Category Archives: Nonfiction

CNN: “The Senate on Monday passed a major bill to overhaul college athletics with a large bipartisan vote, 77-22.”

That is an impressively bad opening because I have no idea why this is important news. “Major bill” means nothing. “Overhaul college athletics” could mean anything. We get two more paragraphs before we learn the bill will “set national standards for how college athletes can profit on their name, image and likeness.”

We then get a whole boatload of He Says/She Says. Ted Cruz says it offers “simple, commonsense rules.” The NCAA supports it. The AFL-CIO and the NAACP oppose it. It quotes the Toddler saying “It will not only save college sports, it will save the colleges themselves” which adds nothing (is anyone surprised).

I get down 11 paragraphs before I learn anything of substance about the bill, including that it allows the NCAA to regulate player compensation. Given the controversy over this topic, I’d have liked more specifics. Near the end it quotes Cruz saying the bill will protect players’ ability to profit from their name and likeness, which is important. The NCAA has routinely shut down side hustles on the ground the player is (for example) selling art based on their fame as a player, which violates the sacred amateur standards of the multi-million dollar college sports industry. Another sponsor says it will stop colleges from splurging on sports to stay competitive so they can divert money into research or AI (siiiigh) — how does the bill do that? I will note that none of this is new: Rocky and Bullwinkle took shots at college spending on sports back in the 1960s and the 1935 movie Fighting Youth pointed out the contradictions of a big, profitable business that insists the player should do it for free (though this criticism is placed in the mouths of commie subversives).

I took a look at the bill and it’s not so long I wouldn’t have been able to read it if I’d been assigned to cover the story. Obviously a reporter can’t interpret what it means or what the actual effect will be. Even so, some specific quotes from the bill would have grounded it in something other than He Says She Says. For instance, the bill says colleges cannot penalize a player or restrict their eligibility because they made money off their likeness or their name somehow. Cruz saying what his bill does might be spin; seeing the actual words is something else.

There’s also a lot of specific details about financing, which is presumably how colleges will save money. Though I’m curious, given that coaches routinely pull down megabucks (not something that used to be the case), whether it will really divert money away from sports or just from athletes. Which might be more detail that CNN had time to get into.

Still, at least CNN is making a sincere attempt to cover the topic. By contrast, here’s a WaPo headline:

Portraying the Toddler as someone who’s really trying to help us poor, struggling consumers? With ideas like bringing in mystery meat from overseas (supplied by someone Melania Trump knows)? And when it’s his tariffs and his stupid Iran war that are shaping the economic landscape? And as the comment at the bottom says, the headline dances around the Toddler’s complete ineffectiveness — he hasn’t failed, things “have failed so far to pan out.” It’s quite possible the article is better, but given Bezos’ hamfisted handling of the Washington Post, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Bari Weiss, meanwhile, continues to face-palm as head of CBS News. A common argument on the left is that this is new owner David Ellison’s diabolical plan to destroy the media, but as Scott Lemieux says at the link, “there is no evidence for this and plenty of evidence against it. Everything about Weiss’s career suggests that she wants to be an influential propagandist, not somebody who produces a show with declining ratings that nobody likes and is forced to resign in disgrace. She has run a successful group blog pandering to an audience who thinks that Pete Hegseth is the second coming of Clausewitz, and genuinely doesn’t seem to understand that this relatively small sector of Silicon Valley executives and anti-anti-Trump fanatics is not remotely enough to sustain a broadcast news audience. The Ellisons almost certainly have the same delusion, and indeed I would bet a high-end Tiffany bracelet that they sincerely think that Weiss is a mildly contrarian liberal. And the biggest problem of all is that none of them have any respect for the actual craft that goes into TV news, including partisan operations. Making propaganda people want to watch is an art in its own way. Rupert Murdoch understands this and hires people who can execute it.”

I think this has something in common with this comment about decadence.

Which is echoed here.

That includes not appreciating how much skill it takes to do something well. Sure, science can be wrong, medicine can be wrong, regulators make mistakes. This does not mean the opinions of the man in the street are just as good. Or that listening to your Facebook group about the benefits of raw milk for toddlers is a good idea. And contrary to the ever-wrong RFK Jr., AI is not better informed than a good doctor, nor is it essential they consult it.

Case in point, this argument for why school is inherently feminine (posted by Celeste Davis at Matriarchal Blessing)

This is in the first place (and second and third) factually wrong. If men couldn’t obey the military would be a women’s organization. Corporate America would be run by women. Schools for centuries were men only; teachers set the rules and required boys to obey them. And refusing to listen to someone who knows more than you is not “masculine,” it’s stupid. Refusing to learn is in no way admirable.

Despite my reservations about Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, she has a point that losing respect for intellectual and practical skill is not a good thing.