World Cup 2022: El GOAT

In the end, it could only be this. Messi, the past decade's candidate for greatest of all time, against Mbappé, the coming decade's candidate for greatest of all time. Messi scored once and helped create a second, and we thought that was that. Then, with ten minutes left in the game, Mbappé conjured a couple of pieces of magic to take the game to extra time. Messi scored again to win it, once and for all, but at the death Argentine nerves frayed and gave France a penalty, which Mbappé scored to take the game to penalties. And even the shootout was a thriller, as pretty much all of them have been this World Cup: France first (Mbappé, of course), then Argentina (Messi, of course), then two misses from France and three scores from Argentina...

And the cup's been won by a non-European team for the first time in 20 years. At the same time, we got a classic match, probably the first good final in... certainly as long as I've been watching football. And the first final-game hat-trick since 1966, scored by (who else?) Mbappé.

I had slightly mixed feelings going into this match, since both teams' talismanic players are employed by Paris St-Germain, which is owned by Qatar, which is, of course, the host. Whichever team won, it'd be a propaganda/soft power win for Qatar. At the same time, you could forget the background for a moment, the unhinged speeches and hollow justifications from various functionaries of the game, and just enjoy two teams playing really good football.

Did Qatar put on a good show? Yes, I think they did. The venues weren't exactly full, but it seems like things ran as they should. People had a good time, the venues were easy to reach and there weren't any instances of hooligan violence that I read or heard about (you assume the Guardian and whatever other outlets would cover it). This also might be unpopular to say, but I actually appreciate how Qatar stood up to FIFA and the sponsors and said that, no, you wouldn't be able to buy beer in the stadia after all.

Does any of that invalidate the abuses of workers that enabled this World Cup to take place? No, those worker deaths and the obfuscation and double-speak around them will remain a black mark on FIFA and the game in general. Other countries are culpable too, not least Russia, which bookended its hosting in 2018 with two separate attacks on Ukraine and has also passed law after law criminalizing the "promotion" of LGBTQ lifestyles. People have highlighted homophobic chanting in Mexico, and the overturning of Roe v Wade in the US, but none of those things invalidates the criticism of Qatar doing it, at least as long as reporters and NGOs note when other countries are doing bad stuff.

Some numbers

Turning briefly to the numbers, I've put the final touches on my spreadsheet looking at how the Western European teams have done against the rest of the world. In 2006, Western European teams took 2.59 points from their matches against the rest of the world, which remains the highest average this century (this counts penalty shootouts as draws, but games won in extra time are counted as regular wins or losses). For comparison, in 2022 they took 1.66 points per game against the rest of the world, which is actually the second lowest total, after 2002, which was also the last time a South American team won the tournament and the last time an African team went on a run past the round of 16.

That's for all Western European teams, so the likes of Wales or Belgium or Denmark, who didn't make it out of the group stage, are dragging the average down. If we look at the performance of the 5 big Western European countries - England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain - then they took 1.85 points per game against the rest of the world, which is actually the third-highest in this same period since 2002. The only tournaments where they did better were 2006, when Italy met France in the final, and 2018, when France won and England got to the semifinal.

What's impressive is that these numbers have been improving since the nadir of 2010, when they got 1.63 points per game, especially when you consider that in that period at least one of the big five has always failed to progress from the group stage. It's even more impressive when you consider that Italy hasn't even qualified for the last two World Cups. So really it's only four big teams posting these numbers, and getting better against the rest of the world since 2010. 

That seems to be a confirmation of Soccernomics's argument that the Western European football networks are helping the region dominate. They are home to the biggest, richest leagues, as well as France, which doesn't have an amazing league but which does create world class players who ply their trade in Spain and England, and less importantly in Italy and Germany (I say less importantly because the two biggest leagues are clearly the Premier League and the Primera Liga).

Colonialism vs multiculturalism

This point about the strength of the networks raises another point, about the makeup of these teams. I've seen a few people on social media talk about how these big Western European teams do well only because of colonialism. It's a persuasive argument, especially when you consider that certain French players were born in overseas departments, or have their ancestry from there. Those overseas departments may be officially part of France, but that's just colonialism too, since it means France hasn't let go of them in four or five centuries.

The other way of looking at it, though, is that these players of African or Caribbean or Middle Eastern descent demonstrate the strength of multiculturalism. French right-wing nationalists complain when the French team wins (seriously) because there are so many "black-blanc-beurre" players; at the same time, England's black players get horrific abuse on social media when they miss penalties, and also when their white colleagues miss penalties (Bukayo Saka got abused for England losing to France, even though Harry Kane missed the penalty that would have kept them in the game). But it's actually a good thing that these national teams are selecting the strongest players they can, regardless of skin color or how "French" or "English" or "German" their names are.

I think we can agree that the worst of both worlds would be for, say, France to maintain these overseas colonies, but to deny their residents, who pay French taxes, speak French and use the same currency as Metropolitan France, the opportunity to represent their country in football?

It gets more complicated when you consider the multiracial makeup of the other big Western European countries. Bukayo Saka is of Nigerian descent, but Nigeria isn't part of the United Kingdom, just of the Commonwealth. In contrast to other independent members of the Commonwealth, its currency doesn't have the English monarch (and I say that deliberately). Yet Saka was born in England and came up through its academy system, and represents his adopted country at the highest level. There are clearly colonial links, but as I say, it speaks to the willingness of the football authorities in England to look for talent outside of the traditional groups that provided players.

Most big Western European teams have opened up their selections to non-white players, both from former colonies and from immigrant populations. The big exception, however, is Italy. There have been a couple of notable exceptions, like Mario Balotelli and Moise Kean, but the first black player selected by the Italian national team was Fabio Liverani, hardly a household name, and he was only called up in 2001, long after France and England were well-integrated.

I don't think Italy's lack of multicultural players is the main or only reason why it's had so much trouble at the World Cup since 2006. It has, after all, reached two European Championship finals and won one of them, and has generally done much better at that level than in the World Cup. But Italian society is changing, with the aging of the society and the lack of opportunities driving young Italians abroad, while the country's position in the Mediterranean makes it the first port of call for many refugees and migrants. Saying that welcoming in these migrants will help in football may seem silly, but if that's the way to show Italians that people of color can benefit their society, then I think it's an avenue to explore.

Is Messi the GOAT?

I'm not even going to try to segue smoothly from that section to this, even though Lionel Messi is a migrant twice over: once when his Italian forebears came to Argentina and again when he moved to Spain to receive treatment for his hormone deficiency and to develop his footballing skills. 

But the question of whether Messi is the greatest of all time has been bandied about a lot this tournament, since it's probably his last. I don't know if winning this tournament cements that status for him, because he's associated more with his time at Barcelona, where he won everything he could possibly win and dominated Spanish football alongside Cristiano Ronaldo and Real Madrid. I wonder if winning this tournament, where he's no longer at the otherworldly heights he occupied in the previous decade, really puts him on the same level as Pele or Maradona or Zidane, who are (at least in my mind) associated more as World Cup all-time greats.

On the other hand, Messi is such a cultural force because of football that it would be odd if he'd only ever been a nearly-man footnote to the tournament, like George Best or Zlatan Ibrahimović or other great players who never won or like Best, even qualified. Winning this tournament doesn't necessarily make him the greatest player who ever lived, but it makes sure he's in the conversation.

These arguments apply to Cristiano Ronaldo, by the way. He's never won a World Cup, and now he never will, at least as a player, but he was just as much of a cultural force as Messi. You can appeal to numbers as much as you want: goals, goals per game, league titles, etc. Each has also won their regional tournament, but winning the 2022 World Cup certainly gives Messi a leg up on Ronaldo.

But what does it mean to be the greatest? Pele is the player most people think of, especially if they don't know anything else about football. He was involved in two World Cup wins, including when he came out of retirement in 1970 to play as part of possibly the greatest team the game has ever seen. Yet Ronaldo and Messi (and Neymar, and Ronaldo o fenomeno) have all surpassed certain of Pele's achievements, like international goals, appearances or career goals.

The point about everyone knowing about Pele points to another way of looking at this "greatest" debate, specifically influence. Pele became the face of football for decades, including the 1970s and 1980s' North American Soccer League, which was the previous big shot at selling soccer to American viewers before MLS. But I think the most influential player ever was Johan Cruyff, even despite (or because of) never winning the World Cup.

Cruyff became the game's biggest thinker, along with his manager Rinus Michels, and the two took the concept of Total Football from the Netherlands to Barcelona, from where it grew into the big tactical innovations in the game. This is all an abbreviated version, and to get the full picture of how tactics developed you should read Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson and Zonal Marking by Michael Cox. But the basic point is, without Cruyff you don't get Barcelona (the concept thereof), and without Barcelona you don't get Messi.

What's next?

What's immediately next is a return to the regular season, which was interrupted by this World Cup. It seems less important than these big national questions, but it will be interesting to see how the English Premier League develops now, especially since we'll see what happens with Erling Braut Haaland, possibly the world's best player of the moment who wasn't in Qatar. Will he help Manchester City win the Champions League, or will that prize continue to elude the Gulf petrostates' teams?

At the international level, next summer we'll have the Women's World Cup, where we'll see how the rest of the world has caught up to the US. The team of 2019 may not be at the same level as last time, so will they refresh or get overtaken by other, upcoming powers?

The year after that is Euro 2024, which remains my second favorite tournament. My hope is that Italy will do well again there, and that England's progress under Gareth Southgate will also continue. Having now seen Croatia reach its second World Cup semifinal in a row, I'm also curious how they and the rest of the Eastern European teams will develop. That will depend on how well they get integrated into the existing networks around the Big 5 leagues, of course.

And finally, World Cup 2026 will mark the tournament's return to North America, the first time it'll be held here since 1994 and, really, the beginning of the modern era of football and of the World Cup. It feels a little like over-egging the pudding to hold it in three countries, all of them large enough to host a tournament on their own, especially given how 2022 was effectively held in one city. But FIFA and the media's need for spectacle is insatiable, and holding it across the US, Mexico and Canada means bringing the show to a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise get to watch it. I, for one, would like to go to matches if I'm in the US.

Anyway, that's the end of this World Cup. It's been a problematic one, but in truth, aren't they all? Without discounting the human cost, in lives lost and in dictators propped up and in corruption enabled, the fact that the World Cup comes every four years like (almost) clockwork, is a way to take stock of my life and where I am. I watched my first World Cup final in 1994 on summer vacation in Italy, and I know where I was for every single tournament since. It's given me a lot of exciting moments, like Germany's 7-1 demolition of Brazil to Italy beating France on penalties in 2006 just a month after I'd moved back to London for my first job post-grad school.

It's my favorite sporting event, and I hope to enjoy it for a long time to come. I just hope it gets less shady, and I hope Italy comes back to it.

World Cup 2022: Equal Parts Surprising and Standard

Here we come to the sharp end of the tournament, as the quarterfinals give way to the semifinals. I managed to get all four of my predictions for this round wrong: some were understandable, like Argentina beating the Netherlands or France beating England. Others were less expected, like Croatia battling back against Brazil to win on penalties, or Morocco seeing off Portugal after having beaten Spain. It's been a tournament of upsets and surprises, and it's probably been better for it, especially since this is the first time since 2002 that three different continents/confederations are represented in the semifinals.

Here are some thoughts on what's happened and on what it all means.

Brazil and Neymar

The joke on the Guardian podcast is about how Croatia just don't tire out, but I think this result shows rather that they don't know when they're beaten. I actually missed most of the match, given that it started early on a work day for me, but I did catch the penalty shootout, which was epic - not a comedy of errors like Japan v Croatia or Spain v Morocco, but a nervy and riveting affair that showcased some fine penalty technique. I might have different feelings if I'd been watching a team I cared about, but I've really enjoyed the penalty shootouts this tournament.

As far as Brazil, I've been considering two things since yesterday. The first is what it means that everyone seems to make Brazil their favorites before a tournament but then Brazil always implodes before the final, sometimes in spectacular fashion. In my review of the 2014 Mineirazo I noted that there's never a good reason to assume that the Netherlands will implode, but they always do. The same can now be said of Brazil: it doesn't seem to matter how much talent they stack in their squad, they always come to grief in the quarterfinal (apart from 2014, when they were at home). A lot of commentators and Twitter gadflies note that this is the fifth time Brazil goes out to European opponents but that's nothing special: almost everyone gets beaten by Europe these days. I'm assuming 2026 will feature the same expectations but the same ending for the world's most successful team.

The second thing I've been thinking about is Neymar. Writing in the Guardian Barney Ronay has a good column about what this latest defeat means for him, and he paints a good picture of the emptiness at the heart of the whole Neymar project, not least the way the player attracts derision. For me, the takeaway is that all the hoopla surrounding Neymar has obscured, for me, what should have been a generational talent but has instead become an object of ridicule for all his diving and theatrics. He's tied for international goals with Pelé, but none of that will matter when we look back at this era, because for whatever reason he was just never fully there at the World Cup. Love the player or hate him, but that strikes me as a shame.

That Wout Weghorst brace

I don't have any grand philosophical pronouncements about this match. All I can say is that when the Netherlands equalized in the last minute of added time in the second half, with, of all things, a pass into the wall instead of a free kick... well, I laughed so, so hard. It's just a shame that the Dutch couldn't capitalize on that good work by actually winning the extra time or penalties. Still, it means that Lionel Messi is still in play for this tournament, which spares us anguished disquisitions on how another generational talent hasn't lived up to his best.

Though Argentina shouldn't be writing off Croatia here, because otherwise in twenty years we'll be talking about what an amazing player Luka Modric was (or, you know, maybe he'll still be playing).

Can anyone stop Morocco?

There are two parts to this one, but let's start by giving credit where it's due: this is an amazing run by Morocco, and I'm increasingly hoping they'll get to continue. My head says France will put an end to them in the semifinal, as they did against the rampant Iceland team of 2016, but my heart is looking forward to a Croatia-Morocco rematch in the final.

Now, on to Portugal, and another figure that everyone wants to see fail. Much was made of the scenes of Cristiano Ronaldo weeping as he left the stadium after the match, and like Neymar, I'm tempted to revel in his tears. But like Neymar, the antics and the general weirdness (because make no mistake, Ronaldo is extremely and abidingly weird) obscure a raw talent that bestrode the world of football for a decade, as well as a ferocious will to power that's taken him from an impoverished childhood on Madeira to becoming one of the world's most recognizable people. If I like anything about Ronaldo, it's that will to succeed, and it's a little sad to see that glittering career come to an end this way. But I'm glad it came against Morocco, who've captured the imaginations of football fans everywhere, rather than in another sterile contest against another world's best, Kylian Mbappé.

England's coming home

And now we come to the end. I was most disappointed by this result, because I've felt that this is the first England team in years that I could feel good about supporting. Ever since I moved to Britain I've had a complicated relationship with the England team, since they seemed to be more about satisfying their own sponsors and egos than playing well. Part of this, of course, isn't the players' fault: they were let down by a conservative footballing culture, from the FA on down to the way talent is developed, that continued to act as though footballing success was owed to them because they invented the game in the year Dot.

At the same time, David Beckham represented an early version of the Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Neymar Jr, Kylian Mbappé phenomenon. His talent seemed to take a backseat to his endorsements and his marketability, which likely had something to do with why his then-manager at Manchester United kicked a boot at his head and then sold him off to Real Madrid. All I'll say is that, like Ronaldo and Neymar, this tournament has left Beckham's brand a bit in tatters, though this time because of his shilling for the Qatari regime.

So what's so different about this England team? None of them is a bigger star than the team: Harry Kane seems to be more of the retiring type, while the one player I can think of who's done anything noteworthy off the pitch is Marcus Rashford, for his campaign to ensure that underprivileged kids continued to get access to school meals during the pandemic lockdowns. You can't imagine David Beckham, Wayne Rooney or John Terry making similar, selfless actions (which may be unfair, but there you go).

They've also represented a different vision of England during these years post-Brexit. Since that vote, the country's gotten smaller and meaner and poorer, with an elected class that seems more interest in triggering the libs than actually coming up with meaningful policy (you can make this accusation to an extent about Keir Starmer's Labour Party, too, btw). The England men's team, on the other hand, has continued to take a knee before matches and has pushed back against bad-faith pronouncements by some of the Tories' most unpresentable elements, like Priti Patel. 

This has all come from the top, from Gareth Southgate, who came up from the youth teams and drew inspiration from other sports for training, conditioning and man-management, and who's been quietly but firmly resolute about pushing back against the worst impulses of Britain's leaders. He may not be the tactical genius that would bring England the greatest trophy, but you can argue that a national team job isn't the place for that anyway: there's a reason José Mourinho and Pep Guardiola have stayed in club management.

All I'm saying is, Southgate has taken the England men's team far, in terms of results and maturity, and while he'll need to give way someday, I think the English footballing establishment should consider carefully what he's brought to the team, and not undo all his good work.

World Cup 2022: Surprises Continue

The round of 16 is done, and up until this morning I thought the surprises were all behind us, but along comes Morocco, knocking out Spain and flying the flag for the rest of the world, i.e. countries outside Europe and South America. Of course, that obscures how close Japan came as well... if only they had more practice at penalties...

It feels a long time ago now, but the Netherlands-USA match was just three days ago, on Saturday. I'm left with mixed feelings, because it felt about right for the team, but I was still disappointed by the manner in which they went out.

Every time the World Cup has been held outside Europe, the US has managed to progress from the group stage, and this time was no different. Home field advantage dragged the team further than it really ought to have gone in 1994, when the tournament was held in the US, but I'd say that in the last decade or so, enough good players have come out of the US to justify saying that the team should consider reaching the round of 16 to be the expectation every four years.

That said, it was clear even in the group stage that this team isn't yet up to the level it should be. I think that because I follow so much British football content, it was easy to get swept up in thinking that Wales would be good, when the fact is that their team was composed of a few very good players and a few who play in England's League Two, aka the fourth division of English football. Not only that, the good players don't get regular play: Joe Allen was out injured for much of the season in progress when the World Cup started, and Gareth Bale is more used as an impact sub these days, even now that he plays in MLS. 

So the USA's first failure was not winning that match: first, by giving up that penalty that allowed Wales to equalize, and secondly, by trying to defend their 1-0 lead rather than pushing for a second goal. This tendency was in evidence against Iran as well, so that they ended that match with a nervy finish that could have gone wrong if Iran's finishing had been more clinical.

I've heard a lot of praise for the USA's midfield, and they certainly did their share of running. I also think Sergiño Dest had a good group stage, marauding up and down the wing against Wales and Iran in particular. But I think the team's finishing in front of goal was poor, and the defense always felt one step from calamity - as demonstrated when Walker Zimmerman gifted Wales that penalty.

Watching them against the Dutch, what struck me was how easy the Dutch made it all look on Saturday morning. I hadn't watched as many of the Dutch games, but the sense was that they hadn't quite moved into gear. Well, my sense on Saturday was that the Dutch didn't need to move out of first gear to beat the USA.

This is in marked contrast to the more frenetic pace of the Argentina-Australia match later that morning. Argentina won by a smaller margin, and Australia's goal provided less of a sense of comeback (although if Kuol had scored that would have been nuts) than the USA's goal against the Netherlands. But then the Netherlands just went straight to the other end and pulled back another, killing the match, while Argentina surely was glad to hear the final whistle. The only game that looked as straightforward, at least after 30 minutes or so, was England v Senegal.

There's not much to say about most of the other matches in this round. Valiant as South Korea were, they got hammered by Brazil; Poland also showed a bit more grit against France, only to fall; Japan did well to hold Croatia to 0-0 but were let down by naivety in penalties; and Switzerland looked bereft of ideas against Portugal, as if they didn't know what to do with themselves after having beaten Serbia.

The Morocco-Spain result is the one wild card here, since Spain started the tournament with that statement win over Costa Rica. But Spain then drew against a lackluster Germany and lost to Japan, so it's clear they had weaknesses. And these huge wins don't always translate into victory at the World Cup. What's funny to me is how bad they were at the penalty shootout - Morocco's keeper looked so relaxed and in control that his team has to have studied Spanish penalties in-depth. 

After all this, I still think the English and the Dutch will meet in the final. On the "left" side of the bracket, I'm pretty confident the Dutch can get past Argentina, who look nervy, and they're the team best-placed to expose whatever weaknesses Brazil have (no disrespect to Croatia, but I don't know if they have enough to beat Brazil). Though of the two South American teams, I'd expect Brazil to have the better chance of beating the Netherlands.

Meanwhile, England will have their toughest match against France, but I think they're solid enough to hold the French off - even 538 and ESPN have England as slight favorites. The team is still basically the one that got to the Euro 2020 final last year, and that could have won, so I do fancy their chances, even against a particularly on-fire Mbappe and Griezmann and co.

Whichever of them wins will most likely beat the winner of Portugal-Morocco, whom I expect to be Portugal, at least as long as they start Ramos in place of Ronaldo. I don't know that I'm glad to have written off both Messi and Ronaldo in the quarterfinals like this, but I just don't see either Portugal or Argentina getting to the final, so no fairy tale endings for them.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with myself for two whole days without football...

World Cup 2022: On to the Knockout Stage

Well, we're on to phase 2 of the World Cup, and the point where things get serious. There's no round-robins, no scraping through based on goal difference or fair play, just straight knockouts with the specter of penalty shootouts hanging over everything.

I don't know if I can rule whether it's been a good tournament yet, because the scheduling has meant that I haven't managed to watch that many games. On the second day I tried getting up for the England-Iran match, which would have been thrilling except that it was 5am and I had to go back to bed after the first half. I've also missed most of the 8am kickoffs, to say nothing of the 7am ones in this final phase of the group stage.

What I can say is that there's been a lot of drama so far, especially in the later groups. It wasn't a stretch to say that the Dutch would win Group A, for example, or that England would do well in Group B. But all of the African teams have had unexpectedly good tournaments so far, even if most of them went out in the first round. The same can be said of the Asian teams, given that half of that contingent qualified for the knockout stage, which is more than ever before. Especially on the last day, most of them had good results that left them in the running to qualify for the knockouts, which doesn't usually happen. It'll be interesting to see how Australia, Japan and South Korea perform, as well as Senegal and Morocco.

Predictions Update

On that note, might as well have a look at how my predictions turned out, right? Of the eight groups, I got only three completely correct: Netherlands and Senegal from Group A, England and USA from Group B, Brazil and Switzerland from Group G. The only group I got completely wrong was Group D: I predicted Denmark and Tunisia would go through, but instead it was France and Australia.

It's curious, but like everyone else in the world I assumed Denmark would replicate their form from Euro 2020 last year. As the group stage went on without any good performances from them, it became a running joke about them being dark horses, but of course, it's easy to be critical in hindsight. I can't speak for anyone at the Guardian Football Daily/Weekly, but I think I underestimated the way that Christian Eriksen's cardiac arrest pulled the team together, probably masking the weaknesses of a team that's probably not that skillful to begin with.

I also ruled out Australia because I thought they were too old and not populated with enough Europe-based players. This will likely tell against them in the next match, against Argentina, but then, they haven't been exactly imperious yet either. 

Where's the Dominance?

Then again, nobody's been imperious in the group stage. This is the first tournament this century (I can't be bothered to check any further back) where every team has dropped points in the first stage. In previous World Cups there's always been at least a couple of teams that won all three of their games, sometimes as many as five, but not this year. Indeed, five of the first-placed teams in the groups actually lost a match, compared with none in 2002.

It's a much-loved statistic that Spain in 2010 is the only team to have won the World Cup after losing its opening match. As far as I can tell, they and West Germany in 1954 are the only ones to have won after losing a match at all. That's not an iron law, much as I hate to admit it, so it's fair to say that the front runners remain Brazil, France and Argentina, all of whom have lost a match. But if we were to take them out of the running, who does that leave us with?

The Netherlands, England, USA, Morocco and Croatia are the only teams that haven't lost yet. Since the Netherlands and the USA face one another in the round of 16, that record will end for at least one of them, but the rest aren't scheduled to meet until the semi-finals, assuming they all get there. It seems unlikely, of course, but it underscores how odd this World Cup has turned out.

That said, I think we'll start to see results returning to normal as we go deeper into the tournament, which also implies another win for a Western European team. The technical ability of the core UEFA sides will probably tell, even against the likes of Brazil and Argentina, even as Neymar returns from injury for Brazil. If we assume a bias toward Western European teams, then the best-placed teams to get to the final are, in my opinion, the Netherlands and England

Both have a good mix of experience and youthful athleticism, as well as not being reliant on one or two notable players. This is in contrast to Portugal and Argentina, and to a lesser extent Brazil, who boast a dazzling array of talent even without Neymar. But all three of these teams, plus Spain, have shown that they can be got, whereas the Netherlands and England haven't yet.

Maybe I'll be wrong. We've demonstrated that I'm not exactly Nostradamus, what with my initial (and not entirely unfounded) prediction of France's early exit. But if we presume that history has any bearing on performance, then my current guess is that England will beat the Netherlands in this World Cup.

Or it'll be Morocco! Who knows anymore?

World Cup 2022: The Group Stage So Far

We're well into this World Cup, with every team having played twice, so it's a good time to take stock and see what might happen in the next set of games, ahead of the knockout rounds. I also thought I'd look at which of my predictions have already been proven wrong, because it's always fun to point out your own failures in public!

How are my predictions looking?

In my previous post I said France would go out in the first round, as every other European holder has done since 2002. This has not proved accurate. I can say that I was predicting it because no one ever predicts the holders to go out before the knockout rounds, but of course, that's a recent phenomenon and it's hard to argue convincingly without knowing more about what's happening within the team. I think each of the previous times it happened, the team was in crisis or the rest of the world had caught up to its tactics... but it's still interesting how often it happened.

Also, I did admirably cover my ass by saying I wouldn't be surprised if they bucked the trend this year, so good job me! I do still think that they won't go on to win the whole thing again, because a) it hasn't happened since 1962, and b) they haven't faced a strong team yet. 

My prediction about the US was also based on precedent rather than a sober assessment of the squad's strengths and weaknesses. On the other hand, they maintained their unbeaten World Cup record against England, so it's still possible that they'll get past Iran with a win and go out in the next round. We'll find out tomorrow!

England's also as good as through to the next round, which I think was an easy prediction to make. The only thing that could derail them is getting tonked by Wales and the US-Iran result being crazy too, but with respect to Wales, I don't think they're good enough. I still suspect England has a good path to the final, as well.

My prediction about this being Brazil or Argentina's year looks to be favoring Brazil. Though in my heart of hearts I still think it's going to a top-5 European side (England, France, Germany or Spain, with not-qualified Italy being the last of the 5). On current form France looks the side to beat, but as per my prediction above, England has the cohesion, if not the technical wizardry or speed, to go far, like they did in Euro 2020.

Finally, my prediction about home field advantage has been half right. I suggested Saudi Arabia and Iran wouldn't benefit from the proximity, but both have notched some impressive wins (especially the Saudi win over Argentina). I also suggested Tunisia and Morocco would benefit, and Morocco has indeed won against Belgium, which is a good result. Tunisia's only picked up a point so far, and plays France next, which probably won't result in more than a draw.

Western Europe vs the World

As I've watched the matches, I've also been tracking the performance of Western European teams against the rest of the world. I want to write a longer post about this, but the short version is: I was inspired by reading the latest edition of Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, in which they note the region's structural advantage over the rest of the world (including Eastern Europe). The most eye-opening stat from that section is that in 2006, the most recent World Cup held in Western Europe, the only Western European team to "lose" against a team from elsewhere was Switzerland, which lost its penalty shootout against Ukraine.

I should be clear here and note that Kuper and Szymanski actually refer to "core Europe", which can either mean the top leagues of England, Germany, Italy and Spain, or the founding members of the EU (Italy, West Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands but excluding Luxembourg). Their naming excludes teams from the edges of Western Europe, like Scandinavia, Wales and even England, but they also note that teams who play in the big leagues are favored. At the same time, Portugal is technically a small country at the margins of Western Europe but has nonetheless contributed a lot to Western Europe's dominant style, so the definition can be fluid.

However you define it, the region hasn't been as dominant since 2006, especially because of the holder's curse and the fact that Italy has failed to reach the round of 16 or even qualify since that tournament. But its ratio of wins (with ties counting as half a win) has actually grown since its lowest point in 2010, and I expect that trend to continue this year.

Scoreless draws

As a final point, there's been a lot of talk on the podcasts about scoreless draws in the group stage. So far there have been five, compared with just one in 2018, five in 2014 (for the entire group stage), six in 2010 and five in 2006. They addressed it on Totally Football, where someone noted that there were so few in 2018 because that was the first time the video-assistant referee (VAR) was used, so it picked up a lot more edge cases that in previous years wouldn't have resulted in penalties. 

Counting them up just now indicates that, rather than shooting up to unprecedented levels, the number of scoreless draws has returned to its historical average. This could mean players have gotten used to VAR and aren't conceding as many penalties as in 2018, which was remarked as having quite a high number. Still, it's impressive that so many games have ended scoreless after just two match days, compared with the same number at the end of the group stage in three of the last four tournaments.

I hope to be able to revisit these predictions at the end of the week, when the group stage finishes, and possibly offer a few more predictions for the knockout stages. In the meantime, I'm trying to decide whether or not to wake up early for the matches that will be at 7am - I tried to get up at 5am for the England-Iran match and regretted it, but 7 should be easier...

World Cup 2022: A Party Pooped

The World Cup in Qatar has begun! For better or worse.

I'm always excited, because the World Cup is my favorite thing in the world (ahead of the European Championships, of course). When else do I get to be patriotic about being Italian...? Eh? Oh, right, Italy may never show up again.

Well, in that case, when else do I get to be patriotic about being American, without a bunch of armed fascists getting excited too? The USMNT has become a good vehicle for soft power in recent years, because they play football the way it ought to be played, according to the English (badly but with a lot of heart), and because this is one of those rare instances where they're Just Another Country and not the undisputed world leaders. Some favorite matches recently have been the ones where the US got knocked out, because they fought heroically until the bitter end. I'm looking forward to more of that this year.

On the other hand, there's the whole backdrop to this particular World Cup. Sure, there are the accusations of worker mistreatment and oppression of women and minorities in the host country, Qatar. Those would be bad enough on their own. But then there's also the dodgy way in which this tournament was awarded: no less a personage than former FIFA president Sepp Blatter has suggested that it was "a bad choice".

He could have raised these concerns in 2010, perhaps before his organization voted to award it there on the same day they awarded the 2018 tournament to Russia, but hey: who needs moral courage, eh?

(As for Russia: kinda embarrassing that they can't be there this month because of invading a neighbor, and also, maybe they should have had 2018 hosting duties taken away after the first invasion in 2014? I dunno)

Still, the tournament has gone ahead, despite the misgivings of almost everyone, so let's look at some positives: the hosts lost the first match in abject fashion! A friend of mine on Facebook predicted a 4-0 blowout by Ecuador, which sadly didn't happen. But it was kinda vindicating to see such a bad performance from the team that's only ever managed to qualify by hosting. If they continue to play like this, it'll be a really open group, at least for Ecuador, the Netherlands and Senegal.

The result also sits in sharp relief when you consider that Qatar are the reigning champions of Asia, while Ecuador are the fourth-best team from South America present in this World Cup. Maybe instead of bullying countries to build expensive and useless stadia, FIFA should be addressing that competitive gap?

On the other, other hand: I do appreciate that this is the first World Cup held in the Arab world. There are a lot of fans in that region, and it's great that they can host this big party for the world. I want to be clear that any criticisms I have of the 2022 World Cup are aimed squarely at FIFA and the local organizers and the government of Qatar, whose treatment of women, LGBTQ people, migrant workers and dissidents is shocking and dystopian. But given how despotic the Qatari regime is (and let's also remember that neighboring Saudi Arabia is worse), is it fair to tar all Qatari citizens or residents with that same brush?

That's why I couldn't find the heart to laugh at the crestfallen locals in the stands for today's match. They may benefit from their country's unequal system, but in the end the people showing up in the regular seats (these folks weren't in the executive boxes or anything) just want to have something enjoyable in their lives, and I can't begrudge them that. This may be the only chance a lot of them get to see World Cup football live, or to mix with so many football fans from all over the world, so they should be allowed to enjoy it (I won't be sad if Qatar do go out in the first round, of course).

I don't know if I'll be blogging on the cup every day for this tournament, but I'll hopefully be able to come up with some clever insights at regular intervals until the final on 18 December. In the meantime, I'll leave you with some predictions, based on how things have gone in previous tournaments:

• France is going to get eliminated in the first round, as Germany, Spain, Italy and, well, France themselves have before them. Since the turn of the millennium Brazil's been the only holder to reach the round of 16, and I expect this trend to continue, primarily because no one else is talking about the trend (538 rates France as fourth most likely to win, which is similar to what they said about Germany four years ago). That said, with all the injuries plaguing the France squad this year, I also wouldn't be surprised if they pull together and buck the trend.
• The US is going to continue their own trend of doing well when the World Cup is not held in Europe. In this case, "doing well" means getting past the group stage, but I don't expect them to get past the round of 16.
• I've got England tipped to do well, which in this case means reaching the final (!). Playing with the various predictors, if England win their group, they should have a relatively easy path to the final. This is predicated on things not blowing up for them along the way, but oddly enough I don't think the other European powerhouses (Spain and Germany) have enough to go all the way.
• This could very well be Brazil or Argentina's year, unless it isn't. Going by the relative strengths of their matchups, I have them meeting in the semifinal and Brazil beating England. But since most of the other predictions I've seen have Brazil winning, I'm starting to qualify this prediction somewhat (538 predicted Brazil was most likely to win in 2014 and 2018 as well).
• The traditional boost to the host country's neighbors won't benefit other Asian teams, like Australia, Japan or South Korea, but I expect it to benefit North African teams, like Tunisia or Morocco. I don't think Saudi Arabia or Iran are well-loved in Qatar (the former tried to blockade the country a few years ago), so I would be surprised if either benefited from much home support. Though it's easier for Saudi or Iranian fans to get there than it will be for 2026, when the World Cup will be held here...

Anyway, those are my predictions, based on nothing more than what's happened before. I've hedged as much as I could, so if any prove to be wrong I'll be able to say I was just talking about probabilities. I'll try and offer some updated predictions when the group stage ends, so that I'll have another chance to look clever.

In the meantime, I'm hoping for both a fun festival of football, and some massive embarrassment to FIFA that will cause the entire executive committee to resign in shame and give us a governing body we deserve. This is, of course, the least likely of my predictions to come true, so take everything I've said for what it's worth.

RIP Kevin Conroy

I was heartbroken yesterday to see that Kevin Conroy, who voiced Batman in the 90s cartoon Batman: The Animated Series, has died at the age of 66. His Batman wasn't the first on-screen version I encountered: that would be Adam West, and then Michael Keaton. But I have to join the chorus of commentators who said he was the best, because he really was.

Of course, I didn't know anything about the actor for the longest time. At some point in the 90s, when watching the Animated Series, I caught on that the guy playing Batman was named Kevin Conroy. Later, when I came back to the Bruce Timm DCAU with Justice League, I was happy to see that they'd kept the same actor. About that time I discovered that he played Batman in the Arkham City video game (alongside none other than Mark Hamill as the Joker!), and even played an older, live-action, Bruce Wayne in the CW's Batwoman, for one of the Arrowverse's yearly crossovers.

I still didn't know anything about his personal life, at least until I saw that he'd written a story for DC's Pride 2022. That issue, by the way, is available for free on DC Universe Infinite (you have to create an account but you can navigate away from the subscription page, if all you want is the Pride issue). Conroy's story talks about how growing up as a gay man in the 1970s and 80s prepared him for the role of Batman. And honestly, it's a great story, taking in the horror and uncertainty of navigating his personal life and his acting career while watching AIDS decimate his circle of friends and colleagues.

The fact that he got the part of Batman, and made it his own the way he did, is also a testament to WB's legendary voice director Andrea Romano, who cast the DCAU shows and loads more besides. She's always shown a knack for finding actors who, on paper, you'd think have nothing to do with the role, but then have made it unthinkable that someone else could ever play that character. Mark Hamill as the Joker is probably her masterstroke, but Kevin Conroy as Batman is her major triumph in the DCAU, because he was the most important part of its very first show.

There are a lot of great Batman moments from the DCAU, both from Batman TAS and Justice League. But if I had to pick a favorite, it's from Justice League Unlimited, where Batman (and Kevin Conroy) showed off an impressive set of pipes:

Condolences to Kevin's family and friends. It's sad that we've lost him, but even if I knew nothing about the actor, he brought to life my favorite version of one of my favorite characters. And that means a part of him will get to live on, whenever we watch Heart of Ice, Mask of the Phantasm, or even just this JLU episode, This Little Piggy.

Authoritarian Rule Will Look Like Office Space

I feel like democracy and open society are having a bad moment at the time, in part because their proponents aren't doing a good job communicating their benefits. People like me (and I'm not saying liberals or progressives or lefties, but all people who care about free elections and less state control) can say that the Republicans are driving us toward authoritarianism or fascism - and it's true - but to many/most Republicans, or to so-called independents, it just comes off as left-wing sour grapes.

What's worse is that the average Republican seems to think that authoritarian rule is a good thing, as long as it means smashing the libs. There's a certain tendency toward this on the left, too, by the way, but the difference is that no progressive or Democratic figure is trying to dismantle the administrative state, while large parts of the GOP are. But the upshot is that, whatever side of the aisle you're on, the allure of suspending democratic norms is appealing if it means stopping the other side from "ruining America".

So how does the average, right-thinking person who doesn't want to see authoritarian rule in America communicate this in terms that even the most blinkered, hang-em-all independent can appreciate?

My suggestion for the Democratic Party, and whatever Republicans out there still believe in rule of law: authoritarianism will be like being stuck in a job you hate, and that you can't quit.

What does that mean?

Think about the worst job you've ever had. Maybe it's a retail job where they change shifts on you at short notice, or where they dock your pay if you have to go to the doctor or get your car fixed. Maybe it's an office job where the management keeps an up-to-the-minute accounting of how many minutes late you arrive each morning, or how many minutes early you leave. Or the corporate job where they just expect you to work long hours, even if you get your work done on time every day.

I don't have direct experience of living under authoritarian rule, thankfully, but this is how I imagine it. Not so much jackbooted government thugs breaking down my door in the night to disappear me (although it'll come to that), but a continuous drip-drip-drip of petty and annoying legalism, arbitrary rule changes and exhortations to show team spirit (but you're the one who has to show team spirit, while those in charge are exempt).

Your employer monitors what you look at on the internet. Hell, the government already does it in your non-work life too: that is, after all, what Edward Snowden revealed back in 2013, to not much interest from the American public. But under an authoritarian government, all those things you think are private now - messages, purchases, searches - will be of great interest to someone.

In his book about the Real Madrid-Barcelona rivalry, Fear and Loathing in La Liga, Sid Lowe notes that one of the initiatives of the Franco regime was to specify how eggs should be cooked at breakfast. This seems innocuous, but it speaks to the sort of obsession with sameness that pervades both authoritarian regimes and corporate workplaces; a personal favorite of mine was one of the higher-ups at an old office saying she didn't want employees to have personal items or family photos at their workplaces, which was portrayed as a way to smarten up the office but was really just a way prepare everyone for hot desking.

One reason why shows like the Office and movies like Office Space have maintained their cult followings is because viewers recognize the petty and pointless indignities to which employers subject workers. Now, just imagine that instead of an obnoxious "fun" restaurant demanding that you have more than just 15 pieces of flair on your uniform, it's the government.

Of course, some right-wing folks think that the government is already doing that. They point to mandates like vaccines in schools, or wearing your seatbelt, as government overreach. And in fact, those initiatives are designed to limit your freedoms: your freedom to infect other potentially vulnerable populations to avoidable diseases, or your freedom to guarantee your own death and your family's if you get into a car accident. 

These right-wing folks, either genuinely or in bad faith, imagine that eternal GOP (or Tory, or Bolsonaro) rule will end all these infringements of their liberties, by getting rid of the people they've been told are making fun of them. But then when those people are gone, Trump or DeSantis or Bolsonaro or Giorgia Meloni will find someone new who's mocking them, and the cycle will continue.

It might seem farfetched but there's an example of this process. The Tories in the UK aren't quite as far-right as the Republicans, but they are led by a clique with a worrying obsession for "woke culture", which they've used to demonize Labour (and sometimes with Labour's own help, as in the tin-eared response to the antisemitism crisis that swirled around the party before the 2019 election). Since taking power in 2010, the Tories have harnessed this anger against elites and "wokeness" to secede from the European Union, destroy trade with the EU and to an extent the rest of the world, drive down living standards, and oversee a culture of corruption and sleaze and impunity that goes down all the way to police officers who can rape and murder citizens without much in the way of consequences.

And the best/worst part is, the Tories have convinced the voters that all that stuff is somehow Labour's fault!

This is what we can expect when we lose democracy. Life will probably go on as normal for a lot of people, but conditions will worsen, the fires and floods and hurricanes will grow stronger, the infrastructure will crumble... but they'll tell us none of that is important, because we're free.

And we'll be grateful for the crumbs we do have, because if we aren't, well...

In Praise of the All-Star Superfan Podcast

My podcast backlog is never-ending, especially when taking into account ongoing shows like Guardian Football Weekly or WTF with Marc Maron or any of the innumerable history podcasts that I've picked up over the last couple of years. That said, I always like to keep an eye out for interesting new shows, especially if they're in an area that I haven't been following much recently. I seem to get a lot of recommendations from Twitter, and the All-Star Superfan Podcast is one of these.

Hosted by two Irish guys, Alan Burke and Rob O'Connor, the show talks about everything to do with Superman. And I do mean everything: not just comics and movies and TV shows, but also games and even the Superman radio serial from the 1940s. They also manage to talk about other stuff going on in the DC universe, from other DC-related shows to movies and so forth.

So far, so good - but the reason I first downloaded an episode, over a year ago, was that they got legendary comics writer JM DeMatteis to talk to them. I had no idea what connection he had to Superman (it turns out he wrote episodes of the Superboy show from the late 80s/early 90s, which I remember vaguely), but since I loved his work on Justice League in the 80s alongside Keith Giffen, I had to check it out. Since then, I've heard them talk to a number of other luminaries, from Mark Waid to Marv Wolfman, so they're clearly more than just a couple of dudes recording in their basement.

I'll admit I don't listen to every show, since the stuff about the Lois and Clark show isn't a huge draw (though their enthusiasm for it is making me consider revisiting, even despite Dean Cain's turn toward alt-right idiocy). It's the same with the Superman and Lois show on the CW, which I didn't really take much interest in after the pilot, but they talk in such glowing terms about it that I'm thinking of giving it another shot.

That said, it's nice to hear them talk about general developments in Superman and DC stuff from time to time, or to dig into really obscure bits of Superman mythos, like the aforementioned radio serial. Indeed, the talk with Marv Wolfman happened because he said he'd only do it if they could ask about something that he hasn't talked about already a bunch on podcasts; they brought up the 1980s Ruby-Spears cartoon, and he admitted that this was indeed a topic no one else had ever asked about.

Also, God help me, I saw an episode or two of that show when it was on, so that should give you an idea how plugged into Superman I am.

Listening to the show always makes me think about my own fandom for the character. It's way more fashionable to say you like Batman, and traditionally my favorite individual characters were always the Flash and Green Lantern. Yet I've always had an appreciation for Superman, because his stories tend to be a lot more varied than those of those other characters: a Flash story is all about Barry Allen (or Wally West) learning how to use his superspeed in a new way, while a Green Lantern story is always about using the power ring to solve a problem. Batman, similarly, is always using his vast array of skills and knowledge to solve crimes.

Superman, though, is the only character I can think of (except maybe Todd McFarlane's Spawn) who routinely has to solve his problems without his powers. Lex Luthor, particularly since the 1985 reboot, is not a character that Superman can punch out, so Lex Luthor stories always require Superman to outthink his opponent, who happens to be the smartest man on Earth. It's the same with Brainiac and various other characters, though of course every once in a while you do get villains against whom Superman can cut loose - but the most notable of those, Doomsday, actually killed Superman. So you could say the punching part of Superman is the least fascinating thing about him.

I also love the different ways to tell the same stories about him: his origin has a different resonance depending on what time period it's set (there's a great novel by Tom DeHaven, It's Superman!, that goes back to the character's 1930s roots) or where on Earth he's supposed to have landed (Mark Millar's not my favorite writer but he knocked it out of the park with Red Son, which imagined Superman landing in the USSR instead of Kansas). In some stories he's always the last Kryptonian, while in others he encounters other survivors, which lets the creators examine how his US upbringing puts him in conflict with his native planet's culture.

My absolute favorite Superman story, though, is Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, in which Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, loads of other stuff) tied up all the threads from the Silver Age Superman continuity, from the 1950s to the 1980s, to finish up the Superman mythos before they got rebooted in the Crisis on Infinite Earths. It's scary, heartbreaking, but ultimately a loving goodbye to that continuity, helped by the fact that it was drawn by longtime Superman artist Curt Swan, who'd done a lot of the original stories this was based on.

The All-Star Superfan Podcast hasn't tackled that story yet, and I'd be surprised if they can ever get Alan Moore to talk about it, but I'd love to see them do a segment on it. Either way, if they can keep getting great guests, I'll be happy to keep listening.

Spoiler Filled Thoughts on The Rings of Power

For the last couple of months I've been watching The Rings of Power on Amazon, and witnessing social media losing its mind over the show, mostly to dunk on it. Some of the dunking seems to be the usual bad faith, alt-right complaining that a fantasy show featuring magic and Elves shouldn't also feature people of color, but some of it comes from SFF authors I generally admire, or at least appreciate, poking justifiable holes in the teetering edifice of plot that the show runners have erected here.

So is it a good show or not? Should you watch it? I've just finished the last episode of Season One, having essentially had the big reveal spoiled for me (thanks a lot, juxtaposition of pictures with oblique headlines on episode recaps), so I'm going to wade in. Spoilers abound, as noted in the title.

Spotlight and The Thrill of Doing Journalism

So last week I talked about All the President's Men, and highlighted that plus Spotlight and The Post as some of my favorite movies about journalism. This week, lo and behold, Spotlight shows up on HBO Max, so with my endorsement from last week still fresh in mind, I decided to watch it again.

Now, whereas last week I talked about All the President's Men's distinctively 70s filmmaking, with Spotlight I'm struck by the legwork, as I put it then. The reporters on the Spotlight team are shown chasing down leads, frequently by showing up at people's homes and offices, working the phones, working the legal records. All of these are things they tried to drill into us at journalism school, though I'm not sure how well it all penetrated, at least for me, in all cases.

Certainly the stories I wrote, for the most part, weren't as important as the one in Spotlight, dealing with sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and the institutional coverup surrounding that abuse. I worked on one crime story, involving a robbery that turned into a deadly shooting, and made it all the way to the intensive care unit where the victim was being treated, before my and my partner's nerve failed us and we couldn't bring ourselves to hassle the victim's relative who was sitting by his bedside... certainly not for some stupid story for school that only our professor would ever see.

My other bite at the journalistic cherry was an investigative piece were another partner and I tried to establish whether the trash incinerator on the other side of the river from Manhattan was burning electronic waste. I had one good success, when I doorstepped the lawyer for the environmental group who'd turned us onto the story; he was quite impressed that after a few days of not being able to fit me in for a call, he found me at his office so he made some time. The rest of the investigation didn't go so well, which is probably one of many things that... I was going to say put me off journalism, but it's probably more accurate to say that it showed certain types of journalism don't necessarily play to my strengths.

The first instance doesn't bother me so much, for the reason I mentioned. The second one does, because when I watch movies like All the President's Men or Spotlight, it feels too bad that I didn't manage a good investigative piece. There were some factors against me, notably the impossibility of confirming something that the environmental lawyer was probably right about but also acting on his own agenda; also, my professor was pretty bad, since her way of teaching journalism was just to tell us to "write it beautifully" but not actually... teach anything. Yet at the end of the day, the failure is my own, and it certainly pushed me away from taking a class in the second semester on how to do investigative stories (I also didn't care for that class's professor, so I'm not super sorry I missed it).

Still, I fancy that I know enough about the legwork the reporters in Spotlight are doing that I can imagine what it would have been like for me to work on something like that. At the same time, I know from later experience that the pressure of getting things in quickly doesn't always work for me: I believe, or my work experience has led me to believe, that I'm better at putting together an analysis of what's going on, explaining why it's important rather than giving a running commentary on the latest developments.

What I just wrote may be true, or it may be the reason I give for why I didn't do so well in rapid-fire journalism. The job I had after J-school was probably not unreasonable in asking for 2-3 short pieces per day, but I couldn't seem to get them right, even though there were some interviews or discussions that I remember being proud of. On the other hand, a big problem was also trying to avoid rewriting all the press releases that came across my desk.

Something else that Spotlight emphasizes is the changing nature of journalism, into which I found myself ejected from J-school upon graduation. It takes place in 2001, and starts with a new editor taking over at The Boston Globe amid the declining circulation and revenues that came with the rise of the internet. The movie itself came out in 2015, so there was more than a decade's worth of further destruction of the newspaper industry, but the issues raised in the film are still valid now: advertising on the internet killed classifieds in papers, which was the real lifeblood of the industry. This led to the need to attract more eyeballs, which meant dumbing down headlines and subject matter.

To the film's credit, the new editor isn't portrayed as a marketer who's only interested in the bottom line, and he's shown pushing the Spotlight team to give the abuse story more prominence. But it's striking to see the seeds of all the things that have hurt journalism up to now, including a shot of an AOL billboard right outside the Globe's offices. The movie doesn't mention social media or fake news or polarization, but it came out late enough that you can fill in those blanks yourself.

Unlike All the President's Men, they do make movies like Spotlight now, which is a good thing, because it's important to show journalists as more than the amoral sleaze bags that some (predominantly rightwing) filmmakers like to portray. It's also good that the movie shows the legwork, the long hours and the long calls, that should characterize good reporting.

And who knows - maybe one day I'll manage to do something along those lines myself.

All the President's Men: They Don't Make Them Like That Anymore

Since this month is pretty light on things leaving HBO Max, my viewing has been a little more scattershot of late. Instead of worrying about what's about to leave, I've checked out movies on other services, or just about anything that caught my eye. Last weekend it was Everything Everywhere All At Once (which was pretty ace) and this weekend I'm rewatching All the President's Men.

The only other time I watched it was back in 2005, on one of the first weekends I was at journalism school. They wanted to show us an idealized version of one of American journalism's greatest hits, presumably to inspire us to reach the same kinds of heights as Woodward and Bernstein. I don't know if it necessarily worked at that goal, but it did inculcate a love in me for movies about journalism.

For one thing, I like the procedural aspect of it. You've got Woodward and Bernstein chasing down leads bit by bit, sometimes doorstepping a contact, other times working the phones. You see them taking calls at all hours of the day, grabbing food in between meetings, and getting yelled at by their editor for not having enough to go on. So from that perspective, it really does do what my J-school was hoping to communicate, which is the detail work and the tenacity needed to land an investigation.

The other journalism movie I can think of that showed the legwork to the same degree is Spotlight, which I think I'm due for a rewatch as well. That said, I also have a big soft spot for the Post, which is less about the procedural, nitty gritty of journalism and more a high-minded discussion of what the press is for. Probably have to rewatch that one as well.

Now, the main thing that those two more recent movies are missing is the weird naturalism of 70s movies that pervades All the President's Men. Part of it is technological, like when Woodward and Bernstein are driving in a car at night, and they drive through a deep enough shadow that the screen goes completely black, though you still hear their voices. Even into the 80s and 90s, filmmaking technology couldn't cope with dim lighting the way it can now, although clearly the director of this film probably wanted that shot to look natural, to the point of sacrificing the visuals. I don't think a modern film would get away with that.

Then there's the sound production. You have a lot of background hum, whether from whatever's happening in the shot or just the noise the microphones picked up back in the 70s. My favorite moment, though, is when Bernstein's talking to a source outside and a jet flies past, making the two characters have to shout. I can only assume that's on purpose, possibly even to evoke what happened when the real Carl Bernstein was having that actual conversation, but once again, you can't imagine a heavily curated and managed film in 2022 having that same feeling of artful sloppiness.

This is a thing that's always fascinated me about movies from the 70s. You start to see it in the late 60s, not only when New Hollywood directors were coming up but even in something like Bullitt, where shots were deliberately staged differently than they might have been just a decade earlier. The framing of shots and the way sound is recorded are deliberately done poorly (like lens flares), to make things seem more natural. There's also an odd quality to the way lines are delivered, which you wouldn't hear in movies now, again probably to sound more like how people were thought to speak.

It's gone by the 80s, where shots are framed in more traditional ways, although the first Superman film with Christopher Reeves, from 1978, is also shot in that more straightforward style, so it might be a question of what fits the content, too. I have to say, though, as odd as the framing and sound mixing are in movies from that era, I never quite get tired of it, even if the special effects aren't as good as now.

The other striking thing about watching All the President's Men in 2022 is how little has changed, and how much. We've just spent the summer watching hearings about a president's criminal misdeeds (the January 6 insurrection), and read about an entirely different set of misdeeds (the improper handling of classified material at Mar-A-Lago), so that's how little has changed - dishonest president doing dishonest things.

What's different, of course, is the willingness of said dishonest president's own party to condemn him. All the President's Men makes a point of having various Republican characters denounce what the Committee to Re-Elect the President was doing with regard to the Watergate break-in. I can't imagine future movies made about the current era being able to find quite as many Republicans willing to criticize Donald Trump, witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson notwithstanding. Especially when you consider that a lot of these supposed Republican critics of Trump are on record as saying they'd vote for him again.

I don't want to say that the events depicted in All the President's Men seem quaint in comparison to thousands of yahoos storming the Capitol, because going by the portrayal onscreen in that movie, the burglars hired by Nixon's people were just as incompetent as Trump's coterie. And one has to remember, the first time Trump was impeached was for doing stuff to undermine his rival, just like Nixon was doing. Still, it's not quite the same as whipping up a mob to kill your own vice-president and disrupt the electoral process.

Though if that security guard Frank Wills hadn't discovered the break-in, who knows what Nixon might have unleashed later on in his second term?

Separating Art from the Artist (Part N of X)

I don't really have guilty pleasures. If I like something, I like it, and I don't really feel embarrassed to like it, because I don't read books or watch movies to impress other people. That means my reading sometimes extends to genres or series that aren't high on the lists of the top SFF books of the year, for example, much of urban fantasy. I got into the genre through Daniel Abraham's Black Sun's Daughter series (which he wrote as MLN Hanover), and from there I moved to Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson books.

The books are silly, and perhaps a bit repetitive, but they're a fun, breezy read and a good way to get stuck into some female-written SFF, without also being bound to the Ann Leckies or Arkady Martines of the moment (much as I've enjoyed their books). Every once in a while, though, I stumble on some comment that Briggs puts in her protagonist's mouth. It's become a ritual over the ten years that I've been reading the Mercy Thompson books to note some passing comment and wonder what Briggs's politics are. Sometimes it's spurred by the comment that Mercy has a concealed carry license, or it might be anything else.

In the most recent book, it was when one of the werewolf characters talked about how high gas prices were. So I checked Briggs's Wikipedia page, as I always do, and found that there's no mention either way of outre political beliefs. This time, though, I persisted and found some reactions in the previous book where readers were disappointed that another character had voted for Donald Trump. I also found the interview below:

There are a couple of things to talk about here. First is the standard, and kinda disappointing, refrain that she hates both parties equally, which I've found is usually code for "I vote republican". It's tempered, though, by the very correct point that both the Democrats and the Republicans are completely beholden to dark-money - I may agree more with the Democrats' goals, but I'm just as uneasy with how much of the party is beholden to corporate interests and PACs as I am with the Republicans.

Briggs also makes the accurate point that the character in question, Mercy's husband Adam, is a white man from the South who was born in the 1950s, so what political affiliation do they expect him to have? The other source I found, criticizing Adam's voting, mentioned that he voted for Trump grudgingly, which is also an interesting characterization: in real life, plenty of conservatives have voiced displeasure with Trump but have continued to vote for him because they still can't bring themselves to vote for Democrats. Briggs doesn't mention that, but she could very well have been thinking about it.

The other important thing to keep in mind is that for all the conservative viewpoints espoused, there are also some pretty liberal ones. One good example is that werewolf who complains about high gas prices: he's gay, which she's used as a subplot in several novels to show how traditional werewolf society is still patriarchal and homophobic, but also an opportunity for the pack to evolve, by growing to accept him and his fairly elevated place in their hierarchy. The character's mate has also, over the course of the series, become a key ally to the werewolves, despite their long-ingrained homophobia. So there's some social consciousness to the series.

The final thing to unpack, for myself and those other readers, is our own reactions. Honestly, there's nothing that says complaining about high gas prices has to mean you're suddenly a member of the Proud Boys or whatever. It's true that in our rather febrile political climate, the ones most likely to complain about pain at the pump, or at the grocery store, seem to be more right-leaning (at least on social media), but high prices and inflation affect us all, and I've seen plenty of left-leaning friends express dismay at the price of gas. I'm not generally the kind of person who stops reading an author because I disagree with one or two things they or their characters say, and it's important to keep that in mind when reading these stories that might reference current events.

So the upshot is that I'm planning on continuing with the Mercy Thompson books, until I decide that the quality's gone downhill or Patricia Briggs starts having her characters give long explanations about how great Trump is. But given the tenor of the video I've shared here, I think the latter is a remote possibility.

There are definitely some Republican or Trumpist issues that we shouldn't abide in decent society, but let's also keep some perspective: characters can complain about gas prices, believe in concealed-carry or vote for Trump, but we don't have to immediately disqualify the author for those things.

Queen Elizabeth II

Just a quick set of thoughts on the passing today of the Queen of England, and the outpouring of solemnity and scorn that I've seen on social media, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Last year, I wrote a similar post after the death of Prince Philip, which I used to talk about Elizabeth's legacy and what she meant to me and basically everyone else in the West. What I wrote then is still broadly how I feel, though I should add that quite a lot of comments have talked about how her death seems like losing your grandmother. These comments have revolved around a picture taken recently (maybe in the past couple of weeks?) of her standing in a living room in her palace, looking like a kind old lady, and I can't deny, there's a grandma vibe there.

Really, how could it be otherwise? For people of my generation, Queen Elizabeth was this presence who had been there for all our parents' lives, just like a grandparent. The fact that she kept out of the spotlight helped too: she didn't make pronouncements that pissed people off, she didn't throw her weight around. I don't think I ever even heard her voice until I was in my 30s.

As far as the mourners and the detractors, as always I fall somewhere in between. I can't relate to the more fulsome expressions of grief, especially here in the US. Nor can I relate to those who are celebrating, though I can understand why some people are calling out the colonialism that the Queen represented. The British like to pretend that they "stumbled into an empire", and that they were on the whole good colonial masters; they also like to pretend that they let go of the empire with equally good grace and little bloodshed.

What I do think is too bad is how Elizabeth's death is overshadowing the various crises engulfing the UK at the moment, from runaway inflation to widespread industrial action to an energy crisis that will ruin thousands of families this winter. These crises are all pretty much self-inflicted, when seen against the backdrop of Brexit; the only thing that isn't the fault of the ruling Conservatives is the war in Ukraine, but that's just shown up how unprepared and chaotic the country was.

The new prime minister, Liz Truss, has announced an energy price cap of £2,500 per year, but if you think about it, that's already a ridiculous amount of money to pay for keeping the lights on and heating a home. Beyond that, Britain is poised to renege on its own treaty by eliminating the Northern Ireland protocol, thereby also jeopardizing peace in the region, all because the Tories can't be bothered to maintain the agreement they made or to find a long term solution that works.

In my more cynical moments today, I couldn't help thinking that Elizabeth saw her moment to shuffle off, given the chaos facing the country in the near future. Certainly the political and social climate won't do any favors to her heirs, and in decades to come we'll probably look back on the Elizabethan era with a fondness that probably won't be entirely warranted.

Still, it's the close of an incredible era, with way too many cultural moments to count. It'll be interesting to see how King Charles III navigates the next few years, and how he'll diverge from his mother's way of doing things.

Quick Thoughts on Judas and the Black Messiah

Just finished watching Judas and the Black Messiah on HBO Max, and I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to check it out earlier. As with so many movies and books in my various queues, there was always something more urgent to watch, but the spur for me to watch it now was the fact that it's set to disappear from HBO Max at the end of September.

The first thing to say is that the movie is stuffed with magnetic performances. Daniel Kaluuya is the most obvious one, playing Chairman Fred Hampton, but LaKeith Stanfield does a great job as Bill O'Neal and so does Jesse Plemons as FBI agent Roy Mitchell. Kaluuya and Stanfield have rightly been recognized for their performances, but I was struck by Plemons in this, how he's clearly evil but also, to an extent, conflicted by what he's meant to be doing. 

What I liked about his performance was contrasting it with his roles in Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad, which are clear opposites to one another, while in this film he's somewhere between the boy in Friday Night Lights and the sociopath in Breaking Bad - he has things he cares about, and isn't even completely unsympathetic to what he's asking of Bill O'Neal, but he's quick to harden his heart and do what his superiors order (with Martin Sheen playing a gross and sinister J. Edgar Hoover, making a nice change from Jed Bartlet).

Of course, it's perverse to write about Judas and the Black Messiah and only single out the white dude for praise, so let's be clear that Daniel Kaluuya is amazing. His speeches suck you in from the first scene, and the speech he gives when he gets out of jail was especially electrifying. Beyond that, I loved his relationships with Deborah, Bill, even the other gangs that he enlists into the Rainbow Coalition.

As far as the history, it's an era that I know so little about, even though the Black Panthers were founded just across the Bay in Oakland. That said, it's not surprising that a group that couched the racial liberation struggle in Marxist/Maoist terms would be hard for American culture to understand. But it was fascinating to see the organizing that they did, in addition to their more proactive methods of countering police brutality. It makes me want to find out more about them, because a cursory search on their Wikipedia page just now shows that there was a lot to the original organization, good and bad.

One thing that the movie elided but that I thought would have been interesting to raise was that Rainbow Coalition that Fred Hampton put together. He's depicted pulling together other Black gangs in Chicago, as well as Puerto Ricans and the Young Patriots, which look like a white supremacist movement, mostly because they're all shown to be southern whites and they're standing in front of a Confederate flag. It turns out that they were a far-left movement that also advocated class struggle, but aimed at poor whites from the South.

Knowing that, it makes more sense that Fred Hampton would have been able to bring them into his movement, but it would have been nice to see it spelled out better. The fact that there was a revolutionary group aimed at poor whites is a pretty eye-opening idea, since the portrayal of them on film usually seems to lean on the racism.

Of course, part of my problem is that my understanding of the 60s is mediated almost exclusively through Star Trek, Spiderman, music (Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel especially) and repeated viewings of Forrest Gump when I was in school. The latter, in particular, does a nice job of transmitting the atmosphere of the 60s, but doesn't go very deep, and none of those sources can encompass the wide sweep of everything that was happening then. So we end up with cartoonish portrayals of the Black Panthers or other movements of the era, without understanding what they were actually about.

That's why I liked this movie so much: it goes into a topic that I feel I ought to know more about, anchoring it around a fascinating personality in the form of Fred Hampton. And by showing us what was happening in the 60s, it lets us draw a comparison with how race relations are going now, showing how despite certain markers of progress, there are still the same power structures in place that led to Hampton's assassination.

As I mentioned, Judas and the Black Messiah is streaming on HBO Max through the end of September. I'd have liked to watch it earlier, but I'm glad I caught it now.

British Library Crime Classics

While my go-to genres of books are SFF and history, I'm never averse to the odd crime, thriller or mystery novel. This is one of those interests I've inherited from my dad, and like him, my preferences range from John le Carré at the more literary end to trashy airport thrillers, though he traditionally opted for Tom Clancy doorstoppers, while my interests run to the pithier international thrillers, like Tokyo by Mo Hayder (which I read when I went to Tokyo).

More recently, he's developed a taste for British mysteries, after years of picking up Agatha Christie mysteries (presumably an interest he got from my grandmother), so whenever we've gone to Borderlands, an SFF bookstore we like up in San Francisco, he's brought back various books from the so-called Golden Age of Crime Fiction. I've skipped over the Dorothy L Sayers books he's gotten, grown concerned at the decay of PD James's Adam Dalgliesh books, and explored with interest the really obscure books he's bought from the British Library Crime Classics series.

This series is heavily focused on writers that have been largely forgotten and are long out of print. There are basically no names I've heard of before (John Bude, Freeman Wills Croft, Mavis Doriel Hay, et al), and the titles are what you might call stereotypical: The Cornish Coast Murder, The Santa Klaus Murder, Death in the Tunnel, Murder in the Channel. If a TV show like the Simpsons made fun of the British interwar mystery genre, these are the kinds of titles they might come up with.

The quality is also, to put it charitably, variable. I've read four of the books so far, and I'm at 2-for-2 of good vs bad. The first I read, Death in the Tunnel, while stolid and far from unpredictable, was at least well-constructed and terse, while Murder in the Channel was boring and afflicted by terrible prose. The Cornish Coast Murder benefited from its real-life locations (apparently a novelty in British writing back in the 1930s) but is dragged down by really rotten prose and dialogue. On the other hand, The Santa Klaus Murder is one that I resisted for the longest time, because it seemed to contain the worst excesses of the "cosy" mystery subgenre, but it's proven much better-written and, if not gripping per se, moderately well constructed (no spoilers, though, as I'm planning to finish it tonight).

What's interesting is how the series has resurrected all these books that have been forgotten since World War II, largely because the authors have been dead for decades. John Bude, for example, wrote about 30 mystery novels, apparently, but since he died in 1957 is unknown now (that, and the Cornish Coast Murder is pretty bad, as I said). Mavis Doriel Hay, by contrast, died in 1979, but she only wrote the Santa Klaus Murder and two other mysteries, all of which were also forgotten since she wrote on other non-fiction topics during her long career.

It just shows how it's generally hard to predict what will remain in print forty, fifty or sixty years in the future. Agatha Christie certainly created some entertaining and atmospheric mysteries, but is she really better than these other authors? Or to put it another way, if an author can churn out potboilers at the rate that John Bude did, it seems strange that they'd have gone so completely out of print. Though given how easily some SFF books fall out of print even these days, it's probably not that surprising.

The other interesting thing is seeing the mores of interwar Britain portrayed this way. You can obviously get that by reading Agatha Christie (just google the original title of her book, And Then There Were None), but it's still fascinating seeing that culture even in these little-known books. Bude's Cornish Coast Murder contains some whoppers, like suggesting that the murderer's erratic firing indicated a woman, while Hay's Santa Klaus Murder is full of class commentary about the murder victim's driver and secretary, though in the case of the latter, Hay does a better job of portraying those attitudes as wrong-headed.

Of course, there's also the fact that so many of these unearthed writers are women, which means characterizations are presented differently. Hay isn't quite as sexist as Bude, as you can imagine, and her female characters (and central romance) are better drawn. The genre is one that's always been heavily represented by female authors, so it's good to see that a number of these women are also being brought back into print; contrast that with Gollancz's SF and Fantasy Masterworks series, which republish some notable (if not quite forgotten) works in those genres, but almost exclusively by male authors.

As I've suggested, some of these books and authors deserve their obscurity, but if any of them catch your attention, they're worth a read. And for all that I've criticized John Bude's first mystery novel, I was sorely tempted to borrow the other three by him that my dad had on his shelf in Italy; in the end I left them there, for future lazy vacation reads.

Spoiler-Filled Thoughts on the Sandman

Just finished Netflix's adaptation of DC/Vertigo's The Sandman the other day, and thought I'd share some thoughts on it, both the good and the bad. As it says in the title, I'll be talking spoilers, so be warned (though do spoilers apply for a TV show that faithfully follows a comic that ended about 30 years ago...?).

Mike Duncan vs Mary Beard: Different Approaches to History

A couple of months ago I wrote a post talking about how much I was enjoying Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast, and how it was sticking with me more than previous attempts to learn about Roman history, including Mary Beard's SPQR. Now that I've finished Duncan's series (as of yesterday) and had a chance in Italy to review some of Beard's book, I thought it would be a good time to look at the two different approaches to history and why I responded better to one than the other.

Part of it is clearly the way my brain retains information. Over the course of several months, I listened to Duncan narrate various points in Roman history, and I think the repetition helped facts to stick in my mind. He also helpfully pointed out when an important figured entered the historical record, so that my mind was primed to learn more about this person I'd been told to expect.

By contrast, when I read SPQR it was in my lunch breaks at work, and in the evenings, and at times I've found that I focus too much on getting through pages to really take in what I'm reading. I have this romantic idea of how many books I should be reading each month or year (4 and 50, respectively), and sometimes find myself chasing page counts rather than luxuriating in the prose or the facts for which I'm ostensibly reading a book. It seems likely that SPQR fell victim to that, as other books have before it.

Ironically, I'm finding that in certain circumstances the antidote to that forgetting is to read multiple books at the same time, a few pages at a time. Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is one of several books I'm reading (or rather rereading) at the moment, and I feel I'm retaining more than I did the first time I read it, back in 2003 or so.

The other difference between SPQR and the History of Rome is how they're organized. SPQR is clearly a work of erudition, drawing on Beard's expertise in Roman and Classical history, but looking at it again last month it didn't seem organized in the way I'd have preferred (I'm tying myself into knots to avoid saying that it's poorly organized, because I don't think it necessarily is - it's just poorly organized for me).

I suppose this is how my brain organizes information, but I need that spine of who was in charge, and in what sequence, to take in the sweep of history. This is why I've retained more of John Keay's China: A History, than of his India: A History. The book on China is given shape by explaining how each of the major dynasties arose, while India's history is a little more messy and so I have more trouble understanding the significance of the Maurya Empire, among others. All I know is that it came long before the Mughals, but I have precious little understanding of what happened between them - hence why I'm also rereading that book.

Another example is British history, or English history, if you prefer. A couple of years ago I picked up Simon Schama's History of Britain, thinking that it would be good to finally have a grounding in the history of the nation in which I've spent most of my life, apart from the US. His books are well-written, don't get me wrong, and I did get some understanding of that sweep of history, but for whatever reason his middle volume, on the English Civil War and the various religious wars, escaped me.

Subsequent to that, I picked up a copy of Rebecca Fraser's Story of Britain, which in the UK is (possibly cheekily) titled A People's History of Britain, and which I christened in my head A Tory History of Britain. It's defiantly old-fashioned, hanging its structure off the doings of kings and queens and nobles, and Oliver Cromwell; a review I read praised its focus, saying that it was superior to the current vogue for relating the daily life in "Boringshire".

Having read Fraser's book, though, I can say that the approach helps, conservative revisionism aside (and besides, Robert Tombs's The English and Their History made Fraser's Tory History look positively Blairite). Don't ask me to distinguish between the Angevins and the Plantagenets, or to put the Poitevins into that historical context [never mind, I just looked it up on Wikipedia. Ed.], but between one thing and another I have a better sense of how the Stuart dynasty failed and gave way to the Hanoverians, who led to Queen Victoria and the current British royals.

By the way, this isn't to say that history should never deviate from talking about what nobles and royals were doing. The History of Rome took a couple of episodes to talk about what daily life was actually like in different points of the empire, and did so in a way that made it come alive better than any source I'd seen before. That said, his series misses out on what women were doing during those centuries of Rome. This is in part because the sources we have available don't say anything about women, although he has a lot more to say about various empresses at the end of the Western Empire.

Looking at SPQR again, Beard organized her book to touch on various topics, and only devoted one chapter to the emperors, from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius. Her overall scope ends in the early 200s, when Caracalla gave citizenship to all residents of the empire, as opposed to just Romans or Italians. There are certainly good reasons to foreground the historical currents rather than the emperors, who weren't always in control of events, but I can't help feeling I'd have gotten more out of her book if she'd used the sequence of emperors (roughly speaking; you don't have to go into too much detail on Otho, Galba or Vitellius, as she doesn't) as a starting point to talk about what life was like in the empire.

To put it another way, not much may have happened during the reign of Antoninus Pius, fourth of the so-called Five Good Emperors, but that's because Rome was enjoying an unprecedented period of stability since the accession of Nerva through the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian. Antoninus Pius isn't too interesting on his own, but he's worth mentioning when considering that stability, since it would end with the death of his successor Marcus Aurlius, and would never be attained again. SPQR didn't leave me with that understanding, and the History of Rome podcast did.

Back in Italy

I'm writing this from my family house in Italy, and in a lot of ways, it's been a bit of a relief being back. There are also ways in which it hasn't, like the gigantic heatwave plaguing all of Europe right now, but unfortunately this was the time that I could go, so I'm trying to make the best of it: I'm currently sitting in the living room on the top floor, in the dark, with all the windows open. There's an anti-mosquito spiral burning in one window, and a fan blowing in air from outside in another, so hopefully this is keeping the bugs (e.g. mosquitos and hornets) away.

But anyway, back to... just being here. The last time I was in Europe was May 2019, not only before the pandemic but before I met my now-ex. I turned 40 during the trip, and had two birthday parties (one in London with my mom and sisters, the other here at Brozolo with my dad and extended family), as well as taking a city break to Stockholm in between. After I got together with my ex, I planned to bring her here, and show her London and Paris too, but of course, the pandemic got in the way the last two summers.

I was still a little apprehensive about traveling, since despite what almost everyone seems to think, the pandemic hasn't ended yet. But I figured that my parents and sisters have all traveled between continents without catching it, so I could too. So I booked my flights so that I'd be away for most of the month of July, and got to planning with my folks.

One thing I made clear to my mom and dad separately was that I wanted to keep as much as possible to how I've been doing things in the Bay Area. No indoor restaurants, although I was prepared to make a couple of exceptions, and I'd wear masks everywhere. My plans changed a little at the last minute, so that I wouldn't be in Rome with my mom on this trip, which has made staying masked up even easier, because being out in the country means fewer crowds and rarely eating out at restaurants.

I also stipulated that I wouldn't be stopping by London, because masks are politicized there (almost as bad as in the US), and because it seems that government policy there is to give everyone Covid and then tell them they're on their own. More seriously, much as I'd love to go back, I think that'll have to wait until the pandemic is more under control than it currently is. In the event, I think I did the right thing because travel through the UK has been even more disrupted than in other parts of Europe.

Otherwise, things are pleasingly the same as they ever were here. My dad's put me to work on various DIY projects, and I've also put myself to work doing some cleaning and tidying, because things pile up and my dad's not the best at housework... We've gone to see relatives at their houses, and are planning on doing some day trips before I leave next week. My sister's also coming over from London this weekend.

Some stuff is frustrating, like being unable to beat this heat, but generally it's nice getting back to my routine from before the pandemic. A lot of stuff is just how I remember it, and some stuff has improved (like the internet here at home is loads better than three years ago). It's also been nice just being Italian (ish) for a few weeks, and not worrying about the usual stupid stuff I have on my mind at home.

Now that I've managed this trip (hopefully without picking up Covid, but there's still a week to go!), I'm starting to think about taking more trips. Ideally abroad, because mask-wearing is so politicized in the US that I just don't want to deal with worrying about my seat mates freaking out because I'm wearing one. It'd be nice to see some other parts of Europe, or even to get out to Asia, if they're letting Americans in. I also want to go visit my other sister in Australia, though that might be for next year, hopefully when the virus has calmed down.

It's ironic that I earn more than twice as much as I did eight years ago, when I moved to California from London, but I'm taking way fewer interesting trips than I did at that job. Of course, part of that comes from the pandemic, but I'm hoping it calms down soon so that I can get out of the house more. In part, being here has reminded me how much I missed going to bars and restaurants and museums, seeing friends and family and hopping on planes every once in a while.

It'd also be nice if I could finally manage to get out to Vancouver for that trip I promised myself back in 2018, as a reward for starting my previous job. The mini guidebook I bought then has been sitting on my nightstand ever since, so it'd be great to put it to use.