BOREDOM IS SOPHISTICATION.

That's true of soporific public radio.

That's true of a concert of tenure music.

That's true of serious film (pronounced fillllllm).

That's true of juried art exhibitions.

Why should footie be any different?

It's “the beautiful game,” and for most of my adult life I’ve been patiently informed, usually by someone who calls it fútbol, that I simply lack the sophistication to appreciate it. But they’re wrong. Soccer isn’t beautiful. It’s boring, and it has nothing to do with sophistication.

The author documents a number of things, including outcomes often indistinguishable from a coin flip.

After a dozen footie-relevant posts in the past two months, it's time to put the dodecahedron back in the locker for a while.  That is, once stoppage time is done.

Sorry, I couldn't resist that parting shot!

Find yourself a circus and go to it.

THE PERILS OF PRESENTISM.

There is no topic so humble that an academic can't befoul it.  Consider "The Rise and Fall of the Public Sandbox."  It's a review of a book, which suggests a lot of Theorrhea is in hiding.

STANDARDS MATTER.

National Review's Brian Allen correctly observes, "If the art is amateur hour, race or gender won’t do anything to make it better."

One of these days academic gatekeepers will rediscover that undeniable truth.

REMAIN CALM, ALL IS WELL.

According to the infelicitously named Chad M. Topaz of Williams College at the house organ for all wokeness, all the time in higher education, "The journals are fine. Everything is fine."

UNFINISHED BUSINESS.

The local preservation railways attempt to use car-cards no newer than those in use when the owning railroad abandoned service or retired the cars, trackless trolleys, or buses.

That ticket only won in a notorious headline prematurely published by the then-very-anticommunist Chicago Tribune; Joseph McCarthy did win a Senate seat in Wisconsin, something that did not require advertising buys on Illinois Terminal cars running out of St. Louis, and a subsequent Republican president appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, touching off a number of unintended consequences.

HOW QUICKLY CAN PUBLIC OPINION CHANGE POLICY?

Consider, dear reader, that the Eighteenth (liquor prohibition) amendment took effect on 16 January 1919, and was repealed effective 5 December 1933.  The Interstate Commerce Commission, an early manifestation of the independent regulatory commissions, or the administrative state, if you will, was established by An Act to Regulate Commerce dated 7 April 1887 and finally, mercifully, allowed to expire in 1995, long after it had outlived its usefulness.

All that by way of preamble to the recently issued Trump v. Slaughter, which restores some presidential powers to swap out appointed or hired employees of the regulatory agencies, broadly understood.  That ruling has people such as Outside the Beltway's James Joyner troubled.  "American society is considerably more complex now than it was in 1935. It makes even more sense now than then that some regulatory functions should be carried out by subject matter experts not subject to the changing whims of the electorate."

That position has, from the beginning, been the logic of the administrative state.  It's as simple as a city council setting up a commission to adjudicate streetcar fares or cable connection rates rather than having to conduct a vote every time business conditions changes, and as fraught as, in protecting those "subject matter experts" from those "changing whims of the electorate" you get, if not necessarily "swarms of officers, harassing our people and eating out their substance," unelected bureaucrats.  In three-plus decades of teaching regulatory economics, I never lacked for material suggesting that things didn't always turn out in practice the way we could draw them up on the blackboard.

OH, THE HUMANITIES!

Joanne Jacobs notes, "You can major in Taylor Swift and minor in K-pop -- but shouldn't."  That's in endorsing a recent lament for the kind of work students get away with to earn degrees.

In its early years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered courses covering Virgil, Cicero, Livy, logic, calculus, ethics, chemistry, constitutional law and other touchstones of a classical education.

In the year of our Lord 2026, students can stroll past Lincoln’s statue looming atop Bascom Hill on that very same campus to study video games through feminist, queer and ecocritical lenses.

Culture warriors are busy bludgeoning universities for their ideological monocultures: founding civics institutes, prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion statements in hiring and cutting federal funding to questionable research — but mediocrity is arguably as large a problem as ideological capture.

Maybe the humanities disciplines should have stuck to close reading and creative writing.  It's not as if nobody's noticing.  "Dear reader, it's straightforward enough: think of 'the humanities' as 'those disciplines that deconstruct reality as a hobby' and you won't go far wrong.  That reality has a say in what gets deconstructed never ceases to catch the academy by surprise."

STUDENT ATHLETIC FEES, WELL SPENT?

Buy a sports ticket online, get a press release.  "Mountain West Conference Unveils New Brand Identity, Introducting 'Built Bold' Era."

The Mountain West Conference today announced the launch of a refreshed brand identity, including a modernized wordmark, an updated color palette, and a new defining tagline: Built Bold.

The rebrand marks a pivotal step forward as the Conference enters a new era—one defined by growth, innovation, and transformation.

"This new identity reflects exactly who we are as a Conference and where we're going," said Mountain West Commissioner Gloria Nevarez. "We are bold in our ambition, bold in our commitment to our student-athletes on the field and in the classroom, and bold in how we choose to lead. 'Built Bold' represents our willingness to take decisive steps forward—together—as we continue to shape a national Conference that delivers real opportunity and real impact for our institutions and communities."

The updated visual identity features a refined Mountain West wordmark and refreshed brand elements designed to better represent the Conference's evolving footprint and national reach.

The new look is part of a broader effort to modernize the Mountain West's visual presence while creating a cohesive, flexible system that can be activated across all platforms—from broadcasts and digital media to campus and community engagement.

Anchoring the new brand is the tagline: Built Bold—a rallying cry that reflects the Mountain West's identity and aspirations.

Rooted in the Conference's positioning, Built Bold reflects the Mountain West's energy, excellence, perseverance, and innovation while reinforcing its commitment to leading confidently and shaping the future of collegiate athletics. The Conference's vision remains focused on providing transformative experiences for our student-athletes.

I wonder how many deanlets and consultants got to wet their beaks coming up with the artwork, the tagline, and the corporate-speak.  Whether moving college football from school nights to Friday nights will put any more fans in the stands or make name, image, and likeness contracts more attractive to recruits is yet to be determined.

LIFE IS HARD AND DEADLINES AREN'T GOING ANYWHERE.

Predictably, a "faculty development specialist" called Jordan Davis devotes a column in the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, to argue "Faculty Are Bringing Corporate Culture Into the Classroom" isn't helping students.

What, instead?

There’s a clear value to embedding clinical rotations, business apprenticeships and education practicums in curricula. I support guest speakers, alumni panels and worksite visits for students to learn directly from experts. I’m all for job shadowing, client-based projects and scenario-based activities where students take on professional roles. The value of these engagements, I think, is to give students realistic, human-centered practice in solving ethical, ideological, logistical, creative and rhetorical challenges in their disciplines. In educational settings, these priorities should come well above meeting deadlines.

Being flexible as an instructor can be challenging, but it is possible, with instructors able to choose among many options for flexible deadline policies, whether they are teaching large or small classes. Let’s not allow the urge to turn our classrooms into the workplace—whether for simplicity’s sake or for the illusion of accountability—to detract from our top responsibility: making learning happen.

Right.  "Business as usual. Senior administrators and their enrollment managers can congratulate themselves on their inclusiveness (read admitting unprepared students and calling it access) and U.S. News continue to sell their guides."

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY.

Literally.  Here we were, thirteen years ago.

The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is a glossy provocation to the Perpetually Aggrieved.

What's the over-under that at least one participant in the semiotics workshop wishes she could be a swimsuit model?

In recent years, it might have gotten easier for semioticians to make the cut.

Not too long ago, Sports Illustrated decided that putting Rubens models on the cover of the swimsuit edition was a good idea.  (It wasn't.)

Now comes a new pharmacopeia, and (looking past all manner of potentially nasty side effects, there's nothing that kills the appetite quite like a drug ad coming on during snack time) some might take the pounds off effortlessly, compared with diet, exercise and resting.  That might reduce the value of Rubens models.  "As a plus-size swimsuit model, I'm not worried about GLP-1 drugs. I'm uneasy about what we celebrate when women get smaller."

HOW NOW JOE GOW?

Not yet gone.  "Mr Gow was the chancellor (Wisconsin-speak for campus president) of Oktoberfest destination college Wisconsin-LaCrosse until his unusual side hustle came to light."

Nor forgotten.  "Joe Gow Hangs in Legal Limbo."  And you thought negotiating with Iranians was exhausting?  "While he accepted his firing from the chancellor role, which he was set to retire from in 2024, Gow has argued he should not be fired as a tenured professor for making adult videos on his own time—a position that has been endorsed by First Amendment advocates, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression."

OUR JUNETEENTH FLAG HOIST.

Yes, there is some sort of special flag for the day, but the Flag Code does not prohibit the display of older versions of the Flag.  Thus one from the Emancipation Proclamation era flies at Cold Spring Shops headquarters.

The history lesson accompanies that photograph.

Unfortunately, former president Barack Obama used the dedication of his flak tower, er, blast furnace, er, coaling dock, er, presidential center to engage in a ridiculous perfomance of presentism.  "Obama said the founders 'fell terribly short' of the Declaration's promise by leaving slavery intact and limiting the vote to white male property owners."  Well, a guy who is slagging on a memorandum of understanding that some Iranians are asserting turns Old Persia into a colony (with a Trump casino on the Caspian Sea?) is not somebody who we should respect for his intellectual chops.

LESS PROMOTION THAN BANISHMENT?

Scott Scheall's "Why the Worst Get on Top in Academia" notes the nasty circle by which the proliferation of unfunded mandates provides career opportunities for failed scholars.

The incentive structure of the modern American university encourages relatively unsuccessful scholars, those who fail to establish fruitful research programs early in their careers, to pursue administrative positions, where they wield authority over more successful colleagues, who actually generate educational value. As a result, the American university is disproportionately governed by relative academic failures.

An effective scholar enjoys benefits impossible to find elsewhere in today’s workforce: freedom to follow ideas wherever they might lead and a considerable amount of free time to do it. Those who succeed aren’t inclined to leave the laboratory or library for administration.

Though administrative salaries tend to be higher, the rest of an administrator’s work-life is poorer in every other respect, involving endless committee meetings, paperwork, budgetary knife fights, student and parent grievance adjudication, and the difficult business of cultivating donors. Intellectual freedom and scholarly prestige are nowhere in evidence. 

I concur in part and dissent in part.  First, once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a tradition of servant leadership in higher education in which each highly respected faculty member would take a turn as department head, or dean, or provost, or president.  That was undone by two things, that proliferation of unfunded mandates, which at least until recently, implemented the aesthetic preferences of the faculty, which put defenders of faculty governance in a bad place where some hack could accuse him of Unenlightened Attitudes; as well as the problem that rotating the servant leadership works better in a department with multiple strong faculty members.  That's less common outside the Ivies and the like, and the plot of more than a few academic novels suggest it's not common even there.  Second, as a consequence, endless committee meetings, wordsmithing of documents, and knife fights over penurious budgets are the modus operandi of faculty, sometimes faculty with multiple Minimal Publishable Units on their curricula vitae: often ideas they followed that, judging from the lack of citations to their work, nobody bothered to follow further.  That research time: it's anything but free, and keeping current with what used to be circulated as working papers and what now is being uploaded somewhere has only become more challenging with online working paper repositories and journals.  Rivista Internazionale Numere Due di Bovini doesn't even get a look.

NICE NEWS-STAND YA GOT THERE, MATE. BE A PITY IF SOMETHING HAPPENED TO IT.

Australia's prohibitive taxation of cigarettes is having the same effect liquor prohibition did, a century ago in these United States.

In 2025, an estimated 80 percent of the tobacco consumed in Australia was illegal, up from 12 percent in 2017, according to new analysis from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The study, which is the first attempt by the Australian government to estimate the size of the black market, found that "prices for legal tobacco products have almost tripled since December 2016 driven by annual tobacco excise increases, while estimated prices of illicit tobacco products have remained relatively constant." Since 2020, household spending on legal cigarettes and tobacco has almost halved, but between 2017 and 2025, the amount of nicotine consumed in Australia has risen by almost 40 percent.

You don't expect a prohibitive tax to be a revenue tax, but in Australia the tax is stimulating sales of pinstriped suits and violin cases, or something.

Australia's collapsing legal tobacco market has come with a far darker consequence: a severe wave of gang violence, including firebombings and shootings. Since 2023, organized crime groups linked to Australia's illicit tobacco and vape market have been tied to "more than 200 firebombings," "at least 3 homicides," and "multiple other non-fatal violent attacks," according to the Australian Intelligence Commission.

"It's hard to see how it could get any worse," Rohan Pike, a former Australian Federal Police detective and Border Force member, tells Reason. Pike, who created and led Australia's Illicit Tobacco Strike Team, says the violence is now an "old-fashioned turf war" and that criminal gangs, attracted by the profits, are fighting to control distribution.

Pike says criminal groups are opening pop-up convenience stores, intimidating legitimate retailers into selling their products, and backing up those threats with "firebombings and other types of violence." Organized crime syndicates have destroyed hundreds of tobacconists, convenience stores, and hospitality venues, forcing legitimate businesses out. "Every part of the tobacco control policy is uncontrolled at the moment," says Pike.

Apparently, the bootleggers hope to stay in business even if the taxes go away. "It will be far more difficult to move customers out of the thriving black market that the taxes have created than it would have been in the first place."

So much for those rules and permissions.

FAILURES OF RULES AND PERMISSIONS.

Charles "Strong Towns" Marohn chats with Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker (who apparently isn't able to close a deal to keep the Bears in Chicago, let alone Illinois) about new legislation that might get more houses built in Illinois.  There are "Two Ways to Freeze a Neighborhood," neither of which keep wandering Bears from wandering, but I digress.

I'M THE BOSS. YOU'RE THE KID.

The critical studies types are notorious for using wordnoise to turn a phenomenon of long standing into a thought crime.  Simply take a commonplace situation and tack a "-normativity" on the end and just like that you've pronounced anathema on it.  A few weeks ago it was "autonormativity," which is only slightly more ludicrous than the long-standing "heteronormativity."

If that doesn't work, there's always tacking an "-ism" or a "-phobia" on it.  This week's example is "adultism."

Unattributed bit of investigative journalism retrieved from Joanne Jacobs.

PROGRESS OF A CENTURY.

North America's first stretch of electrified high speed railroad opened in June of 1926.  In the winter of 1960, rail enthusiasts were gathering for final rides.

Unattributed photograph, probably a Kodachrome, retrieved from The Trolley Dodger.

The North Shore Line built this section of railroad in order to offer service between Milwaukee and Chicago that wasn't jousting with automobiles on street trackage and subject to franchise restrictions requiring limited trains to stop on the streets of Wilmette.

VOTE LIBERAL, LIVE CONSERVATIVE.

That's long been a Cold Spring Shops theme, mostly in the defense of bourgeois norms that the self-styled sophisticates engage in all sorts of circumlocutions to deconstruct, whilst living as if they're June and Ward Cleaver.  In a tribute to Theodore Dalrymple, who has been writing along similar lines for years, City Journal's Robert Henderson summarizes the argument as "The luxury belief class walks the Fifties and talks the Sixties."

The attributes that predict professional success—such as impulse control, academic aptitude, and personal accountability—also predict long-term romantic stability and marital commitment. Those who lack these characteristics require strong social norms and regular reinforcement.

Until relatively recently, those norms provided a framework that encouraged people across all social classes to adopt behaviors conducive to long-term success and community cohesion, which minimized the behavioral gap between those at the bottom and those at the top. People at the bottom used to be far more likely to get and stay married, obey the law, prioritize family stability, and adhere to the broader social norms set by their society’s elites.

But as those elites have become more insular and focused on self-perpetuation, the behavioral gap between them and lower-income groups has widened.

These days, though, you can live like Ward and June but you don't have to shop at Red Owl or mingle at the Big Boy or (gasp) bowl at Red Carpet Lanes or take the kiddos to a local amusement park.

Elites’ unwillingness to publicly model and enforce these norms has contributed to a growing divide in family structure, marriage stability, and social behavior. Elite families thrive thanks to education, stability, and delayed gratification, while those below them struggle to replicate these patterns, leading to deeper social and economic inequality.

There are now bubbles for the well-off to fort up in.

For the elite ideas-festival crowd, every basic human good is to be picked apart or deconstructed with smug condescension. With equal fervor, they rehabilitate vice by asking, “What if this bad thing is actually good?”

Though today’s elites speak the language of 1960s countercultural left politics, their private lives reflect the square 1950s morality their predecessors rejected. Look closely at a liberal Park Slope nuclear family in the U.S. and you’ll see little difference from a mid-century suburban Republican one. Both are deeply committed to stability and achievement, which helps propel their kids toward academic and career success. And both embrace a convenient moral justification for that success: in the 1950s, belief in God and country; today, a commitment to social justice and ethical consumption.

For "ethical consumption," though, read "leaving the big box retailers and the industrial scale eateries to the lumpenproletariat."  And never do the spawn of the upscale self-styled progressives ever work there.

PEAK COMMON DREAMS.

I read them so you don't have to.  "GOP Gerrymanders Make the South’s Black Communities More Vulnerable To Data Centers."

GOOD.

"Six Flags bans influencer from all parks 'for life' after his shocking video violating safety rules."

I hope the clicks and likes were worth it.  "'Guests who violate our Code of Conduct are not welcome in our parks,' a Cedar Point rep tells EW of YouTuber Allen Ferrell, who filmed himself eating chicken nuggets on a 310-foot roller coaster."

Apparently "EW" means "Entertainment Weekly," but my reaction to what this fool did for clicks and likes was also "Ewwwww."

Ferrell, who has nearly 4 million followers on TikTok and 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube, shared a video of himself sticking a 10-piece box of chicken nuggets into his pants before boarding the Millennium Force roller coaster.

Ferrell is seen in the footage pulling the box out and eating the nuggets while the ride drops from its 310-foot height. His riding partner then extends a hand holding an open container of sauce, into which Ferrell dips his nugget before it slides off his face.

I once snagged my brother's sunglasses when the g-forces on a coaster you might have heard of did what they do.  I would not have been able to catch a stray drop of dipping sauce even with my younger self's reflexes.  This happened long ago, before people had portable 'phones to take selfies, which is another way to get yourself banned from an amusement park.  "During the ride, the phone came loose and struck another rider, which, according to local news, sent the injured person to the hospital for treatment."

The laws of physics are immutable.  Roller coasters are for riding no-handed, not for amateur photography.  And yes, I have taken point-of-view photographs on roller coasters.  With the management's permission.