Bouquets & Brick-bats
Bouquet
To the USA Winter Olympic team, which won its most gold medals (12) in the past 76 years while coming in second to Norway. But we don’t actually care about losing to a country of 5.65 million people where all it ever does is snow. Instead, we are proud of great individual performances by athletes like Alysa Liu, Breezy Johnson, and Jordan Stolz, who radiated pride in being Americans and joy in being themselves before the eyes of a very large portion of the planet.
The most memorable part of the Winter Olympics for us, though, was not any of the individual performances, as spectacular and heart-stopping as they were. It was a scene that unfolded immediately after the USA men’s team’s thrilling victory over Canada for the gold medal in hockey. After winning 3-2 in overtime, USA forward Dylan Larkin and defenseman Zach Werenski skated back …
2026 FIFA World Cup Events By State
Alabama — Burning effigy of Lionel Messi at “It Ain’t Football!” monster truck rally
Alaska — Giant soccer-ball-sized snowball fight with catapults
Arizona — “Kick like a Mule” tournament featuring teams of mules playing soccer
Arkansas — Greased hog capture event on regulation soccer pitch
California — Night of 10,000 youth soccer games sponsored by Mexican cartels
Colorado — Rich people play soccer behind electric fences guarded by armed drones
Connecticut — Coronation of State Soccer Mom MILF
Delaware — Visa/Mastercard promotional 24.78% interest rate on all youth soccer equipment
Florida — Soccer Moms versus MAGA Moms Spring Break Wet T-Shirt Contest
Georgia — “Use your feet not …
Harlan County, USA
50 years later, a hot report from the American abyss
Oh, to recapture the power of those old documentaries, made with Nagra tape recorders and 16mm stock and filled with life-stuff
Barbara Kopple’s tough Kentuckians put us to shame
Golden anniversaries are often irresistible, if only because that big fat round 50, as a measure of years, represents a chunk of life we can’t easily dismiss as transient or trivial. Once you get to 50, you know things have changed. Documents that old, like films, can generate conflicted responses — usually a wrestling match between startlement (oh, the unalloyed righteousness of our old ideals) and shameful nostalgia. (Who among us of a certain age doesn’t blush when recalling the naïveté that in 1976 made us love Rocky or A Star Is Born?) Movies were already changing in 1976, edging away from New Wavism and toward Spielbergology and Reaganite solipsism, but it was still the ’70s, and of all the tissue samples we could take from that year, the most salient is Barbara Kopple’s landmark documentary, Harlan County, USA.
We supposedly now live in a Golden Age of …
