I am not much of a sports person. But we did watch a lot of late-night TV growing up, and it's been really lovely plugging into the podcasts of people like Conan O'Brien and other peak-SNL boomers as their late night broadcast traditions start to implode.
I love how the hosts will focus on family, colleagues (including back-office eccentrics), high achievement (movies!), and loss without doing what some other high achievers - especially in the tech world - seems to do, which is to make their audience feel desperate and inadequate. I admire celebrities who have street-level skills and capacities for kindness (and boundaries, of course) and don't turn everything into a negative sum competition. You feel good sharing the same timeline with these people, even though you know you will never meet them and never rise to their level.
I couldn't make it through this one. Partly because I don't care about soccer or monoculture, but mostly because I clicked the link to the fantastic breakdown of "The Single Guy." It was the source of a line that my wife and I still quote 30 years later whenever the rare instance happens of Canada popping up in conversation.
The loss of monoculture is definitely disappointing, but a couple years ago we had the Olympics and most people I know used to watch it. However because it was in Paris or what not, so many conservatives had to be against it. It's like people are looking for reasons to be divisive and can't just enjoy anything anymore.... I blame the phones lol. I had more fun watching the world cup with some Europeans who were here travelling for work, than I did with actual Americans who are trying to figure out if something is lib coded or not.
This reminded me of one reason why we talk on the phone less than we did 40 years ago. We talked about low importance things, but now we listen to a podcast.
I too was very interested that the bad guys in Tuner were Israeli, and I wondered if they’re now the “safe” bad guys the way Russians used to be and we are going to see it all the time now
It's an interesting point that this sort of experience seems to require a mix of broadcast communication and peer-to-peer communication. In peer-to-peer only, you miss out on these big shared experiences, and in broadcast-only you don't have a chance to participate in conversations about it!
I guess in a small enough community, peer-to-peer only can work. But broadcast enables this experience at the scale of a nation (which is why newspapers were essential for nationalism).
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the way that the industrial capitalist system seems to require people to make a choice between maximizing income or having a community. I grew up in a small town in Oregon without a lot of job opportunities and married my High School sweetheart. But in order to make a good loving, we had to move to another state, leaving our support systems behind. The University of Chicago tells us that this is exactly what we should be doing, that we should all be constantly trying to find somewhere else to move because that's the only way to have negotiating power when bargaining with employers over pay. That would mean constantly moving, which prevents you from putting down real roots anywhere.
In my mind, that's another argument for labor unions and collective bargaining. If you can have pretty good wages anywhere, you don't have to make the choice between maximizing wages and building community. It probably does mean less efficiency and therefore a decline in income for a lot of people, but it might actually make us happier anyway. After all, you can't take it with you.
"the way that the industrial capitalist system seems to require people to make a choice between maximizing income or having a community."
As opposed to socialism where the Planing Department assigns you to Ft. Worth Ball Bearing Factory III when you graduate with the major in metallurgical engineering you were required to pursue?
This is an interesting way to attack the problem, but I think wage compression would change the geographic distribution of jobs as a side effect, and probably spur further [Edit - geographic] concentration. After all, it removes the best lever a place like small-town Oregon has to attract investment.
The transition would certainly be chaotic. On the way to a new equilibrium, increased wages would impose costs and simultaneously stimulate demand unequally across the employment landscape, and we'd see the following phenomena, all at once, feeding back on each other:
- Some fraction of businesses might actually become more profitable because of the added demand.
- Some businesses wouldn't be able to take advantage of increased demand because they're supply-constrained.
- Other businesses wouldn't experience the positive demand shock at all, but their costs would go up anyway. They'd have to raise prices or fail.
- Sole proprietors / single-member LLCs would overnight become relatively more competitive.
- Employers that are in low-productivity places for whatever reason (thin labor pools, weak infrastructure) would be squeezed the hardest. Capital chases the highest profits, which will almost certainly be located in successful metros.
Italy runs a version of this experiment permanently: national bargaining sets near-uniform wages across a huge North-South productivity gap, and the result is chronic Southern unemployment.
I grew up a chronic nomad (air force brat), so I feel the pull of the tradeoffs you're describing. "Same towns, lower national income, better wages" sounds somewhat attractive. But the downside risk is "fewer viable towns, with the survivors clustered around metros." I think the positive goals (roots, community, staying put) are better served by policies that raise productivity or lower costs in lagging places than by policies that raise the price of hiring there.
You are describing the 1950s, and the result was not growing inequality, it was the largest growth of the middle class and decreasing inequality our nation has experienced. Rapidly rising wages did lead to higher inflation than anyone today is used to, but virtually everyone walked away with more money in their pockets and a higher quality of life.
No one is coming from walstreet to invest in small-town Oregon. The only way things get invested in there is when the people actually living there have more to spend. Walmart pays low wages, then their profits go to shareholders, who mostly live in big cities. If they paid higher wages, you'd have more money that stays local. Sure, costs would likely go up too, but you get to decide what to buy or not to buy. The end result is more money that stays in those communities which is why those small towns were growing back then and dying now. (That, plus environmental activism).
Also, Italy is not the only nation that allows sectoral bargaining. Also France, Belgium, Austria, Finland, Portugal, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway...my fingers are getting tired but you get the idea. Italy isn't exactly a country I'd like to emulate, but I wouldn't mind emulating some of the others.
I edited my original post to clarify my point. If that changes your response, feel free to ignore the rest of this.
Otherwise, the local multiplier you mention is real, but the historical record cuts in my favor on the other points.
During the 1950s, capital fled the high-wage, heavily unionized Northeast for cheap labor in the South: textile mills to the Carolinas, then manufacturing generally headed to right-to-work states (which appeared far earlier than I had thought - Arkansas and Florida passed the first right to work laws in 1944). The South caught up by underpricing northern labor.
As for Europe, the important variable isn't "sectoral bargaining: yes/no?" It's uniform wages across regions with heterogeneous productivity. Wherever that combination exists, the lagging regions bleed jobs.
Your list of countries offers natural experiments on both sides, and a quick glance at stats shows they sort exactly as you'd expect. The Nordics and the Netherlands have sectoral bargaining, but their regional productivity gaps are small by European standards (nothing like Italy's North-South divide), so the uniform wage is rarely tested by a large lagging region. By contrast, Belgium runs national bargaining across the Flanders–Wallonia divide, and Walloon unemployment has run roughly double Flemish unemployment for decades. Spain's provincial-sectoral system coexists with chronically brutal unemployment in Andalusia.
For better or worse, our regional productivity spread looks more like Belgium and Spain than the Netherlands or the Nordics.
That's a very interesting point about Europe, and bears investigation.
However, your point about what happened during unionization in the 1950s doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The South did not actually catch up, nor did they come close, so who cares if a few of the manufacturers left? By offering lower-priced labor, they were able to get many companies to move there, but at no point in time did the South become a better environment for workers than the Northeast. Seems to me that having large numbers of low-wage jobs doesn't actually do a lot to grow the collective capital of a region. Companies may have fled South in the 1950s, but workers didn't follow, and I'm not aware of any time when the South had drastically better unemployment numbers than the Northeast. I think many environmental regulations and the NIMBY politics of a rich citizenry has done a lot of economic damage, but I don't think the same is true of unionization (broadly speaking at least, now and then you do get a really destructive union).
"You are describing the 1950s, and the result was not growing inequality, it was the largest growth of the middle class and decreasing inequality our nation has experienced."
The point is that it would probably undermine geographic equality (for lack of a better term), not income inequality.
Everyone should start going to school plays and high school football games and other than for the players and maybe actors it will be better for everyone else.
or maybe to not make it so rough on high school students we should all just have a LOT more minor league baseball. that should scratch the itch and not ruin the mental health of a bunch of 17 year olds.
and maybe to help with this we should create minor league sports on a national scale but are regionally divided - we can call them conferences - that are based on regional relationships and 100+ years of history so that in most of the major cities of a region there are lots of alums whose schools play each other and maybe it'll sorta pull everyone into watching these games in the local area and you can even put them on broadcast television so they're somewhat ubiquitous and easy to see. It'd be like the NFL but more regionalized and local.
Oh dang I just re-invented college football before 2024.
Speaking of NBC shows and the monoculture, a friend brought up “Just Shoot Me” and we all agreed we had never seen the show. But then we all remembered the David Cross cameo episode as “slow Donnie” so we must have seen it! Just a testament to how you just absorbed monoculture on your couch without trying.
"Just Shoot Me" was a better show than its reputation, IMO. When reading articles that include outrageous facts/asides that are, at most, tangentially related to the subject matter of the article (e.g., "Last week, serial r@pist Donald Trump issued an executive order concerning toilet paper thickness . . .") I think of a particular JSM episode where Maya goes to talk to a leftwing critic of the magazine and partway through the conversation he randomly shouts out something like, "There's a single mother of eight working 12-hour days in an Indonesian sweatshop stitching American flags until her fingers bleed!" To which Maya, very shocked, asks, "What does that have to do with what we're talking about," and the guy replies, "Sorry, I just have to stay angry."
Yes, as the character Finch. He and Maya (Laura San Giacomo) have one of my favorite exchanges from the show, the set up being that Finch improbably dated a supermodel named Adrienne (played by Rebecca Romijn) for several episodes before she broke up with him.
[Finch is at his desk flipping through a copy of Blush and putting bookmarks in it.]
Maya [walking up to the desk]: Why are you going through the last "Blush: 100 Hottest Models" issue?
Finch [not looking up]: I'm looking for my next girlfriend.
Maya [incredulously]: Huh?
Finch [looks up]: Last year, Blush's readers voted Adrienne the 8th most beautiful woman in the world. I'm willing to go as low as number 30.
I actually possess paper copies of several mid-20th century military specifications for certain products, among which is toilet paper. Just found them the other week while I was cleaning up stacks of old papers in my room.
Not quite an executive order, admittedly, but I think it fits the spirit of your comment.
The Single Guy! I haven’t thought about that show in a long time. Man, I remember in 9th grade in 1995 everyone would talk about the latest episode of Seinfeld. It really did feel much better to be able to talk about a common culture than the atomization we are all experiencing today.
It's weird to me to say that we live in a post-monoculture era when--to a far greater extent than in the 90's--everyone you see looks the same. We may not all be watching the same thing, but many more of us are watching with the same face. That suggests to me a far more pervasive monoculture at work today than when I was a kid watching Must See TV or TGIF. If, though, you really want to bring back the 90's, encouraging people to love mass culture is the last thing you should do. Back then, we went to great pains to signify how cool we were by rejecting the mass culture (while secretly tuning in to Friends every Thursday night).
I am constitutionally incapable of even pretending to be interested in sports (and I am not smug about it) so I just politely nod when friends/coworkers talk about the World Cup, but I strongly feel this post.
Because I am like this I have spent a lot of effort during my life to surround myself with people of similar demeanor, which as its ups and downs as things go, but I find that it's also possible to find shared cultural experiences that aren't quite so mainstream and they are also a great deal of fun.
The one that I have been participating in (and spreading!) in 2026 has been reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl books. They are big enough that you can always find someone in your vicinity who's read/reading them (at least, if you are around a bunch of nerds). They have their ups and downs too, which as you note, is part of the fun of the whole experience -- discussing why something is good or not good.
It's interesting how shared experiences can be seen as positive or toxic when you are school aged. I was allowed to watch The Simpsons and would participate in all the references at school the next day, while feeling out of the loop because I wasn't allowed to watch South Park until I was much older. I also remember the terror of realizing I had missed the new episode of the Chappelle Show and basically not being able to participate in conversations for a day (or wanting to spoil it for myself).
We're starting to go through this a bit with my daughter. She really wanted to watch Paw Patrol which I find vastly worse than other shows. We found out that it basically carries "social capital" at school, where many of the kids watch it. We finally caved one day and watched an episode. She seemed happy enough, but when I asked if she wanted to watch it again at a later date, she said "I don't really like it". It's a funny little world we have here.
My sons were allowed to watch "Paw Patrol" when they were younger and I would try to discuss with them the concerning constitutional and civil liability issues presented by a city turning over all of its emergency services (including law enforcement!) to a private contractor whose entire workforce consists of sapient dogs overseen by a 10 year-old boy. They did not appreciate my "deep reading" of the source material.
This isn't lawyer-brain. Lawyer-brain is watching 90s crime procedurals with your lawyer mother. "That's not in the rules of evidence". "She would be sanctioned by the bar association for trying that!" "The prosecution would have turned that over in discovery." "A judge doesn't make that decision during trial."
It’s remarkable how baseball—arguably slower and less exciting than soccer—was a huge part of the American monoculture as recently as the 1980s and early 1990s but has pretty much disappeared as a cultural touchstone since then. Thanks to Ted Turner, my friends and I could recite the Braves starting lineup. I doubt my 12-year-old son knows more than five teams. The common explanation is that fan interest collapsed because of the 1994 strike, but I’ve never bought that completely.
Also, I had to depend on radio to keep track of all of my favorite college football team’s games into the early-to-mid aughts. It probably has as much cultural penetration as anything other than the NFL and NBA now.
Sadly (from my perspective), baseball is the best sport to experience via the medium of radio, but the worst via TV/video. Once cable TV penetration, in particular, reached a tipping point, I think it was inevitable that baseball's popularity would take a hit. (Incidentally, I think baseball also had a relative advantage when everyone used to read newspapers since there was a game to write about/analyze every single day.)
Wow, this triggered a buried but vivid memory of my dad listening to Tigers games on the weekend while puttering in the garage! I can still hear the announcer’s distinctive voice.
Cable TV and then streaming were huge in getting CFB aired more often. It was so much so that it resulted in the first Supreme Court case that demonstrated that the NCAA has always been a walking antitrust violation that could be sued over almost anything, as many schools did not like it when it tried to regulate when they could and couldn't be on TV.
Interestingly, and of a piece with the overall subject of today’s piece, I now spend significantly less time on ESPN etc. and significantly more time following a devoted team site with daily audio/video content. Even live watch-party YouTube streams during the games themselves.
Way to save the “Rise of Skywalker” record scratch for the end there ;) No, but I think if you think mechanically about how these kinds of monocultural experiences facilitate common purpose - in the sense of participation in something beyond the self and the observation that your actions relate to it - I think you can see why such things feel good and also how to replicate those experiences in other ways. It’s not just God and broods of kids or whatever all the way down.
I am not much of a sports person. But we did watch a lot of late-night TV growing up, and it's been really lovely plugging into the podcasts of people like Conan O'Brien and other peak-SNL boomers as their late night broadcast traditions start to implode.
I love how the hosts will focus on family, colleagues (including back-office eccentrics), high achievement (movies!), and loss without doing what some other high achievers - especially in the tech world - seems to do, which is to make their audience feel desperate and inadequate. I admire celebrities who have street-level skills and capacities for kindness (and boundaries, of course) and don't turn everything into a negative sum competition. You feel good sharing the same timeline with these people, even though you know you will never meet them and never rise to their level.
I couldn't make it through this one. Partly because I don't care about soccer or monoculture, but mostly because I clicked the link to the fantastic breakdown of "The Single Guy." It was the source of a line that my wife and I still quote 30 years later whenever the rare instance happens of Canada popping up in conversation.
The loss of monoculture is definitely disappointing, but a couple years ago we had the Olympics and most people I know used to watch it. However because it was in Paris or what not, so many conservatives had to be against it. It's like people are looking for reasons to be divisive and can't just enjoy anything anymore.... I blame the phones lol. I had more fun watching the world cup with some Europeans who were here travelling for work, than I did with actual Americans who are trying to figure out if something is lib coded or not.
This reminded me of one reason why we talk on the phone less than we did 40 years ago. We talked about low importance things, but now we listen to a podcast.
I too was very interested that the bad guys in Tuner were Israeli, and I wondered if they’re now the “safe” bad guys the way Russians used to be and we are going to see it all the time now
It's an interesting point that this sort of experience seems to require a mix of broadcast communication and peer-to-peer communication. In peer-to-peer only, you miss out on these big shared experiences, and in broadcast-only you don't have a chance to participate in conversations about it!
I guess in a small enough community, peer-to-peer only can work. But broadcast enables this experience at the scale of a nation (which is why newspapers were essential for nationalism).
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the way that the industrial capitalist system seems to require people to make a choice between maximizing income or having a community. I grew up in a small town in Oregon without a lot of job opportunities and married my High School sweetheart. But in order to make a good loving, we had to move to another state, leaving our support systems behind. The University of Chicago tells us that this is exactly what we should be doing, that we should all be constantly trying to find somewhere else to move because that's the only way to have negotiating power when bargaining with employers over pay. That would mean constantly moving, which prevents you from putting down real roots anywhere.
In my mind, that's another argument for labor unions and collective bargaining. If you can have pretty good wages anywhere, you don't have to make the choice between maximizing wages and building community. It probably does mean less efficiency and therefore a decline in income for a lot of people, but it might actually make us happier anyway. After all, you can't take it with you.
"the way that the industrial capitalist system seems to require people to make a choice between maximizing income or having a community."
As opposed to socialism where the Planing Department assigns you to Ft. Worth Ball Bearing Factory III when you graduate with the major in metallurgical engineering you were required to pursue?
This is an interesting way to attack the problem, but I think wage compression would change the geographic distribution of jobs as a side effect, and probably spur further [Edit - geographic] concentration. After all, it removes the best lever a place like small-town Oregon has to attract investment.
The transition would certainly be chaotic. On the way to a new equilibrium, increased wages would impose costs and simultaneously stimulate demand unequally across the employment landscape, and we'd see the following phenomena, all at once, feeding back on each other:
- Some fraction of businesses might actually become more profitable because of the added demand.
- Some businesses wouldn't be able to take advantage of increased demand because they're supply-constrained.
- Other businesses wouldn't experience the positive demand shock at all, but their costs would go up anyway. They'd have to raise prices or fail.
- Sole proprietors / single-member LLCs would overnight become relatively more competitive.
- Employers that are in low-productivity places for whatever reason (thin labor pools, weak infrastructure) would be squeezed the hardest. Capital chases the highest profits, which will almost certainly be located in successful metros.
Italy runs a version of this experiment permanently: national bargaining sets near-uniform wages across a huge North-South productivity gap, and the result is chronic Southern unemployment.
I grew up a chronic nomad (air force brat), so I feel the pull of the tradeoffs you're describing. "Same towns, lower national income, better wages" sounds somewhat attractive. But the downside risk is "fewer viable towns, with the survivors clustered around metros." I think the positive goals (roots, community, staying put) are better served by policies that raise productivity or lower costs in lagging places than by policies that raise the price of hiring there.
You are describing the 1950s, and the result was not growing inequality, it was the largest growth of the middle class and decreasing inequality our nation has experienced. Rapidly rising wages did lead to higher inflation than anyone today is used to, but virtually everyone walked away with more money in their pockets and a higher quality of life.
No one is coming from walstreet to invest in small-town Oregon. The only way things get invested in there is when the people actually living there have more to spend. Walmart pays low wages, then their profits go to shareholders, who mostly live in big cities. If they paid higher wages, you'd have more money that stays local. Sure, costs would likely go up too, but you get to decide what to buy or not to buy. The end result is more money that stays in those communities which is why those small towns were growing back then and dying now. (That, plus environmental activism).
Also, Italy is not the only nation that allows sectoral bargaining. Also France, Belgium, Austria, Finland, Portugal, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway...my fingers are getting tired but you get the idea. Italy isn't exactly a country I'd like to emulate, but I wouldn't mind emulating some of the others.
I edited my original post to clarify my point. If that changes your response, feel free to ignore the rest of this.
Otherwise, the local multiplier you mention is real, but the historical record cuts in my favor on the other points.
During the 1950s, capital fled the high-wage, heavily unionized Northeast for cheap labor in the South: textile mills to the Carolinas, then manufacturing generally headed to right-to-work states (which appeared far earlier than I had thought - Arkansas and Florida passed the first right to work laws in 1944). The South caught up by underpricing northern labor.
As for Europe, the important variable isn't "sectoral bargaining: yes/no?" It's uniform wages across regions with heterogeneous productivity. Wherever that combination exists, the lagging regions bleed jobs.
Your list of countries offers natural experiments on both sides, and a quick glance at stats shows they sort exactly as you'd expect. The Nordics and the Netherlands have sectoral bargaining, but their regional productivity gaps are small by European standards (nothing like Italy's North-South divide), so the uniform wage is rarely tested by a large lagging region. By contrast, Belgium runs national bargaining across the Flanders–Wallonia divide, and Walloon unemployment has run roughly double Flemish unemployment for decades. Spain's provincial-sectoral system coexists with chronically brutal unemployment in Andalusia.
For better or worse, our regional productivity spread looks more like Belgium and Spain than the Netherlands or the Nordics.
That's a very interesting point about Europe, and bears investigation.
However, your point about what happened during unionization in the 1950s doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The South did not actually catch up, nor did they come close, so who cares if a few of the manufacturers left? By offering lower-priced labor, they were able to get many companies to move there, but at no point in time did the South become a better environment for workers than the Northeast. Seems to me that having large numbers of low-wage jobs doesn't actually do a lot to grow the collective capital of a region. Companies may have fled South in the 1950s, but workers didn't follow, and I'm not aware of any time when the South had drastically better unemployment numbers than the Northeast. I think many environmental regulations and the NIMBY politics of a rich citizenry has done a lot of economic damage, but I don't think the same is true of unionization (broadly speaking at least, now and then you do get a really destructive union).
"You are describing the 1950s, and the result was not growing inequality, it was the largest growth of the middle class and decreasing inequality our nation has experienced."
The point is that it would probably undermine geographic equality (for lack of a better term), not income inequality.
You can actually determine someone's demographic without seeing them . . . "Did you love The White Shadow?" A "yes" is a 55-60 year old male.
Everyone should start going to school plays and high school football games and other than for the players and maybe actors it will be better for everyone else.
or maybe to not make it so rough on high school students we should all just have a LOT more minor league baseball. that should scratch the itch and not ruin the mental health of a bunch of 17 year olds.
and maybe to help with this we should create minor league sports on a national scale but are regionally divided - we can call them conferences - that are based on regional relationships and 100+ years of history so that in most of the major cities of a region there are lots of alums whose schools play each other and maybe it'll sorta pull everyone into watching these games in the local area and you can even put them on broadcast television so they're somewhat ubiquitous and easy to see. It'd be like the NFL but more regionalized and local.
Oh dang I just re-invented college football before 2024.
Speaking of NBC shows and the monoculture, a friend brought up “Just Shoot Me” and we all agreed we had never seen the show. But then we all remembered the David Cross cameo episode as “slow Donnie” so we must have seen it! Just a testament to how you just absorbed monoculture on your couch without trying.
"Just Shoot Me" was a better show than its reputation, IMO. When reading articles that include outrageous facts/asides that are, at most, tangentially related to the subject matter of the article (e.g., "Last week, serial r@pist Donald Trump issued an executive order concerning toilet paper thickness . . .") I think of a particular JSM episode where Maya goes to talk to a leftwing critic of the magazine and partway through the conversation he randomly shouts out something like, "There's a single mother of eight working 12-hour days in an Indonesian sweatshop stitching American flags until her fingers bleed!" To which Maya, very shocked, asks, "What does that have to do with what we're talking about," and the guy replies, "Sorry, I just have to stay angry."
Just Shoot Me had an absolutely loaded cast. George Segal! Wendie Malick! Laura San Giacomo! Enrico Colantani!
Wasn't David Spade on JSM?
Yes, as the character Finch. He and Maya (Laura San Giacomo) have one of my favorite exchanges from the show, the set up being that Finch improbably dated a supermodel named Adrienne (played by Rebecca Romijn) for several episodes before she broke up with him.
[Finch is at his desk flipping through a copy of Blush and putting bookmarks in it.]
Maya [walking up to the desk]: Why are you going through the last "Blush: 100 Hottest Models" issue?
Finch [not looking up]: I'm looking for my next girlfriend.
Maya [incredulously]: Huh?
Finch [looks up]: Last year, Blush's readers voted Adrienne the 8th most beautiful woman in the world. I'm willing to go as low as number 30.
I actually possess paper copies of several mid-20th century military specifications for certain products, among which is toilet paper. Just found them the other week while I was cleaning up stacks of old papers in my room.
Not quite an executive order, admittedly, but I think it fits the spirit of your comment.
The Single Guy! I haven’t thought about that show in a long time. Man, I remember in 9th grade in 1995 everyone would talk about the latest episode of Seinfeld. It really did feel much better to be able to talk about a common culture than the atomization we are all experiencing today.
It's weird to me to say that we live in a post-monoculture era when--to a far greater extent than in the 90's--everyone you see looks the same. We may not all be watching the same thing, but many more of us are watching with the same face. That suggests to me a far more pervasive monoculture at work today than when I was a kid watching Must See TV or TGIF. If, though, you really want to bring back the 90's, encouraging people to love mass culture is the last thing you should do. Back then, we went to great pains to signify how cool we were by rejecting the mass culture (while secretly tuning in to Friends every Thursday night).
"everyone you see looks the same. . . . many more of us are watching with the same face. "
I'm sorry, but what does this mean?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6VnhLkwQMk&t=73s
I am constitutionally incapable of even pretending to be interested in sports (and I am not smug about it) so I just politely nod when friends/coworkers talk about the World Cup, but I strongly feel this post.
Because I am like this I have spent a lot of effort during my life to surround myself with people of similar demeanor, which as its ups and downs as things go, but I find that it's also possible to find shared cultural experiences that aren't quite so mainstream and they are also a great deal of fun.
The one that I have been participating in (and spreading!) in 2026 has been reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl books. They are big enough that you can always find someone in your vicinity who's read/reading them (at least, if you are around a bunch of nerds). They have their ups and downs too, which as you note, is part of the fun of the whole experience -- discussing why something is good or not good.
You need some kind of Princess Posse tag.
It's interesting how shared experiences can be seen as positive or toxic when you are school aged. I was allowed to watch The Simpsons and would participate in all the references at school the next day, while feeling out of the loop because I wasn't allowed to watch South Park until I was much older. I also remember the terror of realizing I had missed the new episode of the Chappelle Show and basically not being able to participate in conversations for a day (or wanting to spoil it for myself).
We're starting to go through this a bit with my daughter. She really wanted to watch Paw Patrol which I find vastly worse than other shows. We found out that it basically carries "social capital" at school, where many of the kids watch it. We finally caved one day and watched an episode. She seemed happy enough, but when I asked if she wanted to watch it again at a later date, she said "I don't really like it". It's a funny little world we have here.
Dude when everyone at high school was like “I’m Rick James bitch”
She doesn’t like it? Oof, you dodged a bullet. That’s a lot of toys to have to buy
My sons were allowed to watch "Paw Patrol" when they were younger and I would try to discuss with them the concerning constitutional and civil liability issues presented by a city turning over all of its emergency services (including law enforcement!) to a private contractor whose entire workforce consists of sapient dogs overseen by a 10 year-old boy. They did not appreciate my "deep reading" of the source material.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBFIqRSsixE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDrlrju6kac&pp=ygUbcGFwYSB0cm9sbCBsb25nIHN0b3J5IHNob3J0
Ha ha, yes! I laughed until I cried when that originally came out. :-D (My critique pre-dated the skit though.)
Siri, what does "lawyer-brained" mean?
This isn't lawyer-brain. Lawyer-brain is watching 90s crime procedurals with your lawyer mother. "That's not in the rules of evidence". "She would be sanctioned by the bar association for trying that!" "The prosecution would have turned that over in discovery." "A judge doesn't make that decision during trial."
As an aside, I was genuinely delighted when someone responded with "Res gestae" to a weak hearsay objection on "Law & Order" one time.
Just wait until you need to come up with a modern criminological reading of "Zootopia."
At least there you can plausibly say that their legal system doesn't actually descend from English Common Law...
I cannot like this comment enough. I often dad-splain what my daughter is watching and she's learning to tell me to stop.
It’s remarkable how baseball—arguably slower and less exciting than soccer—was a huge part of the American monoculture as recently as the 1980s and early 1990s but has pretty much disappeared as a cultural touchstone since then. Thanks to Ted Turner, my friends and I could recite the Braves starting lineup. I doubt my 12-year-old son knows more than five teams. The common explanation is that fan interest collapsed because of the 1994 strike, but I’ve never bought that completely.
Also, I had to depend on radio to keep track of all of my favorite college football team’s games into the early-to-mid aughts. It probably has as much cultural penetration as anything other than the NFL and NBA now.
A random person in my high school could’ve probably named the Phillies starting lineup ~2006-2010, but they were an unusually good team.
I still sometimes talk baseball in the office (coworker’s nephew plays and is therefore interested), but there’s more NFL discussion.
It is fun though to have neighbors shooting off fireworks when the Eagles win the superbowl!
Sadly (from my perspective), baseball is the best sport to experience via the medium of radio, but the worst via TV/video. Once cable TV penetration, in particular, reached a tipping point, I think it was inevitable that baseball's popularity would take a hit. (Incidentally, I think baseball also had a relative advantage when everyone used to read newspapers since there was a game to write about/analyze every single day.)
Listening to baseball on the radio gives some insight into how ferociously bored people used to be.
But oh, it was so much worse! The first Masters golf tournament was broadcast nationally on CBS radio in 1934. Golf...on the radio.
Sounds like it would be great as an ASMR!
Wow, this triggered a buried but vivid memory of my dad listening to Tigers games on the weekend while puttering in the garage! I can still hear the announcer’s distinctive voice.
Good take. NFL/college football is perfect for medium of TV - bite sized moments of action with predictable timing that lends itself well to replay.
Baseball is just boring to watch on tv. Going to games is fun, but going to any event is fun
I immensely enjoy listening to baseball on the radio, especially if the announcers are masters of storytelling.
Cable TV and then streaming were huge in getting CFB aired more often. It was so much so that it resulted in the first Supreme Court case that demonstrated that the NCAA has always been a walking antitrust violation that could be sued over almost anything, as many schools did not like it when it tried to regulate when they could and couldn't be on TV.
Yeah, ESPN and Gameday were particularly big.
Interestingly, and of a piece with the overall subject of today’s piece, I now spend significantly less time on ESPN etc. and significantly more time following a devoted team site with daily audio/video content. Even live watch-party YouTube streams during the games themselves.
ESPN and the like have started experimenting with homer broadcasts before, they might become a bigger thing down the road.
Way to save the “Rise of Skywalker” record scratch for the end there ;) No, but I think if you think mechanically about how these kinds of monocultural experiences facilitate common purpose - in the sense of participation in something beyond the self and the observation that your actions relate to it - I think you can see why such things feel good and also how to replicate those experiences in other ways. It’s not just God and broods of kids or whatever all the way down.