Why Football Matters

11:47Naomi Fry:Nomi. I mean, I feel like the most salient text or texts that inform my understanding of football or kind of like my imagining of it, I guess, would be the gossip pages. by which I mean the relationships carried on between a variety of quarterbacks over the years and the beautiful ladies they court. The wags, as it were.

12:20Alexandra Schwartz:Was Jay Cutler the first football player to date a reality star?

12:25Naomi Fry:Didn't he date the girl from the hills? No, if you consider Jessica Simpson a reality star. Because remember when she dated Tony Romo?

12:34Alexandra Schwartz:There you go. From the Dallas Cowboys. I do. I do. I forgot about that.

12:38Naomi Fry:Yes.

12:38Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah.

12:39Naomi Fry:So, yeah. So, Jay Cutler and Kristen Cavallari from Laguna Beach. Laguna Beach. Jessica Simpson and Tony Romo. Tom Brady and Giselle. And now, you know, allegedly Alex Earle, the TikTok, the young TikTok star. Mm-hmm. Canoodling in St. Bart just last week. Like, and of course, and of course, Taylor and Travis Kelsey, which is like the kind of like final bosses of kind of like football quarterback dating, like head cheerleader archetype.

13:17Vinson Cunningham:With that preamble, it has become clear how much we need Louisa to get in here right now and clarify some stuff for us. The New Yorker sports critic Louisa Thomas. Hello. Hi. Hi. Hi.

13:29Alexandra Schwartz:Thanks for coming.

13:30Vinson Cunningham:Here to help. You are not with us, sadly, in the studio, except a beautiful portion of your face. Where are you reaching us from? I am in Boston, Massachusetts. Brighton, actually. Patriots land. Yeah, I was going to say Patriots territory. Okay, Louisa, we want to know, just start us off, what is your background with football? I mean, I grew up reading the Washington Post sports section, like, fairly religiously. So a lot of my, just like game stories, like sports columns.

14:00Alexandra Schwartz:Was Sally Jenkins big for you? I think she's one of my favorites. She was big for me. Although Tony Kornheiser, Tom Boswell are for The Post. Michael Will Bond was a Post columnist. Another little-known writer named David Remnick was a Washington Post sports writer. I did not know this. Yes. I grew up casually watching the national holidays, right? So the Super Bowl, maybe the Army-Navy game, the opening games of the season. When did your fandom arise above that sort of casual Easter-Christmas way of being involved? And how did you get super fan-ish? Well, I started writing for a website called Grantland where there were lots of super fans.

14:52And yeah, so I started watching a lot of football and then I happened to marry a football player. So that was another way in and that.

15:00Alexandra Schwartz:Now you're married to the game. And now I'm married and I'm married.

15:02Naomi Fry:Say more. Yeah. When you say married to a football player, do you mean someone who played football in high school or do you mean. She's talking about the pros, baby. Wow. I did not know this, Louise. So, yeah, so it was funny. My husband is a retired football player, but we got together after his rookie season. So I had actually a couple years of being a wag. That is actually crazy and amazing. It was much less glamorous for me than it is for many people. Although, you know, Christian Juszczyk, who's like now the designer of the day, was at the time dating another Ravens player. So I, like, would do, like, spin classes and Pilates classes with her.

15:46And she's now this, like, you know, she's dressing Taylor Swift. So our lives have followed similar trajectories.

15:52Naomi Fry:Right. So you're coming to us from the inside.

15:56Vinson Cunningham:Kind of. Okay, so I want to know, from Vincent and Louisa, what do you guys find about the game itself that makes it to you a beautiful game to watch? Because I'll just say as an asterisk to that question, I think it's easy to understand for someone who hasn't grown up with these sports why something like basketball can be interesting to people to watch. It's a very kinetic game. It's moving quickly. There are fewer players on the court. You can kind of see them as individuals a bit more. And some kind of spectacular feat is going on very, very regularly. And with football, the thing that always used to strike me when I was younger was how much nothing happened.

16:31Vinson Cunningham:So what's the thing about football that gets you? LESLIE KENDRICK I think one of the things that works for football is that precisely what you're saying, like, it actually rewards interest at any level. You can actually watch it as a moving, abstract painting. There is a certain kind of aesthetic quality to the choreography and the sort of balletic violence in any given play. While it continues, like the more you learn about it, the more it rewards you in different ways because there's so much strategy involved. There's so many complexities. Like it's inexhaustible in that way. So you don't actually have to be an expert.

17:12You don't have to have played football. You don't have to know the lingo, you know, to feel like there's something in it for you. I think that maybe something you're experiencing, too, is that like once you get a little bit interested, it's because it's so inexhaustible. The temptation is to get more and more into it.

17:31Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. I love the outdoor nature of it, although I do love the squeaks and sort of echoes of the cavernous basketball arena. There's something interesting about a game that's played outside and has something to do with landscape and terrain. And you always have to talk about the weather and when it's being played. But Vincent, so many games are playing in domes now. That's true, I know. And it ruins it. I don't like to be reminded about this. The lore, and maybe I'm still talking on the level of archetypes, right? It just feels that way. I still remember being, for a while, all my friends played football.

18:11Alexandra Schwartz:I did for a while, I stopped. I was, though, until my senior year, the manager of the football team, just so I could hang out with my friends. Wow, huge reveal. Crack jokes and carry the first down markers on the pylons and stuff like that. and the sort of inextricable connection with the fall and like the chill in the air always just, it still makes me nostalgic when I watch a football game. I have these little sense memories. Also, even though it is a very highly programmed game, there are like moments of really rare improvisational beauty. Like my only reason to watch sports is because it reminds me of other things like, you know, dance and geometry and like all these other sort of like higher abstractions.

18:56Alexandra Schwartz:And there's just a beauty to somebody like running to the sideline and catching the ball and then trying to tap their toes inside. I mean, there's just like a lot of opportunities for weird beauty from bodies that are always surprising you. There are all these paradoxes of like strength and grace. And then people doing things that they never do in real life, which is just like hit somebody really, really hard. So all of those things contribute.

19:20Vinson Cunningham:The beauty and the bloodshed, would you say?

19:22Alexandra Schwartz:That's, yes.

19:22Vinson Cunningham:The beauty in the blood. The sorrow and the pity.

19:24Alexandra Schwartz:That's right.

19:28Vinson Cunningham:In a minute, we're talking about a new book that argues that football is the best way to understand America. Do not go away.

20:03We'll be right back.

20:06Naomi Fry:races could tip the balance of power in Washington this fall.

20:09Vinson Cunningham:We're also going to go deep on the influence of dark money and tech billionaires. So join us in the run-up to the midterms in 2026. Subscribe to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

20:25Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, Global Fashion News and Features Director at Vogue and co-host of the Run Through podcast. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all-access pass into the world of Vogue. On Tuesdays, join me as I interview influential designers like Calvin Klein, Rachel Scott, and Simone Belotti. On Thursdays, join Chloe Mao, head of editorial content at Vogue US, and Choma Nadi, British Vogue's head of editorial content, as they explore fashion through the lens of culture with guests like Doja Cat and Margot Robbie. Listen and watch the run-through with Vogue wherever you get your podcasts and Vogue's YouTube channel.

21:04I'm Jazzy Sefciak. And I'm Shilpa Oskokovic. And we're senior test kitchen editors at Bon Appetit and the hosts of the Bon Appetit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident, curious bakers. We love to bake. Some might even call the two of us obsessive. And we love to talk about all the hows and whys and what didn't work that come with it. Every month, we publish a recipe on bonappetit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll go bake, send us any questions you have. And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. And this month, we're making tiny tomato galettes.

21:39They are these adorable, maybe four-bite little galettes. So cute. Head to ba.com and come and bake along with us. Send us your questions, pictures, and any thoughts to bakeclub at bonappetit.com or find us on the sub stack. Join us the first Tuesday of every month as we debrief about our latest bake. Find BA Bake Club wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking.

22:11Vinson Cunningham:We've been talking about football. Let's now talk about football. That one was in quotes. No one got it. Okay, it's because this is the title of a new book by the journalist Chuck Klosterman. It's not my fault that this is an audio medium. This book is coming out in just a few days. Chuck Klosterman is, I think he was also at Grantland for a time, and he's just, to my mind, been in the culture for a very long time as a cultural commentator who takes pieces of popular culture and analyzes them in a kind of fascinating and digestible way. So I have here my copy of Football. It's a handsome physical object, I just want to note.

22:52Vinson Cunningham:A handsome volume.

22:53Alexandra Schwartz:It's red with gold lettering. I think it's meant to evoke the texture of the ball, but also sort of an old school aesthetic. It's really cool. Yeah. It's a very well-designed book.

23:04Vinson Cunningham:Well, yeah, and I think particularly because the design of this book, it's more than just a random thing we're noting. I mean, the design of this book says to me, like, you're holding a book that is supposed to look a little bit like a classic in a winking way. A tome. And the argument that Chuck Klosterman is making at the start of this book, the kind of raison d 'etre for the book, is he's saying football is the same way. Football is a classic. It's fundamental to America. It's like by far and away the most watched not only sport but thing in American culture. And he says it's going to die out.

23:38Vinson Cunningham:This thing is going to be on the wane. He's addressing his book at the start to future people, mainly Americans, who have wanted to understand what the whole football craze was about and who don't know because football in 20, 30, 40 years, he thinks, is not going to have the cultural prominence that it has today. Um, so I just want to read a little selection and then let's go in and get to it. But just so listeners have some sense of where Chuck Klosterman is coming from here and what and what he's saying. So he says, football is the clearest projection of how people of the United States think and of what those people value, even and perhaps especially when football is something they actively dislike.

24:23Vinson Cunningham:Louisa, I just want to throw this to you right away. Do you agree with that? Yeah, I think, I mean, to some extent, the numbers speak for themselves. They recently released the list of 100 most watched TV events of the past year. And it's the list is, yeah, Sports Business Journal's top 100 telecasts of 2025. Football games make up 92 of the top 100, which is extraordinary. It's extraordinary. To say the least.

24:53Alexandra Schwartz:Well, it's part of the logic of the book, and we'll get further into this, is that it is precisely because football is such a optimal televisual entertainment that it is so popular. So, like, its televisual popularity is, it's not downstream of its popularity. It's almost TV is at the top of the stream. And football, just by its nature, by the sort of mix of incredibly kinetic action and then a lot of nothing, as we've spoken about, the field, the sort of military design of moving forward, that it's just such a great television entertainment that it just, it takes over. I have a friend, one of my best friends, shout out to you, Dmitry Tarikov, who I recently realized every Sunday, his one time that he's not with his family, he goes to a bar in downtown Manhattan and it's just him and his buddies and their laptops and their...

25:49Naomi Fry:Their laptops.

25:50Alexandra Schwartz:Because they're doing fantasy. They're like, they're working, they're looking at fantasy and it's like seven dudes in a corner of a bar, sometimes laptops, sometimes phone. just like watching a bevy of games, watching like seven games at a time, but in a sort of competitive manner with each other. But it's also a spoke for the social nature of like, and it's like, first of all, I was like, yes, can I be invited? And also just, yeah, it's it's it means more than simply the game. Having it on is a way. It's like looking at a fireplace in some way.

26:20Vinson Cunningham:Yeah. Football clearly has this. Right. So you're saying, Vincent, basically, that football has all these aspects of engagement.

26:24Alexandra Schwartz:It's a great thing to look at, and it's also sometimes a great thing not to look at while it's on.

26:30Naomi Fry:Right, which is, again, one of Klosterman's claims, right? That one of the things that makes football so pleasurable is that I believe the stat that he names in the book is that out of a three-hour-long game, 11

26:48Alexandra Schwartz:minutes are actually action.

26:51Naomi Fry:And the rest of the time is kind of like long, fairly empty moments where you could sort of like do other stuff, converse, contemplate, you know, just have it on. And that, in fact, is not to the detriment of the attraction of the game, but the reason for its attraction.

27:12Alexandra Schwartz:It's constitutive of, yes, its appeal. I was just going to add to like, not only are you kind of like resting from the action, but there is a didactic element because football is so, so complex in terms of the plays, the variations on the plays, the situations that learning what happened, basically, the football announcer becomes very important to the telecast aspect. Because now you're hearing what happened, why you're watching replays, you're getting minute details of the camera view that you couldn't see from the wider view when the thing was actually happening in real time. So there's this rhythm of anticipation, action, and almost not only didacticism, like here's what happened, but also discourse.

27:56Alexandra Schwartz:Then you can talk about what happened and complain about this block and complain about this receiver. So there's this, what we like about art, the thing itself, and then the discourse that surrounds it, a kind of criticism, is inherent to the rhythm of watching football. It's like, here's the thing, here's the talk about the thing, here's the argue about the thing, oh, here's the thing again. I don't know, there's something really nourishing about that for me.

28:18Vinson Cunningham:Yeah. And Vincent, I wanted to just mention a line I really enjoyed from this book, which I found quite enjoyable. I want to know what you guys thought. But having to do with the complexity of the game where for the first time I was like, oh, okay. Hey, Klosterman is talking about how people like to compare basketball to jazz because it's so much about improvisation and the beauty and the fluidity of the movement. And he's saying it's not that basketball is jazz and football is anti-jazz or that basketball is jazz and football is prog rock. It's more that basketball aspires to jazz and football aspires to petroleum engineering.

28:54Vinson Cunningham:And I'm like, oh, my God. And yet people are riveted by petroleum engineering. It means it's a complex operation. It's a very complex operation, right? And a managerial, he's saying like a managerial figure, it so much comes down to the coaching and to the plays and the, Louisa, is that right? Am I getting this right? Well, I mean, it's a, yeah, it's a sport in which everybody has a very, very well-defined role and they have to do their job. Like they cannot freelance, right? In the same way that a basketball player can improvise. I mean, there are certain like a great quarterback. Patrick Mahomes is famous for some of these plays.

29:30Like as the play breaks down, he has the skill and the wherewithal or has at certain points in his career, but large stretches of his career to do something completely extraordinary. and that seems creative in like the best possible way. But part of that is because it's more like very formal poetry. It's like a sastina, like not free verse, right? There are these very kind of like strict rules that everybody has to follow. But actually sometimes that makes those, like that flowering of creativity seem all the more incredible. But yeah, it's very like bureaucratic, right? Like the coaching staffs are enormous because everything has to be so rehearsed.

30:10Alexandra Schwartz:And there's somebody up in a booth above watching to send a play to the person on the sideline. There's lots of sort of headsets and walkie-talkie technology happening in a way that reminds, I mean, it reminds you of, and we'll get more into this because this is another one of Klosterman's contentions, but it reminds you of warfare in certain ways, that this sort of highly technocratic activity that has something to do with the people on the field, but at least on a sort of theoretical level exists outside of them.

30:41Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, the warfare thing is a pretty standard football comparison. I mean, do you guys buy that? I don't see how you couldn't, frankly. Like, these are two teams going into battle against each other. They're trying to gain territory. Yeah.

30:53Alexandra Schwartz:It's about position and situation. I know.

30:56Naomi Fry:I was surprised, I guess. I mean, to me, when I heard, like, the war comparison, And I took it to mean, I guess, always more of the kind of like brute combat of the thing, right, of sort of bodies like trying to annihilate each other. But as I was reading this book and I realized the element of kind of planning and strategy and a highly sophisticated craft that goes into the thing, I was like, oh, wait. They have to be brilliant. Oh, yeah. Are they actually like absolute geniuses? Yes. Yes. But I mean, but football was like born out of a culture. I mean, Walter Camp, who is, you know, credited with codifying the game and is responsible for some of its most like salient features.

31:41It was coming out of a, you know, an era in the early 20th century where there was this kind of muscular Christianity where there was this fear of like the American male becoming like softened and weakened. And that what was like that war had this really salutary effect. And there was this question of, like, could we replicate some of the circumstances of war so that we can toughen up our young men without actually putting them into the kind of peril that, like, World War I, you know, devastating the population. And I mean, and that that actually like was a real concern. And so it is actually in some ways like a very sort of self-conscious like war game.

32:21And a lot of the language is, you know, you talk about the blitz is a, you know, a football term, you know, the trenches are talking about that. That's like a term that is used in football as well. And there's an aerial attack and it can be very self-conscious. Okay.

32:37Vinson Cunningham:Okay. Klausterman says that football is going to die out. He's not the only one who said this, and the basic thrust of his argument is that because of the prevalence of injury, people are going to stop playing it at the lower levels. I actually thought there was a bit of a not blaming exactly, but like pointing fingers at the mothers. It was kind of like the moms are going to stop letting the boys play. And when the mom stopped letting the boys play, no high schoolers play. And when no high schoolers play, no college students play. The pros, it's like this kind of chain reaction argument. That's one thrust of his argument.

33:09Vinson Cunningham:Do we buy it? Nomi Fry.

33:12Naomi Fry:I mean, I was impressed by the kind of like audacity of Klosterman's argument. Like it's the sort of thing that I can't imagine myself doing as a writer. Like I don't know why there was something about this book and kind of like the kind of grandness of its argumentation. There was something very masculine about it, like the type of argument that it was making and the kind of stakes that it was, you know, insisting on. And I was like, wow, I could never write this kind of book. like making the kind of like mothers are going to start saying, no, my kid can't play this in the next 25 to 35 years.

33:59Naomi Fry:You know, I was like, will they? I mean, maybe. I mean, probably. But just do you know what I'm saying?

34:06Vinson Cunningham:What if you suddenly wrote this kind of book?

34:07Naomi Fry:What if I suddenly wrote this kind of book?

34:09Vinson Cunningham:What if you just came out and made a bunch of bold predictions that no one can disprove in the present? Exactly. And sold a bunch of books off of them?

34:16Naomi Fry:I know. I was just like, I was impressed and a little pissed off. And I was like, this sounds right, but I actually have no way of no, I mean, just the effect of it was so like audacious, like enough to kind of piss me off a little bit. You got riled. I got a little bit riled.

34:39Alexandra Schwartz:It also belongs. Do you know what I mean? It also belongs to a genre, you know, Close to Men's boss at Grantland and other friends, they're always on Bill Simmons' podcast, is Bill Simmons. And he wrote a book, it was just called The Book of Basketball. And it's similarly like sort of— Imagine. It's a different kind of book. It's less of a sort of cultural survey like this. It's more of a sort of history plus a set of propositions and arguments. But I think that is a really just sportsy way of writing.

35:05Naomi Fry:Yeah.

35:06Alexandra Schwartz:Close to Men's not just a sports writer, so I don't want to totally lump him into it. But when you write about sports, there's a lot of predicting and saying, I think this guy's going to score 25 points. You know, you got you have to kind of say this kind of thing. And so I thought that was like part of the ethos. Louisa, are you convinced by the argument? I mean, I guess so, because I, you know, I struggle like, you know, as we said, my husband played football and like we have a son. Right. Who's three. And, you know, there was one day where he was, like, running back and forth between the couch and the wall and just crashing into the wall on the couch.

35:42And my husband's like, well, I'm sorry to say. Here we go. And part of me is like, no, let's stop this. And so maybe I'm a reflection of that, you know, the mothers. But he also makes another argument, which I think is, like, really worth pointing to. And it also, I think, speaks to something that the book misses. And I think it misses in a sort of masculine way. Which is that he also argues that it's going to become diminished because there are certain structural changes in the college football game, which has made football less regional. It's made it more national. It's made it more like the NFL.

36:13It's made it more of a television product that is accessible to a lot of people, but less gripping, less vitally interesting and important to particular communities. And one of the things that I think the book misses is this discussion about how football does not just have these like warlike aspects, but that football makes people feel things really deeply. And particularly it makes men feel things really deeply.

36:39Vinson Cunningham:I mean, I've noticed this just by, again, my very limited watching. The amount of men talking about their feelings in the few minutes. 100%. Of like football documentary I've watched. It's astounding. It's actually astounding to me. But this is one of the ways in which I felt like, God, you're like such a man. Like, why can't you talk about this? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent.

37:01Alexandra Schwartz:It's weird. He does like have these scenes of, you know, him as a child sobbing. Exactly. And his family members consoling him to the extent that his, you know, sister's boyfriend calls him the next day and asks if he's okay. And his dad comes up to console him after a particularly wrenching cowboy's loss. So he does tell these vignettes of him, in fact, experiencing this emotion, but yet he has to sort of put on this, like, drag of dispassion and sort of, yeah. There's a hole in the book, though, because of that. Because he actually says there's this list in the beginning of the book. He's like, this book is not, you know, I'm not writing this book for, like, X, Y, and Z reasons, right?

37:37One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And one of them is, like, I'm not going to write about community. I'm not going to write about fandom. I'm not going to write about love. Like, I'm not taking football to prom. This is not a love letter. And he's obviously writing against a certain kind of sports writing, which is like, this is why we love sports or like fathers and sons, you know, like that's what he's talking about. But because he like excludes this like rather large dimension of, you know, being a sports fan or following football, it means that he is like cutting himself off from like what I think is actually like a very compelling reason for football's popularity, which is that it's not only a simulation of war, but it's a simulation of community.

38:12You know, men cry watching football games and that's OK. You know, like they hug strangers and that's OK. Like they their days are ruined or they're elated or they're allowed these like expressions of deep emotions. And I actually think it's like in popular American culture, it's like the only space in which they are allowed to express totally normal human emotions. And they come out that's this conduit, like this necessary conduit for letting people, letting and especially men, like feel things really deeply that humans need.

38:50Vinson Cunningham:You know, Hootie and the Blowfish said, I'm such a baby because the dolphins make me cry. No, Hootie, you're human. You're a man, Hootie. You're a man. Louisa Thomas, you're human. You're fantastic. Thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you. In a minute, why football matters. Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

39:20I'm Jazzy Sefcek. And I'm Shilpa Oskokovic. And we're senior test kitchen editors at Bon Appetit and the hosts of the Bon Appetit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident, curious bakers. We love to bake. Some might even call the two of us obsessive. And we love to talk about all the hows and whys and what didn't works that come with it. Every month, we publish a recipe on bonappetit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll go bake, send us any questions you have. And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. And this month, we're making tiny tomato galettes.

39:56Vinson Cunningham:They are these adorable, maybe four-bite little galettes. So cute. Head to BA.com and come and bake along with us. Send us your questions, pictures, and any thoughts to BakeClub at BonAppetit.com or find us on the Substack. Join us the first Tuesday of every month as we debrief about our latest bake. Find BA Bake Club wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking!

40:23Hi, I'm Rebecca Ford. And I'm John Ross. And we're the hosts of Little Gold Men, Vanity Fair's podcast for film, TV, and awards lovers. And just because the Oscars are done, for now, doesn't mean we are. Join us every week for coverage of the biggest stories in Hollywood,

40:40Vinson Cunningham:interviews with today's brightest stars, and so much more. Listen to Little Gold Men every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

40:52Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, Global Fashion News and Features Director at Vogue and co-host of the Run-Through Podcast. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all-access pass into the world of Vogue. On Tuesdays, join me as I interview influential designers like Calvin Klein, Rachel Scott, and Simone Belotti. On Thursdays, join Chloe Mao, Head of Editorial Content at Vogue US, and Choma Nadi, British Vogue's Head of Editorial Content, as they explore fashion through the lens of culture with guests like Doja Cat and Margot Robbie. Listen and watch The Run-Through with Vogue wherever you get your podcasts and Vogue's YouTube channel.

41:36Naomi Fry:I feel like, you know, thinking about, like, why this game matters. I mean, this is such a huge question, and it can matter on obviously different levels. And to me, what I feel like I'm missing, and maybe not just with football, but with sports more generally, but it seems now from reading the book and so on, talking about it, that football seems to be the kind of like maybe height of this experience, is the sense of kind of like a belonging and a kind of lingua franca to share with other people. Which I feel like, obviously, I have it in other realms, you know, in my life. And not all of them are, like, necessarily kind of, like, highfalutin or, you know, intellectual.

42:21Naomi Fry:Like, I have, like, a group chat where we all, like, almost exclusively talk about, like, reality television. You know, shout out the clubhouse. Named after Andy Cohen's clubhouse. and I feel like I get a sense of belonging from that and a sense of understanding and a kind of like shared rhythm of living and I feel like that is something that football appears to provide in spades. Just even that kind of like week after week, the season, you know, it's like, even the Super Bowl thing. You know, I remember countless years where like I had forgotten that it was the Super Bowl and like I had made plans with another non-football watching friend to like go out to a restaurant or to a bar and it seemed like weirdly empty and I would be like wait what's going on?

43:20Naomi Fry:Like oh it was really easy to get a reservation or like whatever it is and then I would be like oh wait a second right I don't belong to this like very integral form of experience that so many other people are enjoying.

43:35Alexandra Schwartz:Did your, you described very well your sort of engagement and sort of growing, or at least momentary spike of interest in football. Did any of that give you, Alex, an answer to this question, this big question, why does football matter?

43:53Vinson Cunningham:Well, linked to the kind of framing of the Chuck Klosterman book, it did make me think of a few things. The framing of Chuck Klosterman's book being football is a mirror for America in these various ways. And one thing that I think about when I think about football, and it's an obvious thing, but I think about CTE a lot when I think about football. Because I'm not a watcher of the sport. Because there aren't, like, I don't have another real connection to the game and to the sport. And now maybe I will have a bit more of a connection to, like, watching the actual sport. But for so long, it has been to me, football is a very, very dangerous activity that we now know hurts a lot of people who do it.

44:38Vinson Cunningham:And I'm bringing this up not so I can be the moralizing East Coaster, though I'm sure I'll be accused of being that, who like wags my fingers and says like, I can't believe we're letting this happen. But because my question is one that Klosterman himself asks, which is, okay, why, how do we reconcile these things? Like, how do we do it? Do we do it? Why? And, you know, I was reading an article in New York Magazine by my friend Reeves Weidemann. Shout out to former fact checker Reeves. And I just wanted to read this to you guys because. Please. It really crystallized to me something that's going on in America that's also going on, I think, I gather in football.

45:14Vinson Cunningham:He's talking about the player Tua Tagovailoa. Did I do okay? Yeah, I think that's good. Okay. Who's had a bunch of concussions and may have to stop playing the game, but as of now, I think, is still playing the game. and he says, the NFL's chief medical officer, Alan Sills, said that the league would not get involved in Togovaloa's decision to keep playing the game or whether to retire, citing, quote, patient autonomy and medical decision-making really matters, end quote. And then Reeves says, football had entered its era of personal responsibility and I started to see its forgotten concussion crisis in the same light as other emergencies like COVID or climate change.

45:51Vinson Cunningham:There was, of course, a swath of people who denied the issue was a problem at all, but even among those who acknowledged its seriousness, There is often little appetite for more collective action. Wear a mask if you want. Bring a bag to the grocery store. Your brain, your choice. And so I do think that's how we as society have come through collective crises, not at all by bonding together. So football to me is this really interesting example of like absolute huge cultural and emotional cohesion that also is predicated on this very weird individualism argument that is false. Like you guys make your own choice.

46:25Vinson Cunningham:No, it's a choice for the collective. It's a choice to continue to, like, participate in such a collective culture and to entertain the collective. So that's a contradiction that is a very American contradiction to me. And that makes football very poignant, I think. And I think I still would have a very hard time watching the game, quite honestly, because of injury.

46:46Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. Yeah. One thing that football is kind of generous about is that I agree with everything you just said. And it also is a magnifying glass and a clarifier for all of these. You know, the interaction between capital, of which there is vast amounts in football. The money is visible on the field, in the stadiums, in the every part of it screams money. There are military flyovers. The money is very visible in a way that it often is not in terms of the larger American system of capitalism. And so, too, are the downstream effects of what it takes to be a player. Because, you know, everybody who watches football has watched Tua Tagovailoa, who is the quarterback for the Dolphins.

47:41Alexandra Schwartz:He's not a very big gentleman. and be hit, fall to the ground, and then literally his hands squirm involuntarily and make all kinds of, you know, this is a common effect of a really bad concussion. I watched that and thought that the fellow might die. I saw that happen. And it's a really interesting test case because most people who watch football saw that. And then we see this kid who himself deeply desires to come back. And I've seen him recently have press conferences where my takeaway was, boy, that fellow's personality sure does seem to have changed. Oh, God. You know, and he's still a young man, and he still wants to play football.

48:20Alexandra Schwartz:Oh, God. So that is salutary only to the point that everything is very clear. Sometimes capital can be invisible to us. Sometimes the price of labor can be very invisible to us. In football, it's all there. And so what happens, how people change or don't change, how we ignore or don't ignore, how we fix structures or don't fix them becomes, I think, if not a way forward, at least an honest illustration that we don't get in other parts of life.

48:55Vinson Cunningham:That's the conclusion I reached. And like Reeves' comparison to climate change just hit me. Like, yeah, we don't want to change the behaviors that are leading to the problem. We understand the problem will be catastrophic, but we're not very good at dealing with long-term outcomes in the present. And what I have understood now more than I did before is the peel of the game itself. So I get it more about why it's a conflict.

49:20Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, I mean, I feel conflicted about it, but, you know, I do watch it, and that teaches me something about myself, you know? I find it, quote-unquote, fun. And, you know, there is a sort of, you know, at least that one sort of streak of American libertarianism does live in me. It's like, this guy wants to do that, and he makes a lot of money, and he feeds his family by doing it. And, you know, another part of the Tua story that is, I think, another thing that football can do is show different sort of demographic strains, swelling in American culture is the story of the Samoan football player is a huge one.

49:58Alexandra Schwartz:These guys who come from places where other things might not be available to them have sort of made themselves visible in the American scene through football. I am sure that there will be some Polynesian kid two generations from now who is not even a football player, who is, I don't know, a great scholar or businessman who will say, I gained pride to think that I could be X because I watched, you know, back in the day when I was a kid, it was Troy Palomalo, who was the first great Polynesian player. He had this beautiful mane of hair that would come streaming, these curls. He played for the Steelers, streaming out of his helmet.

50:35Alexandra Schwartz:I'll never forget it. He was like the coolest dude. And it's like, wait, where is he from? Football can introduce types to us and all this. So part of me is like, look at, you know, what an extraordinary kid.

50:46Naomi Fry:But also beyond that, just your own enjoyment, right? Yeah, yeah. Your own entertainment as a viewer. You know, not just you, but viewers. So many things we do in life are like that, you know? Are we going to, you know, are we going to take a plane? Like, it's not good for the environment. Like, are we still going to take a plane? Or use a cell phone. Or use a cell phone or anything. Yeah. It's like we can't give a count or be absolutely ethical every moment of our lives. And as you said, Vincent, so correctly, football just makes that clear. Makes it clear. Makes that legible. Yeah.

51:28Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. And yet on the other side of that is this argument, you know, in defense of football is one of the modes that we are operating in. It is this idea of something that brings us together, that we need these opportunities. I mean, if our idea here is like, why is it so hard to disinvest from something that is harmful at least in one way, maybe in many others? I think that is really powerful as a justification and maybe hard to steer ourselves away from.

52:00Vinson Cunningham:Who are you going to be rooting for going forward?

52:02Alexandra Schwartz:Well, you know, the Jets are thankfully not in the playoffs. I don't have to think about them anymore. I am lightly rooting for the third team that resides in New York, the Buffalo Bills. I would like for their quarterback, Josh Allen, to kind of get a Super Bowl under his belt, establish himself as one of the greats of the era, which I do think that he is. And, you know, even though they're in the same division as the Jets, I sometimes dislike them. Western New York, shout out to you. I love Buffalo. I love the wintry winds of the Erie Canal.

52:32Vinson Cunningham:Go Bills. All of it. Go Bills. We enjoy your wings. Thank you, Buffalo. Thank you.

52:45Vinson Cunningham:This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Alexis Quadrato composed our theme music. And we had engineering help today from Pran Bandy with mixing by Mike Kutchman. Next week is our 100th episode. Woo! Can you believe it? I cannot. Me neither. We wanted to celebrate it by hearing from all of you. So we're doing a special edition of I Need a Critic. Come celebrate with us. We'll see you then.

53:36I'm Jazzy Sefciak. And I'm Shilpa Oskokovic. And we're senior test kitchen editors at Bon Appetit and the hosts of the Bon Appetit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident, curious bakers. We love to bake. Some might even call the two of us obsessive. And we love to talk about all the hows and whys and what didn't work that come with it. Every month, we publish a recipe on bonappetit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll go bake, send us any questions you have. And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe.

54:09Vinson Cunningham:And this month, we're making tiny tomato galettes. They are these adorable, maybe four-bite little galettes. So cute. Head to BA.com and come and bake along with us. Send us your questions, pictures, and any thoughts to BakeClub at BonAppetit.com or find us on Substack. Join us the first Tuesday of every month as we debrief about our latest bake. Find BA Bake Club wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking!

54:39Hi, I'm Rebecca Ford. And I'm John Ross. And we're the hosts of Little Gold Men, Vanity Fair's podcast for film, TV, and awards lovers. And just because the Oscars are done, for now, doesn't mean we are. Join us every week for coverage of the biggest stories in Hollywood,

54:56Vinson Cunningham:interviews with today's brightest stars, and so much more. Listen to Little Gold Men every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

55:07Who is going to win control of Congress this November?

55:10Naomi Fry:And what is it going to mean for the final two years of Donald Trump's disruptive presidency? I'm Susan Glasser. I'm Jane Mayer. And I'm Evan Osnos. We host the Washington Roundtable on the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast. We're following what key races could tip the balance of power in Washington this fall.

55:29Vinson Cunningham:We're also going to go deep on the influence of dark money and tech billionaires. So join us in the run-up to the midterms in 2026. Subscribe to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.