Guan here. It is 1969 in Denmark. Birthe Kjær’s Cassatchok is the Dansktop song of the summer. Pornography is legalized in July. The second Olsen Banden film is released in October. Large protests against the Vietnam War are organized in fall. University governance reforms in the wake of the revolutions of 1968 are still being negotiated. And the entire year is tax free.

Until 1969, Danes filed a tax return at the beginning of each year, reporting income from the previous year. Tax bills would be calculated and the tax owed would be paid in quarterly installments. The quarterly tax bills were for tax on income earned last year, so Danes would spend 1969 paying taxes on their 1968 income.

Starting in 1970, European Denmark would switch to a modern tax system where employers withhold tax from wages, and self-employed people make estimated payments. (Greenland would follow in 1975, and the Faroe Islands in 1984.) In other words, in 1970, Danes would pay taxes on income earned in the same year, 1970.

In principle, they also owed taxes on their 1969 income, but with the new tax withholding, that would mean paying taxes for two income years (1969 and 1970) at the same time, which they could hardly afford.

The solution? 1969 income was made tax free, and the final installment of tax on 1968 income, which would normally be paid in the first quarter of 1970, was waived, making 1968 partially tax free also.

Why is this interesting?

Denmark was not the first country to transition from postpaid taxes to withholding, and not the first to have a “tax free” year in some form. The US had done it in 1943 and the UK in 1944. But both of those instances were in a wartime command economy, without normal economic forces in play. The Danish tax free year was in peacetime, and was also fully tax free, not partially like the American and British ones.

It wasn’t a complete free-for-all: tax returns still had to be filed for 1969, and were carefully scrutinized for any artificial moves of income into 1969, with tax levied on “abnormal” income. Workers with income more than 20% higher than in 1968 had to pay tax on the excess.

However, this still meant that a worker could increase their hours by 20%, and the extra income would not be taxed. And anyone who had been out of the labor market in 1968—for example students or homemakers—could start working in 1969, and as long as their income didn’t look too suspicious, that year’s wages would not be taxed.

The tax free year raises a lot of economic questions. How much more would people work if there were no income tax? How does that extra work affect the overall economy?

The total number of hours worked in industry increased 3.3% in 1969, and then fell 1.8% in 1970. The number of women working in industry increased 6.2% in 1969, and stayed high in 1970, before falling again in 1971.

The biggest impact might have been in the balance of payments. The new tax free income was spent on goods that could not all be produced in Denmark, so the country ended up importing more, which wasn’t made up for by increased exports from more manufacturing workers. The trade deficit widened in both 1969 and 1970.

In the end, the tax free year had substantial and measurable effects on the economy. But of course, it was short-lived. There was still a whole state to fund. (GY)

Tell us about yourself.

I run a design studio in New York called Spevack Loeb. We do branding, creative direction, and web design and development, for clients across real estate, hospitality, fashion, art, and finance…a bit of everything.

More recently, we’ve expanded into interior design, both residential and commercial. I had a very hands-on experience renovating my apartment in lower Manhattan and have always had an eye for sourcing art, objects and furniture. I’d say as client work it’s largely the same, but designing physical spaces has been a nice change of pace. We’re still fielding plenty of brand work, but this felt like a useful pivot given how quickly things are changing in our industry.

Outside of the office I’m developing a tennis apparel brand called Nayer Tennis. I play a lot of tennis and I care a lot about clothes and it’s been interesting to approach something from the ground up with more of a focus on product and business development than brand and marketing.

Describe your media diet.

I scroll Instagram as much as anyone else, but it’s mostly keeping up with friends, along with a steady diet of New York Yankees news and tennis highlights. I follow brands and other design studios, but not super actively. I try to stay generally aware of what’s happening in fashion, art, and media, but I make a conscious effort not to let it influence my work too directly.

From time to time I’ll listen to a podcast or read an article, but it’s usually at the recommendation of a friend. Honestly, nothing has held my attention more than a couple of weeks, and I’m regimented about canceling unused subscriptions. I watch plenty of TV and most new movies. I stay up to date on business and investment news via good old-fashioned Google searches. My group chats are incredibly active (probably where I do most of my reading)…and my wife is a journalist, so I get all the other news cycle highlights delivered to me directly.

What’s the last great book you read?

This is a particularly bad question for me. I don’t think I’ve finished a book since high school. I have plenty of time to read, but I just prefer to use my hands and stay active. If I’m relaxing at home, I’m either cooking or cleaning or sewing or fixing something around the house. I always have a pile of Poshmark clothes to alter and a bunch of cooking projects going on. I’ll organize our closets and fold the laundry. But I’m not just sitting on the couch reading. I need to stay busy, develop a new skill, accomplish something tangible.

What are you reading now?

My one and only newsletter subscription is to the Tribeca Citizen although my interest has waned since moving a few blocks north of Canal street.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

We do get a lot of print subscriptions at home and I have quite a few friends who are writers, so I enjoy seeing their names in print.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

While I don’t find reading very stimulating, I do think everyone else should be reading. I’m surrounded by friends in the media so I tend to absorb a lot of information secondhand. I can advise you on bathroom tile and chicken stock but I didn’t read that best-selling novel nor that New Yorker article everyone’s talking about. When I’m hanging with friends I’d rather contribute something totally different to a conversation, or just gossip. I guess some might argue that reading would have the benefit of expanding my mind, but I already have so many creative and administrative projects I’m excited about that I can hardly keep up with my own ideas. That’s my unapologetic justification for not reading.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

LTR (Live Tennis Rankings) is a good one. ATP rankings are typically updated every Monday after tournaments are completed, but if you want an accurate, up-to-date understanding of the points available or needed to defend within a tournament (match to match), LTR has you covered. The UI is horrible and you have to fight off a million pop-up ads, but I think that’s what I love most about it. It’s not trying, but it’s totally functional, and I’d trust it with my life if my life depended on ATP points.

McMaster-Carr is another good one. I think it’s actually a great design and an amazing shopping experience. Anything you could ever need! The navigation is a delight, and I really appreciate the photography.

Plane or train?

I’m good with either. I mostly bike around the city. I never take the subway and feel too guilty taking a cab. The bus is cool if I have time to kill.

What is one place everyone should visit?

Agata & Valentina is a grocery store on 79th and 1st that I grew up going to everyday. It’s this beautiful, authentically New York, grocer with prepared foods, produce, meat, fish, sushi, pantry items, baked goods, and basically anything else you could think to munch on, all somehow smushed into this little chaotic maze of slanted terracotta floors. You’re tush-to-tush with Yorkville’s elite, vying for aisle space as you order your antipasti and barbeque salmon.

Everything prepared and packaged by them is so appealing to me—partly because I’m repelled by the slop of CPG brands at big supermarkets—but also because of the nostalgia and randomness of their selection. I live in constant fear of all my favorite neighborhood institutions disappearing, so please visit and spend all of your money there.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

Everything I do is pretty rabbit-holey. It’s hard for me to just scratch the surface. Sometimes it’s tied to a big life event. This past year I got really deep into wedding planning, which was a combination of a million little creative projects: florals, food design, furniture, photography, print design, and clothing. The year before was my apartment renovation. We’ll see what’s next.

Right now I’m sampling knit jacquard drawstrings for the tennis shorts. I’m always discovering new old apparel and footwear brands. I’ll get obsessed with random tools and objects like kitchen appliances or plumbing hardware. And if I can’t find something then I’ll look into making it myself.

It’s WITI, on the weekend.

Why are these interesting?

A Roundtable Discussion on Homer’s “The Odyssey,” featuring Christopher Hitchens (YouTube)

A great two hours from 2000, for those who need more after the latest Nolan.

The Reminiscence Bump (Wikipedia)

“…is the tendency for adults over forty to have increased or enhanced recollection for events that occurred during their adolescence and early adulthood.”

Are “Coolcations” The Future Of Travel? (Vogue)

From 2024, but newly relevant—as the FT points out this weekend—in this heatwave-heavy summer.

Read more

This YouTube short about sums it up.

A long planned Skytrain is coming, maybe. It looks no different than the monorail you might have ridden at Disneyland in the 80s, yet it still hasn’t launched. Despite being pretty plugged into the world of travel and aviation, I haven’t been able to really parse what it will do, or what value it will bring to passengers other than make them schlep further. The comms have been shoddy at best.

So I did some digging. Here’s the actual pitch: The Automated People Mover is a 2.25-mile elevated train with six stations, running from the terminal horseshoe out to two new facilities: a consolidated rental car center that holds 21,000 vehicles, and the LAX/Metro Transit Center, which opened last summer and connects to the K and C lines. Trains are supposed to run every two minutes at peak, 24 hours a day, free.

The theory of value, as far as I can reconstruct it, has three parts. First, it pulls the rental car shuttles and airport hotel buses out of the central terminal loop, which is the single biggest contributor to the horseshoe gridlock. Every Hertz and Marriott bus circling the terminals disappears. Second, it gives Los Angeles something every serious global airport already has: a rail connection. You will, for the first time, be able to ride Metro to LAX without a shuttle bus transfer. Third, it gives people being dropped off or picked up an option to do it away from the curb entirely, at a station with actual capacity.

It’s worth also noting what it does not do. The train is landside only. If you’re connecting between terminals, the airside corridors still beat it, and you’d have to exit security to ride it. And for the majority of travelers who arrive by Uber or private car, the value is indirect: a little less bus traffic in the loop, marginally faster curbs. As LA continues to grow, this might become less useful.

The people mover is really a piece of infrastructure for the rental car crowd and transit riders, wrapped in the language of fixing LAX for everyone.

Why is this interesting?

The train was supposed to open in 2023. The design and build portion was contracted in 2018 at $1.9 billion. After a $400 million settlement package in 2024, that figure now sits around $3.34 billion, which works out to roughly $1.49 billion per mile.

Wow.

Also worth noting, it completely missed the World Cup, its most visible milestone, and as of this month there is still no announced opening date. Empty trains run training laps on the guideway while the stations sit fenced off.

An L.A. County grand jury report from last year found that delays and overruns stemmed less from engineering than from a dysfunctional relationship between Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA) and its contractor, an inadequate dispute resolution process, and, notably, the contractor leveraging political pressure around the 2028 Olympics deadline to extract more money from the city. The deadline meant to discipline the project became the mechanism for inflating it. City Council has now formally demanded a full accounting from LAWA on why a project that was 96 percent complete in 2024 still isn’t carrying a single passenger.

The lesson? When a public agency signs a decades-long design-build-operate contract and then announces an immovable deadline to the world, it hands its counterparty all the leverage. Every megaproject tied to an Olympics or a World Cup should study this case study of failure and cost overruns.

The train will eventually open, and travelers will shrug and ride it. But the real cost of LAX’s fix wasn’t the building of a fairly simple piece of transport, it was a bad negotiating position. (CJN)

As the city’s skyline grew with sci-fi forms in every direction, the creek remained its center of gravity. Turns out, that feeling goes deeper than a well-run hotel with good tennis and some lush greenery.

Why is this interesting?

The creek is not only the heart of Dubai, but is also one of the great infrastructure stories of the twentieth century.

I was reminded of this by Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, the Emirati collector behind the Barjeel Art Foundation, who writes a recurring column for The National unpacking a single work from the collection. His latest selection is The Creek in Old Dubai by Hala Kouatly, painted in 1979—the same year Jebel Ali Port opened down the coast.

He writes of the painting:

Shades of blue, brown and white dominate the canvas, with dhows lining both banks. In the foreground, traders, sailors and captains converse while others share a meal. Behind them rises the early 20th-century skyline of Bur Dubai, with coral stone, limestone and gypsum buildings suggesting Kouatly painted the scene from the Deira side of the creek.

The story the artwork is telling begins two decades earlier. In 1958, Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed, then Ruler of Dubai, borrowed around a half a million dollars from the Emir of Kuwait to dredge the creek. The loan was facilitated by the British Bank of the Middle East, and repaid in ten equal annual installments.

Dubai had no meaningful oil wealth at the time. What Sheikh Rashid had was a conviction that trade would define the city, and that the creek needed to be deep enough for modern ships. Sheikh Rashid made the bet before the future was visible, and Kouatly painted the old order just before it became recognizable as the past.

The creek project paid off gradually. Banks established headquarters along the water. The British Embassy, the Amiri Diwan, and Sheikh Rashid’s own administrative offices clustered on its banks. Trade expanded. More importantly, the project established a strategy that Dubai would repeat: building capacity before demand materialized.

Jebel Ali Port later opened down the coast, and expressed the same strategic conviction: invest in maritime infrastructure before the need for it is obvious, and let the city grow into it. Today, Jebel Ali sits at the center of a logistics network that reaches around the world. DP World, the Emirati logistics giant that emerged from it, operates terminals across dozens of countries and handles a significant share of global trade.

The even more interesting coincidence, however, is what was happening back on the creek that same year. As the container cranes went up at Jebel Ali, Kouatly stood on the Deira side and recorded the dhows, traders, and captains of Dubai’s original commercial center. She painted a port whose working world brought together Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, and Swahili; a place that still looked complete, even as the city’s center of gravity began moving elsewhere.

She was painting it while it was still fully alive, in the year it began to become the old Dubai.

The towers, the airline, the port empire came later, and get most of the PR. But long before Dubai connected itself to the world by air, the creek connected it to the region by water.

Sitting at the Park Hyatt, I felt the history ambiently before I knew it. This painting helped everything snap together in my mind. (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

After a childhood spent battling monthly strep throat, bimonthly yeast infections, and an annual exotic disease (scarlet fever, anyone?)--all of which was compounded by run-of-the-mill Jewish anxiety– I have a fear of death that my therapist finds worrisome, but which is wholly beneficial for my manager and entertainment lawyer. Because in order to avoid thinking about how there is probably no afterlife, I like to keep busy with lots of work.

I used to consider myself a writer; if I were to use a blanket term these days, it would be “storyteller.” Annoying, I know. I was originally a playwright (not a very good one), then a romance novelist (a pretty good one), then a scribe for radio theatre (didn’t try that hard), and currently, happily, blissfully, a TV writer. I’ve written on a Fox series, staffed in mini rooms, developed shows with Apple, Sony, CBS, Chernin, Bell…whatever, you don’t want my resume. Point is, I believe in old-fashioned TV the way some people believe in God. I think the five-act structure is tantamount to a religious text, I love teasers and tags, and I hope Grey’s Anatomy runs another hundred years.

But, in addition to all that– and probably the reason I was summoned to write this dispatch– I am also a content creator. How did that happen? Well, because I just yearned to receive hate comments from men in Iowa who had never seen a bleached blonde bisexual before. Kidding. The sincere answer is that much of my work has happened behind the scenes, which is cool and I am grateful for employment but also, development is kinda isolating. So I started posting on TikTok and then Instagram and occasionally Substack and now I have over 100k followers across platforms and have done brand deals with companies like Netflix, A24, Neon, TheRealReal and more.

So, hire me to write on your show (contact 42 Management), or pay me to talk about your company (contact Proud Management)…or ask me to do something else, I dunno, I’ll probably say yes (contact me at remysolomonpro@gmail.com)

Describe your media diet.

I wake up every morning on high alert. This is either the by-product of growing up a swimmer and having to haul ass out of bed for 5am practices–or I was an artillery gunner in another life and my somatic system still thinks the British are coming.

My version of reading the news is opening the fifty million Substacks in my inbox. I am particularly fond of Kaitlin Phillips’ Gift Guide and Natasha Stagg’s Selling Out, both of which embody an effortless cool that will forever escape me, a consummate try-hard. Like apparently everyone else who has written this column, I read Feed Me, which pairs nicely with my friend John’s newsletter, The Eastside Rag. I also like After School, Snake Super Health…you get the drift.

After I finish reading whatever delicious little treats have been deposited by the AOL stork (yeah, I’m still on AOL, fuck off), I move on to NYMag. I love those crazy girls, they’re always up to something! And then I hit Deadline for some galvanizing self-loathing. Why isn’t my name in one of these headlines? They hired HIM to adapt that IP? Wait, they told me that show wasn’t staffing lower levels! Those bastards.

As I storm around my kitchen, muttering about how I was robbed, robbed I tell you! – I listen to podcasts. I am a long-time fan of, among many others, The Cutting Room Floor, New Models, Nymphet Alumni, Doomscroll and Where Should We Begin? I also returned to LA Podcast during this mind-numbing election cycle, and have been dipping my toes into Disintegrator.

After that, I like to just steep my brain in a melange of algorithms–TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter–until I lose all sense of self and become one with the Big Computer in the Sky.

What’s the last great book you read?

I don’t know if I’m allowed to talk about this, but in the spirit of asking for forgiveness not permission…I’m gonna do it anyway. Laura Leffler’s new book Art People is astonishing. It’s coming out in 2028 and I don’t want to spoil anything so I’ll just say that when I finished the book, I 1) wept for 15 minutes about what it means to be a woman and 2) immediately asked to option it.

What are you reading now?

I finally started Ben Lerner’s Transcription. Where’s my medal?! I liked Leaving the Atocha Station, so I’ve been looking forward to this one.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

I’m sorry to say that it has been ages since I read a print publication. But I used to be obsessed with Vanity Fair. Like, wrote-Graydon-Carter-fan-emails-obsessed. I would read it cover-to-cover, everything from the editor’s letter to the Proust Questionnaire.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

So glad you asked–you should be reading OCCRP, or the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. This isn’t gonna make a lot of sense, but it almost feels like reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Walk with me here. Good criminals engage with the present in a way major studios do not; they’re constantly experimenting with novel technology, and they love to exploit emergent systems. It also gives me a good temp check on what I should actually be worried about in the endless deluge of things I could be worried about, and what’s just a nothingburger.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

The photo-editing app y2K. I love to take a Klonopin and go to town on that bad boy.

Plane or train?

Plane. I am from Los Angeles, so I don’t romanticize commutes. I’m also completely unafraid of public confrontation, so if somebody puts a naked, callused foot in the gap between their chair and my armrest, I will swat them away with a safety manual.

What is one place everyone should visit?

Montreal. Best city on earth. The kindest people, the finest food, and the sickest parties. Yes, I have written a whole travelogue about my week in Montreal, it’s up on Immaculate Taste.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

Offshore oil rigs. 120 people from radically different walks of life, co-existing in the middle of nowhere for three to four weeks at a time, forced to rely on one another if they want to survive the night? I mean, that’s theater, baby. I got into it by reading Fire on the Horizon, which is ostensibly a book about the BP Oil Spill but is really a book about the culture aboard rigs. And yes, before you ask–I am already taking out a pitch set in this world. So get your grubby mitts off!!

It’s WITI, on the weekend.

Why are these interesting?

How the U.S., U.K. and Pakistan Teamed Up To Stop Another 9/11 (Politico)

When historians look back on the checkered legacy of the global war on terror, they will highlight Operation OVERT as a model.

The Globalisation of Music Through FIFA Soundtracks (Instagram)

Play any FIFA game long enough, and its soundtrack becomes inseparable from that period of your life.

How Robert De Niro Convinced Nobu to Build a Restaurant Empire (Eater)

I only learned this week that De Niro is the luxury group’s co-founder. Here’s another fun read about it.

American Modernism (Mosby’s Files)

Just open it: An amazing browser experience.

Read more

Alex here. A recent trip to Cairo made me realise what a huge, existential challenge our world’s cities face. By population the world’s fifth largest city, Cairo is currently dealing with overcrowding and considerable pressure on its utilities, with its population said to be increasing by approximately 500,000 residents annually. If you zoom out geographically, the numbers tell the same story.

The whole of Africa is urbanising fast. In 1990, just 31% of Africans lived in cities. By 2020, that figure had reached 50%. By 2050, it’s projected to approach two-thirds. Over the next 25 years, the continent will grow from 60 to almost 160 cities of more than one million people, including 17 “megacities”—populations of over ten million people—second only to Asia.

Worldwide, figures suggest that by 2050, nearly 70% of the world’s population will live in cities. There will be nearly 70 megacities, up from 44 today.

Around 75% of the infrastructure that will exist in 2050 to cope with it all has not yet been built.

Why is this interesting?

The growth of megacities is one of humanity’s most intriguing design challenges. The task is often framed as a technical one, of innovation and real estate, but really it’s a cultural one too. And there’s a fundamental tension between what must be built quickly, and what can only be grown slowly.

How do you design a city for today? The answer is you don’t. You can’t prescribe meaning, you can’t rush belonging. What you can design are the conditions for a city to become itself – the social anchors, the districts, the public places, and the systems that tie them all together. Success comes from cultivating culture, not imposing it.

After all, no great city was fully formed from the outset, and the best ones have let their citizens continue to influence their design. Following a devastating flood in 1957, Valencia planned to replace its diverted river with a motorway. When residents pushed back, the space instead became the 9km-long Turia Gardens, now one of Spain’s most loved public spaces.

Cities are never really finished. The Barcelona of today is also not the Barcelona of even ten years ago. Faced with growing concerns about overtourism, rising housing costs and the erosion of local identity, the city has increasingly shifted its focus from being a city to visit to a city to live in. Efforts to pedestrianise streets, reduce traffic and reclaim public space, including along parts of La Rambla, reflect a broader move towards liveability and quality of life.

The same principle can be seen elsewhere. In New York, the High Line emerged from a grassroots effort to transform a disused railway into public space, while in Seoul the Cheonggyecheon Stream was restored after decades beneath a highway, creating a new civic heart for the city.

London’s Canary Wharf was originally conceived as a corporate business district, and for many years felt like a ghost town at the weekends. Rather than accept this as the area’s terminal state, cultural programming was instead brought in in recent years to broaden its appeal—more public attractions, independent retail, better restaurants, nicer housing—transforming it into a destination where people increasingly choose to also live, visit, and spend regular time in.

Great cities endure because they continue adapting to the people who inhabit them. Ultimately, it’s the placemaking equivalent of Wes Jackson’s observation: ‘If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough’. If a city’s DNA can be constructed in a single lifetime, we’re not thinking big enough.

Our next cities will flourish only by creating frameworks that can adapt, reflecting shared values and behaviours, and allow future generations to reinterpret the spaces they inhabit. There are no shortcuts. (AL)

Michael here. Footballing legend turned pundit Thierry Henry said of the French winger Michael Olise: “He doesn’t play the game, he thinks the game.” Olise, who will play against Spain in a World Cup semi-final later today, reads the field with his brain before he runs the field with his legs, anticipating a play well before it happens instead of reacting once it does.

This perfectly captures how some of the best players on the pitch can at times seem like they’re moving in slow motion. They casually glide past opponents. They jog while others sprint. Defenders may close on them at full pace, yet somehow never arrive in time to make an impact.

Why is this interesting?

Soccer at the highest level is a game about speed, and some of the players who look like they use the least of it are often managing it best. There are two different ways to pull that off.

The first is Olise’s way: you move in what looks like slow motion, but you’re not actually slow. Your legs move at a normal pace, or even a fast one; your brain just got there first. Scouts and pundits routinely describe Olise’s dribbling style as languid, and say that he seems to operate on his own tempo, unaffected by the pace of everything happening around him. None of that shows up as reduced effort in his numbers. He’s one of the most heavily used wingers in Europe this season, high in dribbles attempted, crosses, and minutes played. The appearance and the workload coexist; the languidness is a visual effect of his anticipation.

Most of us watch or play soccer reactively. The ball moves, then we move. A player like Olise is scanning the field constantly, so that by the time the ball reaches him he already knows where the next three options are. Sports scientists call this temporal dilation. Composed players aren’t actually perceiving time more slowly than those around them. Their brains are just better at predicting what comes next, so they’re preparing their next move while everyone else is still processing the current one. The stillness is a byproduct. The speed was spent earlier, in the reading rather than running.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Colombia’s Carlos Valderrama built an entire career on it, forty years before Olise. He was known for a ‘lazy’ playing style and a lack of pace, but the reputation missed the point. He barely needed pace, because he read a pass into space before the defense had thought, or tried, to close it down.

They’re fast in the sense that actually decides games, which is arriving at the optimal decision, and taking action, before anyone else.

The second way is seen with the GOAT Lionel Messi. It’s a different mechanism even though it produces the same visual effect. Because Messi is barely moving. Through this World Cup’s group stage, Opta tracked 618 outfield players who’d logged at least 90 minutes. Messi ranked first amongst them in goals, with six. He ranked 618th, dead last, in distance covered per 90 minutes, at 8.1 kilometers.

Some of that is Olise’s trick. Messi reads the game as well as anyone alive, so he’s rarely caught wrong-footed or forced into an unnecessary sprint.

But a lot of it is something else: at 39, and playing a role built around him rather than around (any) defensive work, Messi is simply excused from most of the running. He doesn’t track back. He doesn’t press. His teammates cover that ground so he doesn’t have to.

Messi isn’t appearing slow the way Olise is. He’s actually playing in slow motion, on purpose, and getting away with it because when the ball does arrive, his analysis and actions are still fast enough to produce six goals out of 8.1 kilometers.

Both versions rely on the same underlying idea, which is that a player’s speed of thought is often more valuable than speed of motion. Sometimes the spirited player who covers every blade of grass is just reading the game wrong, while the slow player is ambling toward victory. (MHB)

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a researcher, fashion historian, and freelance journalist. My work mostly revolves around the intersection of popular culture and the military broadly. This can mean writing about the aesthetic of US Special Forces and how it changed over the course of the Global War on Terror or writing about companies like Americana Pipedream and how they are selling military surplus to a younger audience. My academic research is mostly in the same vein, but a tad more historical in its scope. In that capacity, I was fortunate enough to consult on the latest season of Articles of Interest and appear throughout.

Most of my writing can be found over on my Substack, Combat Threads. I think of Substack as my notebook, where I can develop new ideas and work through potential pitches that may end up elsewhere. I like to think of my work as essentially reporting on a subculture. With the military-civilian divide in the US what it is, military culture increasingly exists apart from broader American culture. I want to translate some of that military culture to a more general audience so they understand what they are looking at, for example, when federal agents dress more and more like soldiers: What are they referencing? Where did this come from? And what does it say about culture? etc. People think we live in a militarized society, but really, I think we need a better understanding of what is going on in our military so we can better understand the people who make it up. Ok, off my soapbox.

Describe your media diet.

My first job out of college was as an editorial researcher at Monocle’s New York Bureau. Part of that job was compiling a handful of stories from around the country that were not in any of the major outlets (e.g., The New York Times, WSJ, The Atlantic) every morning to send to the editors in London. This wasn’t just an empty task either, I got feedback — mostly when my roundup wasn’t up to snuff. I still don’t do that, of course, but it definitely shaped how I trawl the internet looking for potential story ideas. So when I open my computer in the morning for the first half hour or so, I try to really cast a wide net and gather up as many open tabs from as many different places as possible. It could be as varied as a story from Soldier Systems Daily, an item in Dezeen, and a piece from Hell Gate. I am also a big fan of Google Alerts which I set up constantly to track my beat and potential story ideas.

Regardless of how fast I am rushing to get out the door, I always turn on the radio first thing when I wake up. We have an internet radio that is set to our local NPR station, WNYC. When I am working on busy work, I sometimes change the radio over to BBC World Service, which I really enjoy in the middle of the day when shows like Assignment or Outlook come on. I also just crush podcasts to an unhealthy degree, including some that I actively don’t like, haha, but feel compelled to listen to potential story ideas or just to see where a certain slice of the culture is on something. But much of what I listen to, I love. I never miss an episode of Know Your Enemy, Ones and Tooze, The Watch, and, of course, Articles of Interest while I try to check in on Joshua Citarella’s Doomscroll, American Prestige, and Angry Planet when an episode catches my eye.

I do still like to read print, and we subscribe to a decent number of publications, which means I am chronically behind on The New Yorker, usually skim New York magazine, and get at least one or two pieces from the New York Review of Books done before the next issue is at my door. Like every good man of the Left, I love reading The Financial Times and try to get most of the way through the weekend edition before Monday morning, with varying degrees of success.

What’s the last great book you read?

This is kind of cheating cause I am not done yet, but I have been tearing through Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s. I had seen a few reviews and had suggested it to a friend who devoured it and kept texting me how much they loved it the whole time, so I bumped it up on my list. It really is no surprise; it is totally my bag. I have long had a fascination with the 1970s European terrorism, the Lebanese Civil War, and characters like Carlos the Jackal. It also paired very well with a book that I was just revisiting for a story I was writing, Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command, as it picks up in a way when The Revolutionists stops, but from the other side. While reading The Revolutionists, you could be shocked by how flat-footed nations were caught by the terrorism of the 1970s, with Relentless Strike, you see what came next as the US invested in Special Operations Forces to deal with these kinds of threats.

What are you reading now?

Because I kind of cheated on the other question, I am going to tweak this to what I am reading next. I am about to head off to Washington state for some hiking and camping, so I was looking for something light (in both senses) to stow in my pack. Whenever I am a bit burned out on reading (which seems to be happening more often), I like to pick up what I call an “out breath” book, usually a detective or spy novel. I find that they help limber up my reading muscle and get my brain firing. For this trip, I grabbed Smiley’s People from the John Le Carré box set I have on my shelf. But when I get back home, I am probably going to pick up The Gods of New York by Jonathan Mahler again after starting it a few months back.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

The reason I still like reading physical publications is the act of stumbling upon a story you would never choose to read if you saw it online. So when I open up a magazine, I like to go to the table of contents, find a story that I really want to read, and instead of just flipping right to it, turn every page until I get there, with the challenge to try to read at least one other story before I get there.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

Peter York. I think about him a lot when I am writing, and he was a real inspiration during my graduate studies in costume studies. Quickly, Peter York is a British writer in the new journalism mold who covered a variety of subcultures throughout the 1970s and 80s. Famously, he wrote the Sloane Ranger Handbook (kind of like the British version of the Preppy Handbook), but that isn’t what I mean when I say you should read him. He has a collection of his pieces called Style Wars that is just brilliant. You can see how he was able to identify nascent trends, come up with an evocative name for them, and write a really incisive column that really unpacks not just what this subculture is but what it is responding to. The Sloane Ranger essay is great, but I am also a fan of Little Magazines and Post Punk Mortem. Again, back to my project, I think of my work as trying to apply this approach to military culture. And some honorable mentions: Michael Lange’s Substack is a must for any politically engaged New Yorker, Thomas Gibbons-Neff’s reporting on American gun culture in The New York Times is unique and always must-read, Prof. Andrew Grove’s Menswear, Archives, Systems is a great place for men’s style-related academic writing.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

Going to be real, I thought about this for a long time and flipped through my phone and came up totally empty. I am on my phone too much, but it is all the usual suspects I fear.

Plane or train?

Can I say car? I know, very American, but as I said up top, I love listening to podcasts and enjoy an audiobook, and driving is the absolute best time for either.

What is one place everyone should visit?

Having a hard time with this one, but I think I would say the Musée de l’Armée in Paris. It is a wonderful, massive museum. I have been there twice in my life, and each time the object that always sticks in my mind is a French soldier’s blue overcoat preserved from the trenches of WWI, still caked with mud. There is something very profound for me, someone who studies military uniforms, to see this over a hundred-year-old coat still covered with the debris of war and being able to see the wear patterns, where the dirt accumulated, to not just see how the coat was designed for military use but how it was worn. It is a striking piece.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

I feel like my whole career is just one rabbit hole after another. For well over a year, I was combing through photos and videos from ongoing conflicts for any sign of a “Pornhub” logo patch on a combatant’s kit. This was kicked off when a photo was retweeted into my feed showing a young anti-junta soldier in Myanmar with a logo patch fixed to his plate carrier, and then I began to see them everywhere I looked in the Russian-Ukrainian War. Eventually, I found examples that really stretched across the world, including some strange ones in the militia/2A movement in the US. I ended up writing about it for Combat Threads, but it really captured that the military aesthetics and culture have become increasingly homogenized and global.

It’s WITI, on the weekend.

Why are these interesting?

The History of Cover Flow (512 Pixels)

An add-on to one of our WITIS this week: Remembering the fun and impact of Apple’s now-retired album scroll view (a Jobs favorite._

German politicians vow to stop VW’s mass layoff plan (Politico)

As Germany’s economic reality grows darker, one of the largest corporate layoffs in history looms.

Air Karen (Air Karen)

The AI that fights airline customer service.

Dinner with Yasuto Komashita (Permanent Style)

A beautifully written interview with an excellent dresser.

Read more

Dick Bailey approaches this imbalance differently. Best known as the founder of The Brando, the ultra-remote resort in French Polynesia, Bailey also established the Tetiaroa Society, the property’s scientific and conservation arm. What began as an effort to protect a fragile atoll has evolved into a broader question: how we explore the ocean, and why we keep looking in the wrong places.

Most ocean life exists between 200 and 1,000 meters, in a band known as the mesopelagic zone. At 200 meters, just one per cent of sunlight remains. At 1,000 meters, none at all. Bailey calls it “the paradigm of darkness.” This twilight band is believed to contain 70 per cent of all animal life on Earth.

It also performs one of the planet’s most important climate functions. Each night, billions of organisms migrate upward to feed near the surface, then return to depth by morning. In doing so, they transport carbon from the atmosphere into the deep ocean, where it can remain sequestered for centuries. Without this biological pump, global temperature targets would already have been exceeded.

Why is this interesting?

Despite its significance, the mesopelagic remains poorly understood. Much of what we know comes indirectly—sonar readings, remote vehicles, isolated samples from rare expeditions. The problem is not scientific interest but access. A single dive to mesopelagic depths in a conventional research submersible can cost more than $120,000.

Exploration becomes episodic and theatrical: flags planted, moments captured, but little continuity.

“Dives in the twilight zone are very rare,” Bailey says. “They haven’t sourced time-series data the way ROVs have. But human-occupied vehicles have inherent advantages in tool manipulation, specimen gathering, and scientific observation.”

Through the Tetiaroa Society, Bailey is trying to change that with a new class of submersible called Honu. The ambition is not to go deeper, but to go back—often.

Honu reaches depths of 1,000 meters at an operational cost of roughly $8,000 to $10,000 per dive, an order of magnitude less than traditional crewed vehicles. That shift enables a different scientific model. Instead of occasional expeditions, Honu dives follow fixed protocols: repeated depth stops at 200, 350, 500, 650, 800 and 950 meters, with consistent measurements at each level. Every dive adds to a baseline and every return visit builds a time series.

The Honu Mesopelagic Science Program, launching in French Polynesia, will establish the first standardized mesopelagic baseline dataset for waters off Tahiti, Moorea and Tetiaroa—direct, repeated human observation of life at 500 meters across seasons. These measurements do not exist today.

The priorities reveal how much remains unknown: tracking carbon pathways from surface to depth; understanding how reefs respond to marine heatwaves; establishing baselines for the biological pump before hypoxia and acidification alter the system beyond reconstruction. As Bailey says, we are attempting to model global ocean dynamics without ground truth for how they function in specific places. The project seeks to fill this knowledge gap.

The future of ocean science will belong less to those who go deepest and more to those who return most often. Understanding will come from the discipline of looking—repeatedly—at the overlooked place that might matter the most.

Ricardo here. I’m moving house this summer, and the room I’m most excited about is also, arguably, the most pointless one in the new place. I’ve started calling it the obsolete media corner: records, books, graphic novels, a SNES, and a wall of Blu-rays in an age when I already pay four different companies to stream the same films.

One night, while thinking about how many shelves we’d need, I wondered why I was so invested in a corner full of things I had technically already replaced. The answer came in three parts. I like having less to choose from. I like that a shelf says something about me without my having to say a word. And, most of all, I realized I love the act behind all of it: finding, handling, considering, and choosing the things that actually mean something to me.

Which is a long way of saying that I love to browse.

The strange thing about browsing is, nobody really designed it on purpose, and almost nobody noticed when it went away.

Record crates, video-store aisles, and bookshop tables were all machines for serendipity. What made them work was friction. They were slow, physical, and slightly annoying, and that was the engine. Friction made you slow down. Slowing down made you browse. Browsing made you stumble onto the record two bins over, or fall into conversation with the person behind the counter whose taste was nothing like yours. You went in looking for one thing and came out holding three, two of which you didn’t know existed when you walked in.

The friction was doing the work. Then, technology arrived with the kindest possible offer: let me make this easier.

First came search, which helps you find exactly the thing you’re looking for. Then came the algorithm: You’re busy, let me suggest what you’ll like next. I promise my business goals have nothing to do with it. And, to be fair, it worked. We got infinite choice and instant retrieval. We handed over the slow part without much of a fight. It’s just that somewhere in that trade, the friction disappeared, and so did the happy accidents went with it.

Why is this interesting?

It took us a while to feel the loss, but now, we’re feeling it.

People are paying real money to get browsing back. We’re buying records like there’s no tomorrow, sometimes without even owning a turntable. We’re making pilgrimages to the last Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon. We’re digging out old iPods. People are quietly rebuilding private video stores at home, with shelves of physical discs they could theoretically stream somewhere else.

The instinct underneath all of it is the same: make it physical, make it browsable, make it mine. Most people don’t really want the old format back. They want the behavior the format used to carry.

Here’s the thing, though. Buying the friction back wholesale is not the answer, and deep down I don’t think anybody wants it to be. I’m not giving up streaming, and you’re probably not driving to a video store in the rain. The more interesting question is whether we can engineer serendipity back in, while still keeping the convenience.

Some people already are. Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, a small bookshop in Bath, runs a subscription where you fill in a questionnaire, get assigned an actual human bibliotherapist, and receive a hand-picked book in the post every month, wrapped in brown paper and sealed with wax.

You never leave your home, but you still get the surprise: The author you would never have chosen. The thrill of opening something you didn’t pick for yourself. That is serendipity with the friction removed, and a human curator dropped into its place.

I’ve spent the last year working on the same problem in music. I’m building a wall display called Spine that turns your streaming library back into browsable album art. It keeps the convenience and access of streaming, but restores some of the curation, presence, and conversation that used to come from living with music physically.

It doesn’t replace streaming. It just makes streaming browsable again. Same trick: keep the ease, smuggle the serendipity back in. Our appetite for getting lost didn’t die with our DVD collections, it just needed a new home.

And if the answer was never going to be a mass return to the old ways, then the really hopeful part is what comes next. The interesting move is subtler: people reverse-engineering serendipity into systems that remain convenient. A bookshop here, a wall display there, and presumably a hundred more to come for film, television, art, retail, and everything else that’s been recently flattened in the name of efficiency. (RA)

It shows the weekly measles cases in the United States from 2024 to 2026. It also notes that from 1994 to 2024, the weekly average was four cases. Since January 2025, it’s fifty-eight.

Why is this interesting?

Measles is the visible symptom. The underlying condition is something larger and, I’d argue, more consequential for the country’s long-term position than any tariff or trade war: Brain drain, and scientific big bets.

In 2025, American scientists submitted 32% more applications to jobs abroad than the year prior. Eighty-five rising and established researchers — including an NIH neurobiologist and a Princeton nuclear physicist — moved to China. The EU launched a 500 million euro package specifically designed to attract US scientists to Europe. This is a structural reorientation of where the world’s best scientific minds believe their work can actually happen.

It’s not just that research budgets got cut, though this is certainly true in many categories. It’s that the rules governing how science gets funded are being rewritten in ways that make the entire enterprise structurally shaky. The proposed changes to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would give political appointees pre-approval authority over every discretionary grant, explicitly forbidding them from deferring to peer reviewers. Active grants can be terminated mid-award for any reason, and applicants can be denied based on organizational affiliations. To be clear, this is an inversion of the post-WWII compact that made American science the envy of the world in the first place.

Elias Zerhouni, who ran the NIH under George W. Bush, put it with unusual directness: the people executing these changes think they’re making the system stronger. They don’t understand the second- and third-order effects. And unlike a factory or a supply chain, you can’t just rebuild a scientific ecosystem once you’ve dismantled it. The timelines are long. Clinical trials that were halted don’t resume cleanly, and the PhD students who didn’t enroll don’t come back. The researchers who left for Zurich or Shanghai don’t return because a new administration promises stability.

The super reductionist version of the story that gets a lot of airtime is a political fight between the administration and elite universities. That framing is too narrow. Two-thirds of all terminated research funding, according to an American Progress analysis of government data, went to public colleges and universities, not Harvard or Columbia. This is as much a middle-American science story as an elite institution story.

The US built its scientific leadership over eighty years through a simple and elegant idea: the government funds the basic research that no private actor has the time horizon or risk tolerance to fund, and that foundational work eventually becomes the commercial infrastructure that generates returns for everyone. NIH funding underpinned basic or applied research related to 99% of newly approved medicines. The NSF’s history includes the groundwork for the internet, Doppler radar, supercomputing, 3D printing, and artificial intelligence.

By disrupting this in the short term, we cut off the supply of downstream things we keep saying we want more of — biotech innovation, AI leadership, energy breakthroughs.

You can’t defund the headwaters and then wonder why the river runs dry. (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a cosmetic product developer and beauty brand strategist. I interned at MAC during college and then stayed for a decade, heading up their designer collaborations and seasonal color collections. I was first hire at Glossier and did all the original product development and branding, including the pink bubble pouch. Went on the road with Pat McGrath for a while, made some clinical skincare brands, little of this little of that. I’ve always been really obsessed with product and color and texture and believe that everyone makes daily choices relating to and informed by the beauty industry, whether they know it or not. Three months ago, I started a beauty and wellness Substack called Self Involved, which focuses on just that. It serves as a place to stick all my product recs and opinions, as well as the broader esoteric health topics I’m interested in that don’t correlate directly to my on-paper career.

Describe your media diet.

Frankly, my diet is heavily informed by my two main group chats. I’m old fashioned and will do the usual players on my own in the morning - the Times, NYMag, Page Six. But then the day evolves into a fullscale media exchange between me and “Gifted and Talented” (covering media, fashion, art, NYC related gossip) and “The Clubhouse” (covering celebrity and culture). What I learn as a result of these chats sending links and then the real-time sharing of our opinions cannot be overstated. We cover the big articles that everyone’s talking about and the random minutiae that makes life worth living. We’re all extremely online and these chats function as a finely tuned filtering system.

My favorite Substack is Health Gossip. I also love Gift Guide, Selling Out, Feed Me, Paraphernalia and Fast & Loose. I use Substack in a much different way than other forms of media. I keep a super tight edit and let things find me naturally. I don’t immediately subscribe to things, I don’t like to be inundated.

I read Lauren Sherman’s Line Sheet as soon as it hits the inbox.

Podcasts I listen to regularly are Huberman, How Long Gone, SUP and Dial #DAN.

I have a beautiful Instagram algorithm that only shows me ballet, Japanese stretching, Bravo clips and yogurt recipes, which is how I like it. My policy here is similar to Substack. I don’t follow beauty brands or look at much beauty content. I like discovering my own things and consider myself to live outside of the beauty industry. It’s how I develop my own ideas and see beauty through a larger cultural lens, rather than being bombarded with brand launches and product tutorials.

What’s the last great book you read?

On Grief by Jennifer Senior. A friend gave this to me recently and it’s an essay on one family’s loss, how they remember it twenty years later, and the specific phenomena that happen over time when multiple people are in multiple types of pain. I avoided it at first and then read it in an hour with pleasure.

What are you reading now?

Lives of Saints by Nancy Lemann. The recent reissue and Times profile of Nancy reminded me to read this, after meaning to for years.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

I open to whatever is on the last page and assess. Then I skim through front to back, looking at ads and for any article that immediately stands out. I read in order of interest, I skip anything I don’t care about. Everything about me has been informed by the magazines I read growing up, but as an adult I hate having too much stuff around so I don’t buy them or subscribe like I used to. There is still no better feeling than sitting around on a Sunday morning and catching up on a stack of magazines though.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

Sami Reiss’ Snake Super Health newsletter. He’s a weird genius with a wild writing style and if you’re a serious health person (or want to be a serious health person) you will lock in immediately. If you take selfies in Alo, you may think it’s a foreign language. A lot of times when people ask me a health question that’s above my pay grade, I refer them there.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

Transit. I live above a bus stop and it shows you the real time bus location so I just wait until it’s a few blocks away and then head downstairs.

Plane or train?

Plane. I can’t believe how many people on here say train. I don’t want anything to do with Penn Station or Amtrak unless it’s, for some reason, an emergency or my last resort. I’m a Delta psycho with an extremely dialed in travel system and am happiest when in the sky. Flying can be easy if you know how to do it.

What is one place everyone should visit?

Buffalo. Biased because I’m from there but Buffalo has the sickest architecture and is an absolutely perfect place in the summer. The vibe reminds me very much of Portland, but without the money. It has a lot of hyper-local, old school businesses and is also worth visiting for the AKG Art Museum (formerly Albright-Knox), Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin House, I suppose Niagara Falls, and 911 Tavern for wings. Stay at The Richardson Hotel, built in 1880 as the State Asylum for the Insane.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

Trying to make sense of the Lisa Taddeo Instagram chaos. I loved Three Women and am fascinated by the amount of people breaking from reality lately. What does it all mean?

It’s WITI, on the weekend.

Why are these interesting?

Flood, fire and famine: Africa braces for ‘Godzilla’ El Niño (African Business)

Severe damage to agriculture and infrastructure is expected across large parts of the continent, and Africa has just a few months to prepare.

Why You Feel Exhausted Without Having “Done” Anything Physically (Facile Things)

The brain is just like any other muscle. It gets tired.

The Timewaster Letters (Robin Cooper/YouTube)

One man’s bizarre letters—to trade groups, department stores, clubs, political parties, and a certain children’s book publisher—and the responses he received to his ideas, observations, and unsolicited feedback.

Judge a Book by its Writing (Uncovered)

Read an endless stream of free book samples, reveal the ones you like.

Read more

Russell here. At 0000 GMT on 27 June 2026, the BBC stopped broadcasting its Radio 4 service via a longwave radio signal. This after over a hundred years of longwave transmission. The broadcast ended with God Save The King and, of course, the shipping forecast.

Radio 4 is still available via a variety of other wavelengths and platforms. (It will stay that way, given that the station’s ongoing transmission is one of the official methods nuclear submarines use to determine whether Britain still has a functioning goverment.)

The great advantage of longwave radio is that, well, the waves are long. The signal can bounce over obstacles like mountain ranges and travel beyond the horizon, mostly hugging the surface of the earth, and occasionally reaching even further by reflecting from the ionosphere. That means it can carry a signal huge distances, and that a single transmitter can serve a whole country, or even beyond. Many Britons over a certain age will remember listening for the warm crackle of longwave as they tried to catchup with the cricket or the football while on trips abroad.

But there are also a few disadvantages to longwave. For one, modern radios aren’t built to receive it, which means the UK audience for it has dwindled to 90,000. It takes a lot of energy to transmit, and that’s expensive at the moment. And the 90-year old gear being used requires thermionic valves which are no longer being manufactured. In fact, only 11 spares remain.

So now the only countries still broadcasting on longwave are Romania, Poland, Algeria, Morocco and Mongolia.

Why is this interesting?

The boom in analogue audio nostalgia seems, thus far, to have bypassed radio. Vinyl and cassettes are back, of course. CDs and reel-to-reel are happening now. And Minidiscs, the best personal audio technology ever, will inevitably soon return. But old-school, non-digital radio is still the province of hams and enthusiasts, not yet hipsters or retro-manufacturers.

Presumably that’s because you need a massive transmitter, as well as your Grandad’s old Roberts or Philco, but can it be long before old transmitters are revived like denim looms, vinyl plants and letterpresses were?

Grimeton Radio Station in southern Sweden is an early longwave transatlantic telegraphy station. It’s been preserved as a world heritage historical site, and is still functional. Once a year, it fires up and transmits brief test transmissions, which can be received all over Europe. A campaign to similarly preserve the huge masts of the Droitwich Transmitting Station, used to broadcast the BBC, has already begun. (RD)

Keith here. We are now into the knockout phase of the World Cup. Bar exorbitant ticket prices, it has so far been a rousing success, full of international tourists discovering Buc’ee’s, Scottish fans making the city of Boston bend to their will through joyous nuisance, and of course, influencers becoming international celebrities.

Like all major sporting events, the World Cup is as much a celebration of commerce and marketing as it is sporting greatness. And no one celebrates this jolt of football-induced pandemonium more than the sporting duopoly of Adidas and Nike (sorry Puma). Since 1998, both have kicked off their world cup festivities by releasing a Super Bowl-sized ad featuring the most famous soccer players in the world.

2026 was no different. Adidas’ Backyard Legends features Lionel Messi, Jude Bellingham, and Lamine Yamal. Nike’s Rip the Script: Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappe, Vinicius Jr., and more.

If you’ve followed these ads for the past three decades, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Nike, not Adidas, is an official sponsor of the event. Nike has generally put more marketing heft into its creative campaigns, more star wattage, more integrations, than Adidas, even though the Three Stripes has been a FIFA Partner since 1970. That partnership buys them the right to use FIFA’s protected marks: the logo, the trophy, the words themselves. They’re the only ones allowed to even say “World Cup.”

Why is this interesting?

I can think of three reasons. First, despite the wide variety of athletes and potential themes to explore, these commercials always seem to follow the same playbook.

Beginning with Nike’s 1998 campaign, which focused on the Brazilian team passing time by playing soccer in the airport, through to both of this year’s campaigns, the concept is generally “Famous players come together to ply their trade in increasingly bizarre locations and scenarios,” such as…

• The airport (Nike, 1998)

• A steel cage in the hold of a tanker ship (Nike, 2002)

• A Swiss laboratory where scientists teleport players from different eras to settle a bar argument (Nike, 2022)

Perhaps the most famous of the ads, Nike’s 2014 “Winner Stays”—where youth players suddenly turn into famous footballers by evoking their names—shares many hallmarks of Adidas’ 2006 ad “José +10,” where two kids draft that year’s world cup stars, CGI-ing players from yesteryear to play alongside them.

The second interesting element is which stars each brand can use, and what clothing they’re allowed to put them in. As you’d expect, it all depends on who sponsors each athlete. It’s why you have never seen Messi (Adidas) and Ronaldo (Nike) square off in a World Cup ad, despite it being the single most obvious creative idea in the sport.

Sometimes, across their club, country, and individual brand contracts, a player might have three different sponsors. Case in point: Portugal recently ended its multi-decade relationship with Nike, signing with Puma. Ronaldo remains a Nike athlete. His Saudi club, Al-Nassr, also left Nike, to sign with Adidas. That’s why Ronaldo appears in generic apparel in Nike’s Rip the Script ad.

Likewise, in Nike’s 2014 “Winner Stays,” you first see Ronaldo in Portugal red, Neymar in Brazil’s canary yellow, and Rooney in England white. Then Zlatan Ibrahimović arrives not in Sweden’s bright yellow, but the red, white, and blue of Paris Saint-Germain. At the time, Sweden was sponsored by Adidas. Later, Gerard Piqué and Andres Iniesta, two Barcelona players, show up in their club shirts rather than Spain’s, for the exact same reason. In Adidas’s 2022 “Family Reunion,” Son Heung-min appears in a tasteful sweater, because both his South Korea and Tottenham kits were made by Nike.

Neither company will dress their athletes in their rival’s shirt, full stop.

The third interesting point is that these ads are conceptualized and filmed in advance of the teams’ rosters being finalized. Which means some decisions about who to feature don’t pay off. If you pause at this campaign at 4:25, you’ll see an England player who has failed to make any impact at all this World Cup—because he didn’t even make the squad. (Coca-Cola likewise invested in Cole Palmer’s marketability.)

Sometimes, the brands don’t care whether the athlete is in the World Cup or not.

French firebrand Eric Cantona has appeared in four Nike commercials, despite famously never playing in a World Cup. (His infamy from karate kicking a spectator during a Manchester United match has made him an eternally marketable foil.) Cantona appears as an airplane passenger (1998), announcer (2002), a TV host (2006), and actor in a fishing scene (2026).

Both Nike and Adidas have also blended the past and the future. In previous ads, CGI helped feature old footballers. But Adidas’ 2026 ad took it one step further, creating AI David Beckham. As the technology gets better, expect AI to feature more prominently. Pele filming a TikTok after scoring in new Nike boots? It’s not inconceivable. (KO)

* In 2018, Nike made a brief strategic detour to release a bunch of vignettes instead of one big ad; it reversed again in 2022 with the Footballverse ad.

** A special thanks to my research assistant Julian O’Brien for painstakingly confirming athlete presence in the commercials.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m Mary H.K. Choi. Author, essayist, podcast host, screenwriter. I’ve been a culture reporter for over two decades, writing for a slew of different magazines. Many long defunct, including the one I launched as editor-in-chief when I was 27, called Missbehave. I also worked on the Summer I Turned Pretty Season 3. I ghost wrote DJ Khaled’s business book. I’ve also written comics for Marvel and DC and I’m a New York Times bestselling author. My fourth novel Pool House is out now.

Describe your media diet.

A good mix of newsletters, podcasts and various magazines. Including zines. Nymphette Alumni. Audiobooks. Bandsplain. Articles of Interest. Cake Zine. Granta. Anything that Hunter Harris and Peyton Dix touch; together or separately. Las Cultch. Interior Motives. Feed Me. The New Yorker. Throwing Fits. Vogue. Also, I really enjoy Air Mail but almost in the way that I love coming across a print issue of the Robb Report. It’s all such rich people shit, not to be confused with the newsletter, Rich People Shit. Town & Country has been really good for a while too. I love how young and vibrant Interview is. I also just found out that Readers Digest has 12 million paid subscribers and still produces the small-format print edition which is thrilling. Their last cover was all about breakfasts across America which feels like a print version of a Buzzfeed gallery from 15 years ago in a way that I am deeply into. I also recently wrote an essay for High Snobiety and was delivered a print issue that was an absolute bruiser. The paperstock was gorgeous and the curatorial vision has gotten so specific in a way that I admire. Which is not to say that it’s haphazardly niche-core, just that it feels like the vision of particular people. Zero TikTok but so much interest in it. More IG scrolling than is advisable. I adore the chat section of The Mole Hill newsletter. It’s the coziest place on earth which is such a testament to Viv Chen’s vision. Her readers just do the most wholesome show & tell of grails they’ve acquired or ask and answer questions about what shoes to wear to a wedding. It’s both sincere and exacting.

What’s the last great book you read?

I just listened to 2017’s Eleanor Olyphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman and loved it. This whole time I thought it was by Fredrik Backman, the guy who writes all those ‘A Man Called Ove’ or ‘Britt-Marie Was Here’-type novels. I think because of the title and timing and the cover, I’d filed it in the wrong section of my head. I don’t really go for heartwarming Scandi, Triumph of the Human Spirit stuff, they’re just a bit relentlessly Christmassy in a way that I find oppressive but I loved this book. Eleanor Olyphant is totally different. It’s Glaswegian and not at all male. It’s all PTSD and mother-hunger and neurodivergence which is very much up my alley.

What are you reading now?

The Bloater by Rosemary Tonks. The language is electric.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

I subscribe to the New Yorker but only my partner reads them in hardcopy. I read the articles online and then become silently resentful when he gets them all wrinkly from the bath even knowing I won’t read it in analog. With other magazines, I always read the editor’s letter first and then hop around by byline.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

I wouldn’t know. But Alex Chee told me to read Gary Indiana so I’m doing that. Also, ever since Michael A. Gonzales wrote about screenwriter and novelist Eleanor Perry, who wrote 1968’s The Swimmer, based on the short story by the same name that John Cheever wrote for The New Yorker, I’ve been trying to track down a copy of her novel, Blue Pages, that isn’t riotously expensive. Maybe if everyone wanted to read that it would get reprinted.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

I think Libby is super-famous but it is genuinely my favorite app. So many magazines, library books, audiobooks for free. The only thing that’s a bit tedious is wading through the “available now” view since you have to scroll past the same massive genre franchises and the airport thrillers or lady-murder books or those cozy stories about anthropomorphic animals that teach us about humanity or romances that involve WWII.

Plane or train?

My father-in-law travels by train whenever he can. He enjoys traveling at the speed of time and never getting jet lag upon arrival. I think this is marvelous but my ADHD would go nuts from the waiting and my Autism/hypermobility would go ballistic from the sitting. Which is to say, plane. By a lot. Despite airports. I also loathe a road trip. I’m not built for any of it.

What is one place everyone should visit?

The Keith Haring bathroom in the LGBTQ center in New York. It’s like mini church. Best place for a cry. I imagine it’s what Quaker church is like but everything I know about Quaker church is from Fleabag season 2. As an aside, I once saw Hot Priest Andrew Scott on that same block. Personal best as famous people sightings go. (His arms!).

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

Earlier this week I was grappling with a wild bout of vertigo. I couldn’t tell if it was book tour related or fatigue or a weird pillow situation but it was an insane experience. Full on flop sweats, violent dizziness, throwing up, the whole do. I’ve had vertigo before so I had my partner look up the Epley maneuver which is a series of moves that uses gravity to shepherd the crystals in your ear back to where they need to be in order to stop telling your brain that you’re spinning out of control.

Then I started thinking about who this Epley person was, this Epley of maneuver fame, and he’d challenged the prevailing wisdom within the whole ENT community in the 80s that the little calcium carbonate crystals weren’t anchored in place and rather moved around, which meant you could move them back. I can’t imagine how life changing this was for chronic vertigo sufferers. It’s astonishing how effective it is given how simple the steps are and it really goes to show what a difference a person can make by flouting convention and how brave people have to be at certain points in their life. I’m also so grateful for YouTube in general. Of course then I looked up what makes these crystals go for a walkabout in the first place and sometimes it’s just age. It’s always age! I’m so glad I’m not one of those live-forever, bio-hacking tech people. It’s like throwing spears into the ocean to fight Neptune. What a choice!

It’s WITI, on the weekend.

Why are these interesting?

5,000 Restaurant Menus, Years 1880-1920 (Pudding)

Once you start looking, it’s even better than it sounds.

“Carspreading” To Wipe Out Up To 14% Of On-Street Parking In European Cities (Clean Technica)

Cars are getting bigger. Streets are not!

Goalkeepers beware: Trionda World Cup ball hits ‘crisis’ point at certain speed (Guardian)

Some, like Luca Zidane, have been bamboozled, and an academic paper bears out Joe Hart’s opinion about its movement.

An Eclipse Is About to Lift “Emptied Spain” Out of the Shadows (NYT)

And authorities are racing to catch up to the full logistical implications of the event.

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