The World Cup Is a Cash Grab. Fans Will Pay the Bill.: FIFA has built an $11 billion event that is too big to fail. But off the pitch, someone will win, and many others will lose. - "The organization’s relationship with the Trump administration has provided it with unfettered access to soccer’s largest untapped growth market and set it up to generate roughly $11 billion in total revenue for the upcoming tournament. It’s also put FIFA in a position of relative strength in negotiating with U.S. host cities. As part of its World Cup contract, the governing body maintains a full monopoly on not only broadcast and ticket rights but also concessions and sponsorships over the course of the tournament. The case FIFA made to host municipalities was, chiefly, that the residual economic benefits of accommodating the tournament—from tax revenue to increased business profits—would justify the costs attached to it. But this rationale was predicated on selling the World Cup to a full and open international marketplace—to say nothing of avoiding environmental pitfalls like economic slowdowns or widespread immigration enforcement–related fears. Now, with each of these one-time givens eroded, the arithmetic for host cities has been altered. Even more crucially, the math has been altered in ways that don’t apply to FIFA’s own accounting."
Friday, June 12, 2026
Wednesday, May 13, 2026
Reading archive 2026-05-13
What is Section 230? Landmark social media lawsuit spotlights legal shield: The decades-old legal protection has drawn bipartisan criticism. - "One of the cases, Gonzalez v. Google LLC, concerned a lawsuit brought by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, an American woman who was killed in an ISIS terrorist attack in Paris in 2015. The lawsuit against Google, the parent company of YouTube, alleged that YouTube recommended ISIS recruitment videos to users. The high court ruled against the plaintiffs."
Do women need to exercise differently from men – and ease up on cardio after 40?
The Unhappy Hosts of the World Cup: Cities and states are covering a lot of the costs of this summer’s matches, and have few options for bringing in much revenue. - "The unhappy truth of international soccer is that the World Cup generates lots of money-for FIFA. The Zurich-based group will take in $13 billion from the tickets, parking, merchandise, on-site concessions, sponsorships, and television rights. Meanwhile, the cities and states that host are responsible for the costs: stadium retrofits, security, transportation, administration, public 'fan zones' for everyone who does not have a ticket. Not only does FIFA not share tournament revenue; local organizers say the federation's infamously controlling contracts have left hosts with no plausible way to recoup expenses. Those hundred-dollar train tickets are not the product of a state looking to make a buck off of the World Cup, but of one trying to salvage an investment in a system that makes FIFA rich while taxpayers foot the bill."
The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon: Under the sterile blue lights of his studio, Fallon laughs endlessly at the same pseudo-jokes, rubs elbows with Trump and Sam Altman, and ushers in the death of culture. - "Fallon acts as the high priest of a terrified optimism, his rictus grin serving as a shield against the encroaching silence of the real. Here, in the sanitized, over-lit heart of the American culture industry, there is an inescapable horror. But it isn't a monster lurking in the shadows; it is the manic, unblinking insistence that actually, there are no shadows at all. If the Gothic tradition of fear teaches us that the ruins of the past haunt the present, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon offers the inverse: a present so forcefully flattened, so aggressively “fun,” that it has exorcised history entirely, leaving us trapped in a sterile, eternal loop of viral games and celebrity lip-syncing while the world slides into climate collapse and fascist politics.
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"The real, unsettling mechanism of Fallon’s banal horror is its insistence on a radical non-engagement with reality: a position that, in our current political climate, is itself an aggressively political act. Fallon doesn’t do politics, or if he does, he wants to 'keep his head down' because 'we hit both sides equally.' Tellingly, Donald Trump has called for the firing of almost all of the other late night hosts—Colbert, Kimmel, even Seth Meyers—but excluded Fallon from his hit-list, because Trump recognizes that there’s nothing about Fallon’s empty banality that could be anything close to a threat.
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"The horror of the Tonight Show is not found in any singular problem, but in the totality of its project: the systematic replacement of the real world with a brightly lit simulation of “niceness.” Fallon is the court jester of the Anthropocene, a figure who invites us to watch celebrities play parlor games on stage while the air outside the studio begins to smell of tear gas and smoke. In Fallon’s sterile loop of viral repetition comes the final victory of the commodity over human beings—a world where even our laughter is outsourced to the demands of the algorithm. You don’t even need jokes anymore. All you need is to say something that sounds like it could be a joke, and the hollow laughter will come. To watch Fallon is to stare at the face of a culture that has chosen the comfort of a rictus grin over the heavy, necessary terror of the truth. It serves as a grim warning: if we cannot reclaim our play, our politics, and our presence from this algorithmic void, we will be left with nothing but the echoes of a desk being slapped in an empty room, for an audience that has long since ceased to exist."
Tuesday, November 29, 2022
Reading archive 2022-11-29
How Both Sides of the Pit Bull Debate Get It Wrong
D.C. lawmakers pitch a plan for ‘Green New Deal for Housing’ - "Trupti Patel, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Ward 2, argued in her testimony that the city should move forward on paying for housing regardless. 'This is a basic human right we’re talking about, and we shouldn’t be talking about the challenges of executing it,' she said." [ed note: lol]
Saturday, October 22, 2022
Reading archive 2022-10-22
As Elon Musk expands his reach, Washington worries: Many lawmakers see the billionaire as too powerful and increasingly reckless - "'Elon, The Everywhere' is what one White House official called him. 'He believes he is such a gift to mankind that he doesn’t need any guardrails, that he knows best.'"
Under Xi, China wants absolute security. It’s making the world nervous.
Sunday, June 17, 2018
Reading archive 2018-06-17
How the conventions of political journalism help spread Trump’s lies
Putin hoped his World Cup bid would improve relations with the West. They’ve suffered instead.
Laura Bush: Separating children from their parents at the border ‘breaks my heart’
FBI agent removed from Russia probe for anti-Trump texts says he’s willing to testify before Congress