Announcing Issue 79: Player HatersOur new issue surveys the state of competition in Fortress America, where the only flourishing industries are sports betting and YouTube.
Nearly half a year into his second administration, our chief dealmaker’s game plan for national greatness seems to be faltering. Escalating tariff wars have been met with international opprobrium and plunging domestic confidence. Is this what winning looks like? Baffler no. 79, “Player Haters,” surveys the state of competition in Fortress America, where the only flourishing industries are sports betting and YouTube.
The latter’s vloggers have embraced the country’s masculinist turn: fewer suicide forest pranks and tiny-mic’d street interviews, more beating the shit out of each other. Sean Nam demonstrates how influencers took over the dying sport of boxing, selling sloppy bouts to an uneducated audience while decrepit and corrupt regulatory bodies played blind and profited big. Elsewhere in violence, Grayson Scott writes on Professional Bull Riders, a multimillion-dollar novelty league that sells highlight reels of bovine-on-man accidents and the Western frontier as not a place but a vibe, easily accessible everywhere given this nation’s omnipresent fears of invasion.
Other athletes watch as once quintessentially American pastimes experience a downturn. Dennis M. Hogan contemplates whether college sports are too dependent on exploitation to survive paying players. And Dave Denison wonders how long the change-resistant sport of bowling can endure the vulture capitalists buying up alleys around the country.
On its current course, the United States could use some juice. Domestic production will have to be bolstered and industrial inputs found. Meg Bernhard reports from Arizona’s copper mines, necessary for the cutting-edge technologies America will need to furnish for itself if the twenty-first century is a game the country hopes to win.
“Like most other aspects of American life these days, college sports are now divided between a very small group that thrives and the vast majority struggling to stay afloat.”
“To be a bowler is to be at war with change. You feel it in the moment as you are bowling. But you also feel it whenever industry leaders talk about the need to ‘evolve.’”
“Copper mining requires enormous amounts of water and threatens to contaminate the air and groundwater with heavy metals like arsenic, lead, and uranium.”
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