian press brought me to Sloviansk, just 20 kilometers away from Bakhmut, but I could get no closer: Artillery was (and is) still booming there.

Mostly, I offered you this tour from a fortress on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in Portugal. I came here with Tymofiy, now 8 years old, for a retreat so that we could get some sleep—yes, Ukrainians travel now for sleep. The place is ideal, I think, because it is as far away from Russia as you can get in Europe. I climbed the walls of this ancient Portuguese fortress and raised my Ukrainian flag, with the name of my hometown, Bakhmut, written on it.

We are returning to Ukraine, my son and I. Our Bakhmut no longer exists, but one way or another, we’re still there.

A High-Water Mark in American Mass Culture

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › culture › archive › 2023 › 09 › nancy-ernie-bushmiller-three-rocks-biography › 675377

The great cartoonist Wally Wood once observed that not reading Ernie Bushmiller’s long-running newspaper comic strip, Nancy, is harder than reading it. Its minimalism makes the strip into something like a stop sign or a middle finger—it’s just there, all of a sudden, and you may find yourself responding to it before you’re ready to do so. This suddenness is part of what makes Nancy so funny. In many ways, the strip is a series of jokes about the nature of jokes. Despite the two rambunctious kids, Nancy and Sluggo, at its center, it’s not about childhood, like Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes are. And, despite its surrealism, it’s not about the silliness of life, like The Far Side is. It’s about the rules of comics, which Bushmiller made so clear that the reader can understand them at the first, most casual glance at one of his strips. A deeper look—which Nancy resists with all its might—suggests that Bushmiller’s great contribution to popular culture was the way he understood language itself.

Take, for example, a strip that shows Nancy spilling ink on the wall and then repeating the ink stain over and over again, with disorienting perfection, turning the mistake into a wallpaper pattern. Another has Sluggo taking a picture of Nancy’s unchanging, helmetlike hairdo and holding it up upside down against a picture of his own face, because “I wanted to see what I’d look like with a beard.” It takes much longer to describe these panels than it does to read them. Your brain says that one ink stain is an error, but the same ink stain repeated exactly is a design. Hair turned upside down equals a beard. And then you laugh.

For Bushmiller, the “snapper”—his term for that final panel that makes you chuckle—was everything. The shorter the mental distance the reader had to travel from the setup panels to the punch line, the better. His strip, he often said, was for “the gum-chewers,” and he encouraged his acolytes and assistants to “dumb it down” at every opportunity. Given the sophistication of his work, “dumb” seems to have meant “simplify.”

Bushmiller was hard to categorize. A lifelong newspaperman from a poor neighborhood in the Bronx, he was also a self-made intellectual who secretly took figure-drawing classes to help him draw better cartoons. He could draw and paint in great detail, but instead, he used as little detail as possible. Various cartoonists and their teachers, including Bill Griffith, the creator of the Zippy comic, have explained Bushmiller’s drawing philosophy before. The oft-used example is that the perfect number of rocks to communicate the idea of “some rocks” in the background of a comic strip is three. One is “a rock,” two is “a couple of rocks,” but three is “some rocks,” and any number of rocks greater than three is superfluous.

[Read: The invisible artists behind your favorite comics]

This approach wasn’t the quickest road to the praise heaped on lushly drawn comics such as Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. Nancy’s popularity has waxed and waned over the decades: Bushmiller originally inherited a strip called Fritzi Ritz in 1925; he eventually added Fritzi’s niece, Nancy, as a character, to keep things lively. In 1938, the strip was renamed for Nancy, and has run in some form under that title ever since. By the mid-’40s, the strip was unmistakably Bushmiller’s. His deliberately familiar subject matter and artistic conservatism—plenty of his strips from that period poke fun at beat culture and abstract expressionism—made it easy to mistake his inclinations for boorishness. In its first season, in 1976, Saturday Night Live ran a segment featuring a list of “people who dolphins are definitely more intelligent than”; it included Joe Louis’s accountant, Prince Charles, and Bushmiller.

Perhaps because of this reputation, Nancy has not been preserved the way other strips across its many eras, such as Peanuts and Krazy Kat, have been. This can partly be explained by the uncomplicated nature of Nancy’s characters; even though Bushmiller drew thousands of strips across decades, you don’t get to know Sluggo over the course of a Nancy bender the way you do Charlie Brown. But beyond that, many comics scholars, notably Bill Blackbeard, arguably the single most effective voice for preserving the often-junked funny pages, famously hated Nancy. The strip is noticeably absent from The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, an otherwise authoritative reference book edited by Blackbeard in 1977.

During his lifetime, Bushmiller never got the respect paid to his broadsheet-page peers. But among veterans of the counterculture, whose work appeared in alt-weeklies and independent comics, his accomplishments were taken seriously at least as far back as the 1970s. Rather than being a liability, Bushmiller’s unpopularity was a great opportunity for unserious behavior among comics’ career pranksters. Pro-Nancy buttons advertising a “Secret Bushmiller Society” showed up at conventions; so did “Busch-Miller” beer. Griffith was an out-and-proud friend of Nancy; so were the publisher Denis Kitchen and the cartoonist Scott McCloud, the author of the art-school staple Understanding Comics, who holds Nancy up as a model of visual economy.

Courtesy of Bill Griffith 2023 / Abrams ComicArts*

Recent books dedicated to analyzing Nancy could be seen, in part, as a sign that the guard has well and truly changed: 2017’s How to Read Nancy, by the artists Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik, is a 274-page monograph devoted to breaking down a single Nancy strip published on August 8, 1959. Last month brought Griffith’s clever new biography of Bushmiller, a graphic novel fittingly called Three Rocks. A comics preservationist for most of his long career—he and Art Spiegelman anthologized old comics in the late ’70s in their magazine Arcade—Griffith approaches Bushmiller with reverence for his virtuosity and with a reporter’s eye for detail. If Arcade was a desperate attempt to gather together as much good work as he and Spiegelman could while the underground industry collapsed around their ears, Three Rocks has a calmer, retrospective feel; it examines Nancy’s now-assured place in the comics canon, and argues that Bushmiller is as consequential a cartoonist as a rival like the Peanuts creator Charles Schulz.

In Griffith’s eyes, Bushmiller is a contradiction: a conventional Republican who scorned beatniks and hippies but liked underground comics, a student of stupid jokes who described himself as “the Lawrence Welk of comics” but helped define the semiotics of his art form for Griffith’s generation. Because that generation would help shape the modern graphic novel, it seems fitting that Griffith would devote one to the man who made it all possible.

Throughout Three Rocks, Griffith collages Nancy with his own cartoons—an apparently irresistible impulse. The strip’s deft compactness has elicited a similar form of admiration from fine artists over the years, including the brand-conscious Andy Warhol. For cartoonists in conversation with fine art, the joys of Nancy are endless—Spiegelman placed Nancy and Sluggo at the center of his painting Lead Pipe Sunday. Nancy’s precise shapes, always drawn to the millimeter, also appealed to the younger Newgarden and Griffith, who remixed its components in their work. Newgarden did so in a strip for Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s pioneering art-comics magazine, Raw. In Three Rocks, whenever Nancy appears, she is expertly lifted from one of Bushmiller’s drawings and incorporated into one of Griffith’s. (In one lovely sequence, Fritzi shows up in a Krazy Kat strip.)

In part, Nancy’s simplicity responded to pragmatic need. Much like road signs that must be visible to a motorist going full tilt down the highway, the newspaper comics of the 1950s and onward had to be readable at almost any size. Full-page confections such as McCay’s Little Nemo and Nell Brinkley’s Betty and Billy and Their Love Through the Ages were out. Blackbeard deplored the trend in The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, and many artists agreed, especially when newspaper syndicates began to dictate a standard panel arrangement that papers could cut up and reassemble to fill different-size holes. But minimalists flourished under these rules: Nancy, Sluggo, Charlie Brown, Lucy, and latecomers such as Garfield and Dilbert are all instantly recognizable even when the text is too small to read—especially Nancy, something Griffth demonstrates visually in Three Rocks.

The consumerist shift of mid-century America probably had something to do with Nancy’s efficiency too. The rise of advertising culture and television as a mass medium in the 1940s and ’50s meant that brand names and logos proliferated in living rooms across the country: the pink script on Barbie packaging, the twin flags on the front of a Chevrolet Corvette, the red-and-white Campbell’s Soup can. Warhol wasn’t the only one to notice. We still live with the hangover from that era—many of the underground comics of the subsequent decade were made by artists horrified by rampant consumerism. Objects that have passed out of our daily lives thus persist, oddly, in our visual vocabulary. This is in part the legacy of mid-century artists such as Dr. Seuss, with his ubiquitous goldfish bowls and glass milk bottles, and Looney Tunes animators such as Chuck Jones and Tex Avery, who immortalized anvils, diet pills, and double-breasted suits with shoulder pads.

Bushmiller is part of that legacy as well. His great gift was knowing which objects and ideas had indelibly entered the American consciousness, and then understanding how to reduce those to astoundingly efficient images. Toy guns, hoses, ribbons, steam shovels, tennis rackets, cactuses—items that would have been familiar to the newspaper-reading American of his era—all found their way into his panels. (He kept a toilet plunger, the source of many Nancy gags, by his desk.) As Karasik and Newgarden put it, “Perhaps not since Brueghel were the schemas of an entire culture afforded such a precise and monumental delineation.”

Such delineation was a fraught process elsewhere—the United Nations Conference on Road Traffic, held in Vienna in the fall of 1968, sought to establish international standards for road signs, among other things. It was broadly successful, but its specifics were hotly contested: At one point, the French objected to railroad signs featuring a modern diesel engine instead of a steam locomotive; they had used a picture of the latter since 1904. Bushmiller labored under no such second-guessing. The strip that ran on November 8, 1968, the day the conference’s treaty was signed, is legible today.

Bushmiller didn’t merely have a good instinct for how to codify something visually—every gifted artist has that. He also had an unerring instinct for which objects, specifically, were so universal that they could be reduced to just a few strokes of his pen. His work could be stodgy and even retrograde, but it could rarely be misunderstood.

*NANCY and all comics by Ernie Bushmiller are copyrighted and reprinted with the permission of Andrews McMeel Syndication for UFS.

‘Baseball, the Eternal Game, Shouldn’t Be Shortened’

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › magazine › archive › 2023 › 10 › the-commons › 675109

How Baseball Saved Itself

For the July/August 2023 issue, Mark Leibovich went inside the desperate effort to rescue America’s pastime from irrelevance.

Thank you for the fantastic article on baseball. During the 1960s, I was a Ph.D. student in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. About the time baseball season began one year, I participated in a robust argument over America’s favorite pastime with my colleagues. I felt that it was an incredibly boring way to spend time, and I wanted to debate the subject with empirical evidence. As engineers, we agreed to define “action” as any time the ball or a player was moving. I then used a stopwatch to determine the ratio between “elapsed time” and “action” in a typical game.

I applied this definition to a game the following Saturday. Unsurprisingly, the ratio was 20 to 1—for every hour of elapsed time, one would see just three minutes of action. Professional football and basketball have far more action per hour than baseball under the same definition, which I think explains their relative popularity.

It wasn’t solely the analytics revolution that slowed down the sport—baseball’s always been like that! The question now is whether I should analyze another game to determine if the new rules changed it for the better.

David M. Carlson
Fountain Valley, Calif.

Baseball, the eternal game, shouldn’t be shortened—if anything, it ought to be lengthened, after the model of classical cricket. Live in the moment. Each pitch presents the entire history of the universe. The pitcher rotates the ball in his hand, feeling ever so sensitively for the contours, the stitching, the seams that might yield an advantage, before hurling it to the plate with the force of Zeus’s thunderbolt.

But how will the baseball travel? Will it sink or curve, go high or low, flutter in or out, changing speed as it continues to its destiny? Breathing in, the umpire concentrates on the ball speeding toward him. Breathing out, he calls a ball or a strike, with thousands of eyes cast upon him and his judgment. The loneliness of the umpire, the batter, and the pitcher sets them outside time. At that fateful moment of contact between ball and bat or mitt, all existence is suspended.

To shorten that momentary dance with eternity is to miss the meditative profundity of a baseball game. No, Mark, it is we who are at fault for wanting to speed up the game, with designated batters, virtual walks, limits on mound visits, pitch clocks, and rigid placement of the fielders.

David Glidden
Riverside, Calif.

I wanted to read Mark Leibovich’s article on baseball’s updated approach, but found it difficult when I ran across another dusty relic that needs to go: Red Sox worship among the media elites.

I grew up a Yankees fan, but somewhere along the line, sportswriters began looking at the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry as if it were the defining narrative of baseball. As they cast the Yankees as the bad guys who were always trying to buy the World Series, and the Red Sox as the good guys who represented the nobler, purer defenders of the sport, they seemed to forget that many people in other parts of the country don’t care for either team. If anything, they tend to hate both teams because the sports media spend too much time writing and talking about them. After all, other teams have equally storied pasts. Speeding up the game and giving the rules a hard look will certainly improve the experience for fans, as Leibovich writes. But it’s long past time for the sports media to recognize their part in holding the game back by ignoring more interesting narratives.

Eric Reichert
West Milford, N.J.

I share Mark Leibovich’s joy over the new baseball rules to speed up the game. But baseball isn’t that much slower than other sports. The average basketball game lasts anywhere from 135 to 150 minutes. There are constant interruptions precipitated by fouls, time-outs, and halftime. And the final two minutes on the clock can take 15 minutes.

Most unsettling for those of us who love baseball is the constant complaint from football fans that our sport is slow while football is fast. Their favored 60-minute romp takes more than 180 minutes to complete. And, as a wise observer once pointed out, to make matters worse, football combines two of the most detestable facets of American life—violence and committee meetings.

Perhaps someday the NBA and the NFL will take lessons from MLB and learn how to shorten their games.

Dennis Okholm
Costa Mesa, Calif.

I agree with Mark Leibovich’s conclusions regarding the benefits of baseball’s new pitch clock. The pitch clock is the greatest innovation the sport has seen in ages, and it may well save the game. But the gradual slowing-down of games was not the only thing that drove fans away from baseball.

Consider the 1994 strike, which canceled approximately a third of the season and the World Series and was seen by many as millionaires fighting over lucre, fans be damned. Or consider the over-the-top salaries, even for subpar players, as ticket and concession prices have skyrocketed. Baseball once sold itself as the best buy for family entertainment in America—but it hasn’t been that for quite some time.

Finally, the cheating that has gone on for decades has put off many fans, and the lack of any meaningful accountability has surely only made it worse. Players who were known to use banned substances—Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa—still lead the league’s counts for most home runs in a single season, accolades that should have been expunged from the books. And Leibovich barely touches on perhaps the worst of these scofflaw violations: The Houston Astros were caught cheating in the 2017 and 2018 seasons, including the 2017 postseason, which netted the team a World Series victory. Nonetheless, they were permitted to keep the championship title, and none of the players who cheated was disciplined—they are still playing now. When several Chicago White Sox players conspired to throw the 1919 World Series, by contrast, they were barred from baseball forever. For some fans, these problems are more serious than the length of games.

Allen J. Wiener
Clearwater Beach, Fla.

Mark Leibovich Replies:

Thanks to all those who took the time to reply to my article; I hope it was at least more engaging than the baseball of years past. Major League Baseball certainly has no monopoly on potentially league-destroying scandals. Each major sport has faced its share of drug, gambling, and cheating catastrophes over the years, and no league has cornered the market on bad leaders, clueless commissioners, or idiotic owners either. Sports fans have shown themselves to be willing to forgive a lot—but not necessarily boredom. Of all the sports, baseball is uniquely slow. No matter how many stoppages there might be at the end of a basketball game, the clock guarantees that very few NBA contests surpass two hours and 30 minutes. Football games rarely take more than 3:20, and the fact that teams play only once a week buys a great deal of spectator leeway. Last, I’ll apologize for indulging my Red Sox compulsion. I’ve always assumed that the Sox-Yanks thing was off-putting to nonpartisans, even when the rivalry was at its most compelling (not recently, in other words, unless you count this season’s epic battle for last place in the American League East). In the spirit of fellowship, I’ll concede that some of my favorite baseball friends are Yankees fans. We are more alike than not—beyond just insufferable.

Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “Jenisha From Kentucky,” the Atlantic senior editor Jenisha Watts reflects on how her mother’s addiction shaped her childhood in Lexington. She describes finding escape and empowerment in literature and narrates her struggles as a young writer and editor in New York, determined to hide her past. Our cover image is a portrait of her painted by the Ivorian artist Didier Viodé. With a minimalistic color palette and broad, acrylic brushstrokes characteristic of his style, Viodé strove to capture Jenisha’s self-possession.

Elizabeth Hart, Art Director

Corrections

The Resilience Gap” (September) misidentified Richard Friedman as the former coordinator of Cornell’s mental-health program instead of its former medical director. After publication, “Killer Apps” (September) was updated online to clarify YouTube’s policy for removing videos, which excepts artistic content such as music videos from its prohibition on harassment.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

The Joy and the Shame of Loving Football

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 09 › football-sports-entertainment-recommendations › 675270

This story seems to be about:

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is the staff writer and author Mark Leibovich. Mark has recently written about the long-shot presidential candidate who has the White House worried, and how Moneyball broke baseball.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Streaming has reached its sad, predictable fate. Hip-hop’s fiercest critic A knockout technique for achieving more happiness

The Culture Survey: Mark Leibovich

Mark wrote a little introductory note for our newsletter readers, so I’ll attach that here before we get to his culture-survey responses:

Okay, I will admit to just rereading a bunch of these recent culture surveys and marveling at how well-read, well-watched, and well-listened some of my Atlantic colleagues are. Intimidating! They set such a high and considered bar. Now allow me to lower it.

In comparison, my tastes are a hodgepodge of high-low delights that I pick up from random films, TV shows, or social-media feeds, which then lead me down various other rabbit holes. In other words, my tastes tend to be a meandering mess, depending on my moods, whereabouts, chemical intakes, endorphin bursts, and general exposures (or maybe I just flatter myself, and some algo-god is reading this from a Menlo Park lair, laughing like hell).

Here’s an example from an hour ago: I was driving my daughter to school, hopped up on espressos and flipping around on SiriusXM. Thankfully, Franny (my daughter) shares my quickness to punch the presets, my need for better options at all times, and my jumpy attention span (shorter version: ADHD). I happened to land on the ’80s-on-8 station and somehow found myself hooked on a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac” by Natalie Cole (!). Who knew that existed? I didn’t until this morning, and wouldn’t you know it, the song stuck to my predilection lobes like bubble gum. Then, for some reason, the DJ—the former MTV VJ Mark Goodman—felt the need to come on and trash Natalie’s effort. Totally bogus, dude. And wrong.

This also reminded me that I once had tea with Nat King Cole’s widow, Maria, sometime in the ’90s, at the Ritz Carlton in Boston, where she happened to be living. Lovely woman, since departed. I have a cool story about Mrs. Cole too, which I started to tell Franny, but she was by then deep into her phone.

Anyway …

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I’m writing this on the first weekend of the NFL season. There’s a reason most of the top-rated television shows every single year are NFL games. America’s most successful sports league is such a juggernaut, and I’m definitely part of the problem. Why problem? Because, among other things, football is morally precarious, causes incalculable damage to its players’ bodies and brains, and is run and owned by some of the worst people in the world, nearly all of them billionaires.

Even so, I will definitely tune in to a bunch of games this weekend, with generous bowls of Trader Joe’s kettle corn and reheated leftover pad thai on my lap. Which is a great segue into …

A favorite story I’ve read recently in The Atlantic: One of the teams that kicked off the season Thursday night, the young and promising Detroit Lions, is the subject of a great romp by the long-suffering, lionhearted Tim Alberta. The story is packed with poignancy, hitting many levels and themes: futility and resilience, legacies and character, fathers and sons. Also, faith rewarded: Lions 21–Chiefs 20. [Related: The thrill of defeat]

I’m going to cheat and suggest another article from The Atlantic, even though I read an early version and it is not yet online: next month’s cover story, by my desk-neighbor and pal Jenisha Watts. I have truly never read a story like this in my life, ever, and can’t even begin to describe the wonder of its triumph, or the triumph that is Jenisha, whom I am so proud to know.

The television show that I’m most enjoying right now: Daisy Jones and the Six (on Amazon Prime Video). A total joy. L.A. in the ’70s, road trips, and “you regret me, and I regret you” (that’s a lyric). Speaking of which …

Best work of nonfiction I’ve read recently: The Daisy Jones title cut is “Dancing Barefoot,” by Patti Smith, which led me to Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, which I purchased at my favorite local independent bookstore, Politics and Prose, because screw Amazon, even though it gave us Daisy Jones. (Like football, it’s complicated. Or maybe not.)

Aside: Riley Keough, if you or your reps are reading this, I want to interview you.  MLeibovich@TheAtlantic.com.

An author I will read anything by: Christopher Buckley. The maestro’s been on my mind lately because I just finished Make Russia Great Again, an utterly hilarious Trump-era novel. And yes, there actually is a “Trump-era novel” genre (another pearl being The Captain and the Glory, by Dave Eggers).

I’ll also mention that Buckley once reviewed one of my books, and it was pretty much the highlight of my life—and damn right I’m linking to it.

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: The Worst Person in the World and Licorice Pizza. These were two of the few movies I’ve seen in theaters since (or during) the pandemic, both of which I rewatched on a long flight this summer. Each got into my bones, in their own wanderlusting, generationally particular way. The Norwegian film Worst Person is better than anything the Oslo Chamber of Commerce could ever have spawned (salmonlike!). It also led me to Todd Rundgren’s glorious song “Healing,” which has been feeding my heart ever since.

As for Licorice (again, L.A. in the ’70s), the film blissfully reacquainted me with a long-lost friend of a song, “Let Me Roll It,” by Paul McCartney and Wings. We’ve kept in touch since via Spotify, usually while I’m on my stationary bike, which I try to ride every day in an attempt to mitigate the various erosions of being in my 50s. Speaking of aging and life cycles and the transience of it all … [Related: Licorice Pizza is a tragicomic tale of 1970s Hollywood.]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost. The title is also the last line of the poem, and is now the last entry in this scavenging of serendipity. May the golden wisdom of these words stay, eternally.

The Week Ahead

A Haunting in Venice, Kenneth Branagh’s supernatural mystery film (in select theaters Friday) The Vaster Wilds, a new novel by Lauren Groff (out Tuesday) How I Won a Nobel Prize, a novel by Julius Taranto (out Tuesday)

Essay

Bob Berg / Getty

The Album That Made Me a Music Critic

By Spencer Kornhaber

Smash Mouth has long been, as its guitarist, Greg Camp, once said, “a band that you can make fun of.” The pop-rock group’s signature hit, 1999’s “All Star,” combines the sounds of DJ scratches, glockenspiel, and a white dude rapping that he “ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.” Fashionwise, the band tended to dress for a funky night at the bowling alley. And over nearly three decades, Smash Mouth has remained famous partly because of the flatulent cartoon ogre Shrek.

But the affection Smash Mouth commands is serious—the result of music so simultaneously pleasing and odd that it could rewire a young listener’s brain. In fact, the sad news of the death of original front man Steve Harwell at age 56 has me wondering if the band’s 1999 album, Astro Lounge, is the reason I’m a music critic. Most people can point to songs that hit them in early adolescence, when their ears were impressionable but their interest in other people’s judgment was still, blessedly, undeveloped. Smash Mouth’s second album, the one with “All Star,” came out when I was 11. Every goofy organ melody is still engraved in my mind, and today, the album holds up as an ingeniously crafted pleasure capsule.

Read the full article.

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Catch Up on The Atlantic

Elon Musk’s latest target hits back. The China model is dead. Can Poland roll back authoritarian populism?

Photo Album

This picture, taken on September 2, 2023, shows a player scoring a try during Water Rugby Lausanne by jumping into Lake Geneva from a floating rugby field. The match was part of a three-day tournament organized by LUC Rugby that gathered more than 240 players in Lausanne, Switzerland. (Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty)

The World Tango Championship in Argentina, a scene from the 80th Venice Film Festival, a cricket game in Afghanistan, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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Mark Levin, Jen Psaki get more screen time on MSNBC, Fox News

Quartz

qz.com › mark-levin-jen-psaki-get-more-screen-time-on-msnbc-fo-1850815402

NEW YORK (AP) — Two cable news personalities from the complete opposite ends of the political spectrum — Mark Levin and Jen Psaki — are increasing their presence on television.

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