The power of sports fandom can at times seem irrational, especially to those who, blessed with an immunity to this potent virus, can utter those devastatingly inhumane words: “It’s just a game.” As the novelist Nick Hornby wrote in the opening of Fever Pitch, his wonderful memoir of growing up an Arsenal fan in England: “I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.”

Sitting in a Phoenix sports bar watching the Carolina Panthers utterly dismantle the Arizona Cardinals in the NFC Championship Game, I witnessed this pain of which Hornby spoke, and which I had felt in my core the previous week when the Denver Broncos knocked my Steelers out of the playoffs. The atmosphere in the bar went from celebratory to funereal over the span of two quarters. By the end, we were at a wake, talking in hushed tones, awkwardly reaching for some reassuring words of consolation for each other.

“Well, they had a good season” sounded a lot like the variants of that line you often hear at funerals: “He led such a full life.” At least no one said: “It’s only a game.”

So why the depth of passion among so many sports fans? Part of it, to be sure, is our appreciation and love for the sport being followed, and that sport’s central role in the sliver of our lives we can devote to leisure and entertainment. But I think that is only the tip of sports fandom’s iceberg.

The depth of our passion and commitment as sports fans comes from our sense of identity, how we connect to our past selves, and how we remain connected to the meaningful places in our lives, and to the people around us. Sports fandom, like religion, is fueled by nostalgia and a yearning for permanence in a world that is inherently impermanent.

Which is what makes the disappearance of Atlético Español so traumatic for me—the fatal version of the disruption alluded to by Hornby, alongside the pain. When I tune into Liga MX and see so many of the other teams Atlético used to play against still around, it’s as if I’ve been edited out of a picture I thought I was in, as if the moorings tying me to my childhood in Mexico have been irreversibly cut.

Back in America’s version of football, many people are stunned that, after a deluge of scandals in the last couple of years (brain injuries, star players involved in off-field crimes, allegations of cheating, franchise owners eager to bilk cities for sweetheart stadium deals), the NFL’s ratings continue to spike. Ratings for this past regular season and playoffs are up from a year ago, at a time when audiences for almost everything else keep fragmenting.

When NBC launched Sunday Night Football in 2006, the telecast ranked ninth in primetime ratings for the season. Ever since 2011, Sunday Night Football has been the undisputed primetime leader. A remarkable 14 of the 15 most watched TV shows last fall were football games, and the six highest-rated broadcasts of all times are Super Bowls (the M.A.S.H. 1983 finale is clinging to the seventh spot).

The NFL has done a brilliant job of leveraging fans’ nostalgia and desire to remain identified with the places they’ve moved away from. Hence the need to keep franchises in places like Green Bay and Buffalo, even if many of their fans cheer them on in warmer climates, and for a business model that makes all franchises competitive.

Parity means most teams will have moments of glory, enough to deepen an entire generation’s engagement with their ancestral NFL tribe. But the league puts its long-term success at risk when it lets teams move around for short-term gain, as it recently did when it allowed the Rams to leave St. Louis for Los Angeles.

We live in an age when we share fewer narrative threads in common, and when fewer narrative threads endure throughout our lives. Holidays help, including the upcoming observance of Super Bowl 50. I remember my mother in her later years turning on the NFL on Sundays to have games on in the background, because she liked to hear “the sounds of fall,” or because it connected her to her son if the Steelers were playing, or to her beloved Boston if it was the Patriots.

The Star Wars cultural phenomenon springs from a similar nostalgia and yearning for recurring shared narratives in an age of impermanence. Its fandom feels sports-like. I took my 11 year-old son to see The Force Awakens on opening weekend, with a lump in my throat at the realization that he is the exact age I was back when the first (or fourth, if you insist) Star Wars came out. Naysayers who complained that the plot of the new film too closely mimics the original Star Wars completely miss the franchise’s appeal. I don’t begrudge successful Steeler seasons because I have seen them before; I thrill at quarterback Ben Roethlisberger and wide receiver Antonio Brown following in the footsteps of Steeler greats Terry Bradshaw and Lynn Swann. And so it is with Rey’s journey echoing Luke Skywalker’s.

We all yearn to tap into these stories and memories that have defined us. As the Red Sox-obsessed protagonist in the Hollywood adaptation of Fever Pitch, played by Jimmy Fallon, asks his less-devoted-to-Fenway girlfriend:

Do you still care about anything you cared about years ago?

The post Why We Let Sports Teams Break Our Hearts appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Forget all that talk about the wisdom of voters, and the great American people. We are the problem, with our shrill, hyperbolic, extremist, intolerant, and polarized ways of engaging in politics over the past two decades.

I can recall in the late ’90s being totally befuddled by how some of my friends, perfectly sensible people when the subject wasn’t politics, would go apoplectic at the mere mention of Bill Clinton.

Our president, I can recall a Michigan banker friend named John telling me, was a socialist, a dishonorable man intent on destroying America. John would practically start shaking when discussing Clinton and the need for the cretin to be removed from office. I couldn’t understand where all this vitriol came from. To what water cooler did he retreat to where such views were the norm? (A clue: I think it was from him that I first heard of Fox News).

Sure, Clinton had his personal weaknesses (almost clichés for a politico, though, which in other eras would not likely have led to impeachment proceedings). But as far as I could see, the president was overseeing a massive economic boom (deregulating John’s banking industry along the way), taking on Democratic unions to push for free trade agreements, balancing the federal budget, and deploying U.S. forces overseas, when required, in places like Kosovo and Iraq. How did all that make Bill Clinton a crazed socialist?

I was equally perplexed by the irrational level of contempt and vitriol leftist friends and colleagues felt towards George W. Bush late in his first term, and throughout his second term. The man was a fascist, they’d say, amid wishful talk of impeachment. I, too, disagreed with much of what Bush did, and worried about that administration’s competence, but the criticism among impassioned liberals, congregating online at a new crop of progressive websites and watching MSNBC and Jon Stewart, was absurdly over the top.

The facts, once again, were becoming awfully elastic and selectively parsed. Take the war in Iraq. Within a couple of years of the 2003 invasion, Democrats talked about the war as a secretive, despicable Bush plot. Never mind that plenty of Democrats supported the initial decision to go to war, and that there had been little daylight between the Clinton national security team’s assessment of Saddam Hussein’s behavior, capabilities, and intentions, and the assessment of the Bush team.

What was becoming clear, however, is that we Americans—specifically the more politically engaged among us—have been losing our ability to respectfully and constructively disagree with governing leaders of a different party, not to mention with each other. Instead of opposing certain policies of a president we don’t see eye to eye with, we jump to questioning that president’s legitimacy to even hold the office, to represent us.

Of course, this psychosis has been most pronounced during President Barack Obama’s administration, when plenty of Republicans have repeatedly questioned the president’s birthplace and religion. And, once again, the extremist rhetoric portraying him as a feckless socialist seems far removed from facts, when you consider how he responded to the financial crisis by shoring up banking institutions without taking them over, embraced a moderate market-based approach to healthcare reform (instead of a single-payer approach), and ratcheted up the drone campaigns against terrorists in countries like Yemen and Pakistan. There’s plenty to disagree with Obama on, and I understand conservatives’ ire at Obamacare and some of his progressive social agenda. But isn’t there a way to oppose the president without ridiculing the man, questioning his patriotism, and denying his legitimacy as a twice-elected leader of the free world?

The anecdotal sense that we have become a far more polarized society was borne out last year by the largest political survey ever conducted by the Pew Research Center. The survey found that Republicans and Democrats are further apart ideologically than at any point in recent history; that the two parties no longer overlapped in any meaningful way; that, in 20 years, the share of Americans expressing consistently across-the-board conservative or liberal positions had doubled, as had the percentage of Republicans and Democrats holding “very unfavorable” views of the other party. The study also found that more and more of us are hiding out in our hardened ideological silos, increasingly segregated from fellow citizens and media that don’t share our worldview. And by worldview, we no longer seem to be talking solely about one’s interpretation of objective facts, but one’s subjective choice of facts.

My list of causes for this would include the end of the Cold War (the daily threat of nuclear extinction didn’t allow for self-destructive partisanship); the balkanization of media, aided by the advent of the Internet; the takeover of politics by the fundraising-industrial complex (it’s much easier to raise money if you’re screaming that you’re fighting a danger to the republic rather than a well-meaning, if misguided, friend from the other side of the aisle); and the poisoning of the idea that Washington is a permanent home where our representatives should live, mingle, and learn to get along.

Choose your favorite polarizing culprits from that list, or add others to it, but there is no denying that we’ve landed at an ugly moment on the eve of the 2016 vote. Recent primaries have featured early “silly seasons” when voters have flirted with absurd candidacies before sobering up. But now the silly season is threatening to spill over into the actual voting process.

Let’s stipulate the obvious: Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders are beyond the pale. In a more serious time, they never would have been considered credible candidates in a national election. Only in silos of same-thinking dogmatism is this not obvious. Trump, in particular, has masterfully capitalized on the cultural moment, turning into a fascist demagogue before our eyes, exhorting people to channel their anger with the status quo and “Make America Great Again” by bullying foreigners and minorities, those “others” who are to blame for all our woes. His candidacy embodies and fulfills the hysterical tenor of our political discourse. He is our political Frankenstein. If we elect Donald Trump president, half the country’s cries that our president is a fascist unfit for office will—for once—be no exaggeration.

The Republicans don’t have a monopoly on a lack of seriousness. Sanders is not leading in the polls, but the fact that so many Democrats treat him as a legitimate choice is alarming. When the self-avowed Socialist (again, real life is catching up with our once exaggerated epithets) was asked in a recent debate how high he’d like to raise income tax rates if elected, he vaguely joked that they wouldn’t go higher than 90 percent. Hillary Clinton is in a different league, credibility-wise, but our debased political culture is forcing her into some intellectually dishonest contortions. So, for instance, she had to come out against President Obama’s Asian trade pact (which she championed and negotiated as Secretary of State) because the “base” these days won’t tolerate any deviance from its dogma or overlap between the parties. It all boils down to “us” versus “them.”

There is that old aphorism (often attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, but of uncertain origins) that, in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve. We must have a reckoning with ourselves, as voters and citizens. It’s great fun to sit back and mock, or demonize, these presidential candidates, but they aren’t the underlying problem. We are.

The post Don’t Blame The Candidates—Blame Yourself appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Indeed, the Stade de France was the one target in Paris last Friday night where the terrorists must have known they’d encounter a level of security they might not (and ultimately did not, thankfully) overcome. But still they deemed it a worthwhile attempt. At least one, and possibly up to three, suicide bombers sought to enter the stadium. As it happened, the first bomber detonated his vest upon being stopped at a security perimeter (the boom was heard during the game’s telecast, and was confused within the stadium for firecrackers). Two other suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the stadium; between them, the thwarted bombers only took the life of one victim. The gruesome plan probably entailed sequencing the explosions inside the stadium in such a way that would have killed (before the eyes of the head of state and a global TV audience) not only scores of people seated near the bombers, but also possibly hundreds or thousands more in an ensuing panicked stampede.

There is another more substantive reason why Islamist fanatics intent on a war between civilizations would target a major soccer match: the sport’s singular role in bridging Western culture and Muslim youth. If you are a crazed “Soldier of the Caliphate,” soccer ranks up there with Hollywood movies and American pop music among the most potent threats in your deluded campaign to win over hearts and minds around the world.

Soccer is one form of global pop culture not driven by the United States, but it’s still a potent Western influence. If terrorists in the Middle East spend any time fantasizing about attacking an NFL or NBA game, it’d only be because they know Americans care about those games; they themselves, and the public in their home countries, certainly don’t. But soccer—the global sport centered around Europe’s major leagues but drawing in players, fans, and business interests from most of the planet—is an obsession throughout the Muslim world.

The game also offers the most prominent example of successful cross-cultural assimilation within Europe. Targeting a match between the French and German national squads may have been a way to strike at two “infidel” nations at once. But, as analysts were quick to point out after the attacks, some of the most prominent French and German stars in recent years—Germany’s Mesut Özil and Sami Khedira, France’s Karim Benzema and Bacary Sagna, among many others—are Muslim celebrities of immigrant backgrounds.

The impressive diversity of Europe’s major soccer leagues, and of their national teams, has long been a potent force for disarming xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment, and outright racism, across Europe. North African immigrants have never felt more welcome in France than when the entire nation rallied around Zinedine Zidane, the captain of the 1998 World Cup-winning French squad. And it is no small cultural milestone for Turkish immigrants in Germany to have millions of German fans these days wearing a jersey bearing the name of midfield artist Özil.

But the converse often gets overlooked: the impact of immigrant players on the mindsets of soccer fans across the Middle East and North Africa, and the crazed terrorists who thrive on the narrative that there is no compatibility between degenerate infidel societies and righteous Muslims.

The sport is a seductress of Muslim youth, as it is of all youth around the world, much to the chagrin of those eager to fend off Western influences. Across the Middle East, soccer has been a galvanizing force in the debates over whether girls should be allowed to play sports. And just look at any photos of large crowds milling about anywhere in the region—whether at a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan or an upscale mall in Dubai or Saudi Arabia—and you will invariably see some people sporting Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, or Manchester United jerseys.

European games are avidly watched across the region, courtesy of Qatari-owned beIN Sports, the same TV network broadcasting Spanish and French games to U.S. audiences. The success of so many Muslim and immigrant players in the English, Spanish, French, and German leagues provides a constant counter-narrative to tales of immutable estrangement and alienation between West and East. And it isn’t just about players—business interests from Muslim countries (most prominently the airlines from the Gulf states) brand themselves through the sport, to a point where people in the Middle East (and as far away as Malaysia, in the case of some teams) proudly feel that certain fabled European clubs belong to them.

In some cases, they literally do. Paris’ own iconic team, Paris Saint-Germain F.C., is now owned by Qataris.

The targeting of soccer by jihadists fighting modernity should only intensify as the game’s influence continues to expand in the Muslim world. And when you look at the calendar of upcoming major tournaments—with the next two World Cups slated for Russia and Qatar, and next summer’s Euro Championship hosted by France, kicking off in the targeted Stade de France—security forces everywhere, not to mention lovers of the game, should consider last Friday night a declaration of war by the terrorists against the world’s most beloved sport.

The post Why ISIS Declared War on Soccer appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Even as candidates vying for the nomination of the party associated with big business call for walls separating us from our supposedly scary southern neighbor, big business itself is treating Mexico more as an organic extension of the U.S. market, and less as a foreign country.

This has long been true in how companies treat their U.S. and Mexico manufacturing operations as part of one integrated supply chain. And now consumers are on the verge of benefiting from a more tangible indication of corporate America’s embrace of Mexico. In a move that will save travelers, immigrants and cross-border businesses a fortune, telephone companies are rushing to acknowledge that Mexico isn’t just another foreign country, but part of our North American home.

In July, T-Mobile announced its “Mobile Without Borders” initiative, under which most of its plans will cease treating Canada and Mexico as foreign markets. If you are in Los Angeles and your mother is in Guadalajara, you can now call or text her using the same minutes or flat rate you have to call your friends across town, or in neighboring states. If you are an American businessman in Mexico City or a tourist in Cancun, bring your phone, and use it down there as you would on a trip to Chicago. No more fumbling with separate SIM cards or astronomical roaming charges—or feeling disconnected.

In pitching “Mobile Without Borders,” T-Mobile CEO John J. Legere told USA Today that his rivals were on track to make $10 billion in foreign roaming charges—a windfall he called one of the wireless industry’s “dirtiest little secrets.” This is a tax on connections with our closest neighbors, since Mexico is by far the number one destination for foreign calls out of the United States. Together with Canada, it accounts for some 35 percent of all foreign calls originating in the U.S. and 59 percent of all cross-border minutes.

Bravo, T-Mobile, says this subscriber. I have many friends and work collaborators in Mexico, and find it absurd how difficult it is to talk to them, especially when away from an office landline. I often can’t answer calls from Mexico, and have written countless apologetic emails about not being able to call anytime soon because “mi celular no puede llamar a México.” Similarly, when I am visiting Mexico, my phone is useless for communicating with folks back home.

T-Mobile may have been first off the block to erase the border for callers, but it acted in reaction to AT&T’s far more consequential $4.4 billion acquisition of two Mexican mobile carriers this past year. AT&T is now in the process of spending billions more to upgrade its Mexican network, and rolling out its brand to Mexican consumers, as it seeks to take on the overwhelming leader in the market, Carlos Slim’s América Móvil. Both AT&T and América Móvil plan to make the North American market one seamless calling zone for more than 400 million consumers.

This all amounts to a belated fulfillment, on the communications front, of the greater interconnectedness between our societies recognized by the adoption two decades ago of North American Free Trade Agreement. Why is this happening now? Two reasons: The first is the increasing power and influence of Hispanic consumers on this side of the border. The second is the determination by the Mexican government that it is time to even the playing field for new competitors willing to take on Slim’s once-protected phone monopoly.

Canada, for its part, has long felt closer to home when it comes to making calls. Thanks to the old AT&T’s North American Numbering Plan devised more than a half-century ago, Canada and some small Caribbean nations were included in our shared area code system, precluding the need to dial the dreaded “011” prefix for international calls.

Although you would never know it from listening to U.S. politicians, Canada and Mexico are linked to the United States to a different degree than other countries. We are in extreme denial of this reality when it comes to Mexico, our neighbor with whom we have unique geographic, economic, cultural, and demographic overlaps. It was always bizarre that our phone companies would treat (and price) calls to Mexico as if they were calls halfway around the world.

The reflex to push Mexico out of our consciousness, and pretend it isn’t right here, is pervasive across government (our immigration laws don’t acknowledge our special interconnectedness with Mexico either, which is why they are so dysfunctional) and broader society. About once a week I send notes to major media outlets gently pointing out that Mexico, contrary to their reporting, is not a “Central American nation.” I usually get an immediate appreciative “Oops, of course, we’ll correct” note back. But there’s a troubling powerful cultural undertow that leads to these repeated “oops” moments.

It is fitting that carriers are now acknowledging that there is a single cohesive North America market that includes Mexico, no part of which is as “foreign” as the rest of the world. And that’s true no matter what Donald Trump and his imitators on the campaign trail tell you.

The post Why is Mexico Still an International Call? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Obama is spending a good amount of his remaining political capital selling the nation on an ambitious free trade deal that would bind together a dozen Pacific nations in the Americas and East Asia. This so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would represent 40 percent of the world’s GDP and a potentially valuable counterweight to Chinese influence in Asia. (China is not a party to the proposed agreement.) In pushing so passionately for this deal, Obama is following Bill Clinton’s 1990s playbook. Clinton, who faced down the Democratic Party’s organized labor constituency to adopt the North American Free Trade Area and help establish the World Trade Organization, embraced the notion that the outside world offers the United States more of an opportunity than a threat.

Presidential candidates (including Barack Obama in 2008) courting narrow constituencies tend to make anti-trade talk. But America hasn’t had a truly protectionist president since Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression. That’s no accident. When it comes to the nation’s overall welfare, the economic case in favor of expanding trade is simply too overwhelming to ignore if you sit in the Oval Office. And then there is the national security imperative: It is hard to lead the world if you are afraid to trade with it

But in our political realm, trade has become to many on the left what immigration is to the right: the convenient foreign scapegoat for everything people uncomfortable with change are upset about. This is mostly about feelings, and mostly our feelings about those people. Call it bipartisan xenophobia: Conservative Republicans unfairly demonize foreigners in this country; liberal Democrats unfairly demonize foreigners in other countries.

Those opposing the trade deal disingenuously accuse the administration of shrouding its pernicious giveaway to corporations and foreigners in unprecedented secrecy. Never mind that sensitive treaty negotiations between nations are always conducted behind closed doors, and that presidents have been granted congressional authority to negotiate such deals and refer them to Congress for a straight up-or-down vote since the 1930s. Headline writers at The Economist penned an Onion-esque headline for a story on the pushback on trade Obama is facing from his usual allies on the left: “Fighting the Secret Plot to Make the World Richer.”

But Obama is understandably more exasperated than amused, snapping that Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a leading critic of the trade deal, is simply “wrong on this,” and that his fellow Democrats need to “dig into the facts” on the subject.

The president has correctly noted that the TPP would level the playing field for American exporters, like U.S. automakers, providing them better access to countries like Japan, whose own exports already have good access to our domestic market. He’s also right in arguing that critics of globalization tend to overstate the extent to which trade agreements are responsible for the disruptive power of broader market forces. Much of the manufacturing outsourcing and the surge of Chinese imports over the past two decades had little to do with any specific trade deal. For that matter, people tend to overstate the impact of globalization on wages and employment, while understating the impact of technology (and its productivity dividends). Better to blame foreigners than our cool new devices for whatever ails us.

One of the arguments for the TPP, and for greater economic engagement with Asia, is that there is no setting back the clock on globalization. The United States can either choose to remain a close partner to Asia and the prime architect of the world’s economy and trading system, or step aside and allow China to take the lead on both fronts.

TPP critics are also attacking efforts to harmonize standards—environmental regulations, foreign investment limits, property rights—across borders. They’re accusing Obama of doing the bidding of large multinational corporations. However, as we understood in the Clinton era, we don’t live in a populist zero-sum dystopia. Sometimes, what’s good for big business can also be good for the rest of us, too. The European Union is the classic example of how efforts to harmonize and regulate standards across borders can dramatically shore up the rule of law in many nations, both for citizens and business.

Closer to home, Clinton’s much-maligned North American Free Trade Agreement led to an explosion in trade within North America. Mexico is now the second-largest buyer of American goods on earth, importing more U.S. goods than all of the once-heralded “BRIC” countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) combined.

Democrats in Congress who oppose their president on TPP, and a similar proposed deal with the European Union, should all read a recent Wall Street Journal story on how Mexico became the fourth-largest exporter of cars in the world. Mexico has attracted more than $20 billion in new investments by automakers and parts suppliers in recent years. The American South has also been successful in attracting foreign automakers’ investment, but most of their recent investment decisions, including by companies deciding whether to expand existing U.S. or Mexico operations, have gone Mexico’s way. The reason cited for Mexico’s edge wasn’t the old story about labor costs. It was the fact that Mexico has something precious the U.S. does not have: free trade agreements, beyond NAFTA, with many of the world’s largest economies, including the European Union. The lead example in the story was Audi’s decision to build its Q5 for all markets in Mexico instead of the U.S., because the company doesn’t want to pay the costly tariffs it would need to bring a U.S.-made car back into Europe.

The current TPP fight, like many of our other debates around trade, is stuck in a caricature-ish and outdated view of a global economy neatly divided between north and south, one in which it is unreasonable (so goes the labor unions’ argument) to ask us affluent folks in the global north to compete with those striving underpaid poor people in the global south. The fact is that by 2030, an estimated two-thirds of middle-class consumers in the world will live in Asia. It would be self-defeating for the United States to retreat from its free-trading agenda just when the purchasing power of consumers elsewhere reaches new highs—and overshadows our own. There has never been a better time to invest in high-paying export jobs.

Both corporate America and the public seem to get this, even as the political debate would suggest a vast divide between them. A recent Gallup survey shows 58 percent of Americans see increased trade as an opportunity, with only 33 percent seeing it as a threat. But Obama, who enjoys rare GOP backing on this issue, needs to bring along a face-saving number of Democrats to close the deal. Hillary Clinton advocated for the TPP as Secretary of State, but now ducks whenever asked about it, worried as she is about being outflanked on the left.

Which leaves her husband. My free trader’s dream consists of Bill getting a hall pass from his wife’s campaign (or maybe slipping his security detail?) to speak out, on behalf of his own legacy.

The post Can Barack Obama Uphold Bill Clinton’s Free Trade Legacy? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

All of which is to say I don’t envy Janet Yellen.

The Federal Reserve has been a fantastically lax economic parent since 2008, letting us all binge on the financial equivalent of sugary treats like its quantitative easing and near-zero percent interest rates that basically begged financial institutions to take free money. When historians look back at Washington’s response to the crisis of 2008-2009, they will marvel at the Fed’s unprecedented, “whatever it takes” measures, and at how these dwarfed the stimulus provided by Congress and the Obama administration.

Trouble is, it’s proven awfully hard for the Fed to pull us back to normalcy. After much drama, the Fed has managed to phase out its quantitative easing program (which entailed the central bank pouring tens of billions into the economy a month by buying a range of assets to prop up their value). But it has kept its benchmark interest rate at essentially nada (that is the technical financial term) for an unprecedented period, as if the economy were still in need of life support. We can quibble over how strong the economic recovery has been, but we no longer have any business being in the intensive care ward. In the past couple of years, employment numbers have surged, consumer confidence has rebounded, the banking system has gotten itself back on solid footing and, by some measures, the stock market has tripled in value from its harrowing bottom in March 2009.

And so, the drama that unfolded last Wednesday in Washington was all too familiar to parents faced with the challenge of pulling their kids back to normalcy while trying to minimize the associated temper tantrums (in this case, by a stock market addicted to easy money and the safety blanket of a Fed willing to do whatever it takes to keep us out of trouble). This was Janet Yellen’s “just one more cookie” or “just 15 more minutes of TV and then it really is time for bed” moment.

She artfully minimized the temper tantrum. In the Byzantine and cultish Fed-watching realm, no ritual is more venerated than the parsing of the statement released by the central bank’s committee that meets to review interest rates every other month. For some time that statement has consistently included the soothing phrase that the Fed would be “patient” before hiking rates again, but investors have been fretting for months over when the Fed would drop that one word, realizing that it would amount to a last call or final warning.

The Fed had no alternative but to drop the word “patient” from its statement, lest it lose all parental credibility. But it confounded expectations by sending other conflicting signals, including on how low it thinks unemployment can go before it triggers inflation. And in the most memorable phrase of the day, cheered by the stock market but probably deplored by parenting experts worldwide, Yellen stated at her afternoon press conference: “Just because we removed the word ‘patient’ from the statement doesn’t mean we’re going to be impatient.” Which, to a kid, would sound a lot like, “Who knows what will happen—you might even score another cookie!”

Now, to fully understand Yellen’s apparent indecision, we have to acknowledge an inconvenient truth that is all too often overlooked: The Federal Reserve and its chairwoman—contrary to what conspiracy theorists, congressional critics, and plenty of investors would like to believe—aren’t fully in charge.

We often the mighty Fed’s actual mission: to oversee monetary policy with an eye toward maximizing employment and ensuring “stable prices” and “moderate long-term interest rates.” The statutory goal is to keep the economy humming so that the greatest possible number of us can find jobs, without things overheating to a point where inflation gets out of hand (the Fed has defined “stable prices” to mean a desirable inflation rate of 2 percent). The fear for a number of years now (among so-called “hawks” among Fed watchers) has been that all this cheap money sloshing around would trigger an inflationary spiral, especially once the economy started recovering on its own, a process that typically creates more demand for goods, services, and workers, thus driving up prices.

As any econ 101 student knows, balancing employment and inflation is not an exact science under the best of conditions. But the real problem facing Yellen and her colleagues at the Fed is that the world has shrunk and become too interdependent for their controlled domestic experiment to balance those two measures.

Yellen might feel its time to pull us back into normalcy, but in Europe, Japan, and other parts of the world, more feeble economies still require indulgent parenting of the type we are trying to move away from. Many central banks are cutting interest rates and adopting quantitative easing even as the Fed has been eyeing interest rate hikes.

The Fed isn’t supposed to be concerned about the value of the U.S. dollar, but it has to be in today’s world, whether it cares to admit it or not. Because the U.S. economy has been stronger than most over the past year (attracting investors from around the world), the value of the dollar has soared in recent months, and would likely soar even more if interest rates start rising in the U.S. while going down elsewhere (attracting even more investors looking for higher returns on Treasury bills and other bonds).

When the value of the dollar spikes compared to other currencies, a lot of the stuff we love to buy goes on sale—gas, your clothes made in China, German cars, foreign travel, you name it. If the dollar appreciates by 25 percent, as it has in the last half year, Americans are basically handed extra cash in the global shopping mall.

So the strong dollar and economic weakness elsewhere in the world threaten to derail Janet Yellen and the Fed’s careful parenting plans in a number of ways. For one thing, it tampers down the inflation (with everything on sale!) we’d normally see given our own economic rebound. More worrisome, a strengthening dollar can pose a threat to the very recovery the Fed is eager to certify as the rationale for its return to normalcy. That’s because just as foreign goods become cheaper to Americans, U.S. goods become a lot more expensive to foreigners, hurting U.S. exports as well as the profits of U.S. companies doing business overseas. And, lastly, the combination of Fed rate hikes, a surging dollar, and falling commodity prices threaten to wreak havoc on the public finances of many countries around the world, including plenty of U.S. allies.

All of which is to say I don’t envy Janet Yellen. And one way or another, she has no choice but to remain very patient.

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OK, so the loyalty oath was a new one for me.

I signed it with gusto, even though—just between us—I am not sure what’s in the Arizona constitution. But no, I don’t have any reservations about swearing an oath of loyalty; it’s an honor to work for a public institution. And lest you think this is a red state quirk, public employees in neighboring California, and many other states, must take similar loyalty oaths.

But the exercise does seem, happily, anachronistic and unnecessary. We’re living in what has to be the nation’s golden age of loyalty.

Today, there is no truly compelling cross border anti-American ideology or movement with broad appeal seducing our residents or citizens into dividing their loyalties. Despite the disturbing tales of a few troubled Americans picking up and joining Al Qaeda, ISIS, or other terrorist groups, we’re currently in a bear market for global ideologies and causes that transcend nationalism.

A time of such undivided loyalty is a rare luxury in American history. Our nation’s birth, after all, was a searing act of disloyalty against the former sovereign. It’s easy to write off Benedict Arnold as a callous traitor seeking to enrich himself, so we conveniently forget that part of his motivation was the influence of the Loyalist Philadelphia family he’d married into. And don’t forget that during the Revolutionary War, many African-Americans and Native Americans were loyalists too, and for understandable reasons.

Meanwhile, those who did fight for independence had radically different ideas of what their new nation was to stand for, a confusion that would take the Civil War to resolve. In my version of our shared backstory, Robert E. Lee outranks Benedict Arnold as a traitor, but I understand that the other side felt it was the Yankees who’d betrayed the founding ideal of state sovereignty and self-determination. The point is, for much of the country’s first century, half the population doubted the loyalty of the other half.

And for all America’s success at bringing in newcomers for its melting pot, the strains of massive immigration and religious diversity once did challenge national unity, and divided loyalties, in a way they no longer do. Anti-Catholic prejudice in the mid-19th century, for instance, contributed to mass defections among Irish immigrants during the Mexican-American War, when the notorious St. Patrick’s Battalion switched sides and joined their fellow Catholics in the Mexican Army. And during World War I, the political power of Irish and German immigrants arguably kept the country in the neutral column far longer than would have otherwise been the case.

But it’s also worth stressing that once the country did go to war, concerns about the loyalty of German-Americans proved unwarranted. Indeed, official reaction to perceived disloyalty has usually been far more damaging to our democracy than any real disloyalty. I don’t mind a non-discriminatory loyalty oath requiring allegiance to the sovereign that employs me. But the Palmer raids toward the end of World War I and thereafter, triggered by fear of anarchists and the new Bolshevik menace; the internment of loyal Japanese-Americans during World War II; and the McCarthyite witch hunts of the early Cold War years all amounted to cases of self-destructive paranoia.

Communism was surely the most powerful cross border temptress undermining national allegiances in modern times. Unlike contemporary tales of troubled youth in Western countries falling prey to Islamist terrorist groups’ promise of heroic martyrdom, educated elites in democratic Western societies were disproportionately drawn to the internationalist communist cause. Last year’s nonfiction thriller, A Spy Among Friends by Ben Macintyre, depicting the treachery of Kim Philby, the urbane English spy who ultimately fled to Moscow, captured the degree to which Communism seduced Philby and his generation of Cambridge-educated elite (and some of their American counterparts).

Disloyalty then was sufficiently in vogue to merit this cavalier observation from the famous novelist Graham Greene in a foreword to the memoirs Philby wrote in Moscow: “‘He betrayed his country’—yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?” Greene went on to compare Philby’s treason to that of persecuted Catholics under Queen Elizabeth, battling for their vision of a better tomorrow. (Persistent fears of Catholics’ divided loyalties, incidentally, helped establish the tradition of loyalty oaths in England.)

There are no such temptations for ideological adultery today, which is another reason we are nostalgic for the Cold War. That showdown between rational superpowers stands in stark contrast to today’s frustrating wars against failed states and amorphous terrorist groups. But we also miss the less tangible contest of ideas and ideologies tailored to Western, modern audiences, and the ensuing double-crossing and conflicted allegiances it provoked. This nostalgia is why a book like A Spy Among Friends became a bestseller and why TV shows like The Americans are culturally significant.

For now, the whole notion of betrayal as a threat to the nation is so devalued that it was humorous fodder at the Oscars last week, as host Neil Patrick Harris joked that “for some treason” Edward Snowden couldn’t be in the audience to celebrate the documentary about him. And, subsequently, this spy who fled to Moscow chimed in that even he found Harris’ joke funny.

We’ve come a long ways from the days when divided loyalties were no laughing matter.

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Was an Apple really fit for a workplace? Verlyn assured us that it was no toy, and that his Mac could do all the things ours could—the mix of surfing, emailing, and pontificating that the gig entailed—without crashing as frequently as our PCs. Verlyn claimed that his Apple was not susceptible to those nasty viruses that plagued our land of “Wintel,” and I wanted to believe him. I too bought a Mac, and instantly felt cooler as a result.

Fast forward to 2015, and some days it feels like the novelty would be for someone at a meeting to take out a laptop that isn’t an Apple. And yet, somehow, the caché and cool factor remain. Apple has managed to walk the tightrope between ubiquity and coolness, attaining one without sacrificing the other.

The company just announced the most profitable quarter in U.S. corporate history, a three-month period in which it sold almost 75 million iPhones and 5.5 million Macs and made $18 billion. Tim Cook, Steve Jobs’ accessible and down-to-earth successor as CEO, couldn’t help himself on the earnings call, describing the quarter as “historic” and his company’s performance—selling on average 34,000 iPhones an hour, 24/7—as “hard to comprehend.” Apple is now the world’s most valuable company, with a stock market valuation of some $700 billion, and nearly $180 billion in cash on hand. The company’s online iTunes store counts a staggering 800 million active users.

What’s most astonishing, given those numbers, is that Apple is far less ubiquitous than you might think. It actually has plenty of room to grow. Indeed, it may only be getting started.

If you look at its existing product lines, Apple only truly dominates the tablet market. In the far more important (in terms of profit margins) phone and computer markets, Apple doesn’t lead the pack. The competing Android operating system runs more than two-thirds of the world’s smartphones. Apple ranks fifth worldwide in the number of computers sold, and third in the U.S., where its market share has been steadily creeping up toward the 15 percent mark. In both computers and phones, there is plenty of market share left for Apple to steal from others.

Apple’s growth strategy is impressively disciplined and patient. The company doesn’t slash prices or create subpar products to meet less affluent consumers in emerging markets halfway. Apple instead holds out its meticulously designed, pricier products as coveted trophies for new middle-class consumers. In much of the world, an Apple device has replaced the Louis Vuitton bag as the most tangible symbol that you have arrived. If you want to showcase your universal consumerist aspirations, head to one of those starkly modern Apple stores that are fast becoming landmarks in most global cities.

Not long ago, critics scoffed at Apple’s foray into China with its higher-priced devices (luxury items, really), predicting a rout. No one is scoffing now. In the last quarter, Apple’s iPhones outsold all other smartphones in China, as the company pulled in $16 billion in revenue. The world’s busiest Apple store is in Shanghai, and Cook made a point on the earnings call to say Apple intended to open 40 stores across China soon. Apple doesn’t chase foreign consumers, but rather waits for them to become affluent enough to afford its wares.

If Apple’s prowess is impressive when looking at its existing product lines, the company’s true potential becomes even harder to comprehend (as Cook might put it) when you consider that it is only starting to wade into an array of markets that it will likely revolutionize, and dominate, in short order. Apple Pay, its bid to become your all-encompassing cashless wallet, is off to a strong start. Fledgling Apple ventures like HomeKit, CarPlay, and iBeacon provide clues to Apple’s unstated, ultimate goal: providing you with one portal, or operating system, that links your Apple devices, your car, and your home. As the “Internet of Things” evolves from hype to reality, Apple will seek to hand you a remote control—to your entire life. The Apple Watch, coming this spring, will no doubt be central to this effort, possibly making the brand indispensable to consumers in even more ways, particularly in tracking their health and fitness.

As was true with past devices and services, Apple is hardly being a trailblazing pioneer. There are plenty of “smart watches” and digital wallet surrogates already out there, but Apple has a way of biding its time, learning from the mistakes of others, and then introducing a tweaked product or concept that will go mainstream, in part because it fits in so well within the broader Apple ecosystem.

People at Apple talk a lot about this notion of an ecosystem. The company isn’t mainly about the hardware or the software, but the interplay between the two. Earlier, this was one of the knocks against Apple, that Jobs obsessively controlled both hardware and software—creating a closed system to protect precious aesthetic sensibilities—to a point where the company was out of step with the more open and collaborative tech culture. Hardcore techies have always resented what they consider Apple’s heavy-handed efforts to create tidy, uniform, turnkey systems that resist hacking or excessive customization.

But a coherent ecosystem is exactly what your average consumer wants.

No other company is anywhere near being able to match Apple in providing us with such seamless curation of our lives. The Italian novelist Umberto Eco famously said in the 1990s that Apple was like Catholicism, in that its followers had to adhere to one way of doing things, while Microsoft (you could say Google nowadays) was more akin to Protestantism, which gave followers more latitude to reach their own conclusions and organize themselves accordingly. Apple is unique among Internet giants in getting consumers to pay top dollar for its goods and services, while other companies like Facebook and Google rely instead primarily on an advertising model to subsidize their interactions with consumers.

And so Apple’s prospects appear brighter than ever. Its own success would seem to be the only threat to a company that has billed itself as the scrappy underdog. After all, it was Apple who encouraged us to “think different” and launched its iconic first Mac in 1984 with a commercial celebrating the machine’s subversive ability to deliver us from an Orwellian “1984” collectivist nightmare.

Therein lies the company’s existential challenge: Can Apple remain cool if its products become the one indispensable means of controlling your life and communicating with others? Can it remain an aspirational brand once it’s within everyone’s reach? How distinctive can the world’s largest company, no matter what it does, ever be?

I reached out to Verlyn, who now teaches at Yale, to ask whether he’s still inhabiting the Apple ecosystem. He is, and his disgust at his pre-2000 Windows experience sounds as raw as it did when he first started proselytizing for the Mac. But he draws a line at the coming Apple Watch: “I’ve never worn a watch, and I can’t imagine starting now.”

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First, Breyer cited the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ old line about not having the right to cry fire in a crowded theater. Then, he asked some interesting questions: What does that proverbial theater look like in our hyperlinked world? And what is our era’s equivalent of being trampled to death in that theater? As if remembering himself, he quickly added that the answers to such questions get defined in actual cases before the Court, over time (as opposed to on Good Morning America).

At the time, Breyer’s TV provocation was roundly denounced by all right-minded free speech absolutists (a club I frequent). But I have found myself thinking about his questions in the aftermath of two major events involving the cross-border repercussions of speech: the horrible attack on satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, and the hacking of Sony Pictures before the release of the sophomoric comedy The Interview.

If I am being honest, these are times when I find myself rethinking my free speech absolutism. (Wait, am I really free to say that?!).

The crowded theater is a meme in First Amendment law that is often invoked out of context and has been overtaken by subsequent, more expansive free speech rulings. Another First Amendment meme is the “marketplace of ideas”: Us absolutists like to say that all speech should be permitted so that truths can prevail in that aforementioned ideas market. A third important meme—the current constitutional test for whether the state can restrict speech—is that of “imminent lawless action.” In a case involving hateful Ku Klux Klan speech in the 1960s, the Court held that the government can only forbid speech that is intended to trigger imminent lawless action, and is likely to do so.

All of this would be easier to judge if speech could be contained within tidy territorial boundaries. But the Paris tragedy and Sony hack beg not only the Breyer question of what constitutes the “crowded theater” in this age of instant global communication, but also a redefinition of the marketplace of ideas, and of “imminent lawless action.” Should the expanding boundaries of our so-called theater or marketplace make us rethink what’s acceptable speech, because more lawless action can be more imminent in a more interconnected world?

Of course, there is nothing new about taking offense across borders at the speech of others, and taking action to stifle it. Think of Catholics across Europe seeking to silence early Protestant propagandists in the German states during the Reformation, Stalin hunting down Trotsky in Mexico City to silence his chief critic, or the theocracy of Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa to silence Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses. More recently, Denmark found itself in the crosshairs after a Danish newspaper published cartoons featuring the Prophet in 2006. And the online release of the anti-Muslim film Innocence of Muslims contributed to anti-Western riots in the Middle East. Google ultimately determined that it was prudent to block access to the film on YouTube in some countries.

What’s different in today’s world, as these recent cases illustrate, is the immediacy of all speech, no matter where it takes place. Indeed, several legal scholars argued that perhaps we should rethink the permissibility of releasing such offensive material as the Innocence of Muslims, bound as it was to trigger a violent reaction. It’s getting harder to draw distinctions, at least in terms of real-world repercussions, between uploading something onto YouTube in the privacy of your home and broadcasting that same content halfway around the world. It’s a very large crowded theater we operate in.

Back in my absolutist First Amendment club, this is an unsettling line of reasoning. As Americans we are understandably wary of watering down our liberties (including the liberty to offend one another) to conform to some international norm. If we are all going to coexist in one global market or theater that transcends borders, our traditional attitude has been that others will just have to develop thicker skins and relish the same liberties we enjoy. Deal with it, in other words.

That is a fine sentiment, but it’s easier to uphold as an abstract principle than in a context where lives are at stake. It also doesn’t account for the most pressing threats to free speech rights. While we devote a great deal of attention to the few life-and-death cases that require balance protecting speech with preventing its consequences, we fail to acknowledge just how often mundane commercial interests are already influencing content and speech across borders.

This reality comes up mostly when we talk about China, where media outlets like Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal have been accused of pulling punches in their news coverage so as to not undermine their own corporate interests. Internet companies, for their part, are constantly wrestling with the dilemma of either playing in China under Chinese rules, or being shut out.

Hollywood studios are also intensely aware that the majority of moviegoers are now outside the United States, and that China will soon be their most important single market. Major studio productions are keen to alter plots in ways that please Chinese and other foreign audiences. In the midst of production, the 2012 thriller Red Dawn saw its menacing villains go from being Chinese to being North Korean, lest the studio poke the eye of such an important market. Who cares about the North Koreans, and what could they ever do to us anyway?

Now we know.

Speech has consequences, and we’re already seeing how more and more entertainment content is being produced with overseas consequences (or appeal) in mind. Should news and humor follow suit? And how do we feel now that, for all intents and purposes, the de facto guarantors, regulators, and potential censors of our speech are private companies like Google?

It is no longer the preserve of Justice Breyer and his robed colleagues to decide when we can offend each other, or cry fire in a theater. Indeed, like it or not, the day may soon come when it is no longer solely up to Americans to make the call of what can be said, even here in America.

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I like it because it is both a timeless exhortation—to expand one’s horizons—and a particularly timely one. The year 2015—the far-away year Marty McFly travels to in the 1980s classic Back to the Future—is shaping up, ironically, to be a year when the reassuringly familiar reasserts itself. Such mainstays as the Bush-versus-Clinton dynastic feud, the Star Wars saga, interest rates, U.S. power around the world, the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers, and the telephone all are poised to make a comeback this year. But don’t trust me: Grab a half-dozen Post-it notes and make a few forecasts of your own on the defining questions of 2015.

Before going any further, however, I realize my last comeback suggestion might seem absurd: that the phone, used as such, as in the lost art of dialing and talking, is back. But the hacking of Sony in late 2014 may prove a tipping point, forcing people in many different workplaces to avoid putting certain things in writing. “Call me” may turn out to be among the most emailed words in 2015, shedding their once ominous overtones to become shorthand for, “I have something juicy to say about this, but I would be crazy to write it.” Here’s an interesting forecast close to home: Write on your first Post-it whether you think you will spend more or less time talking on your phone in 2015 than in 2014 (and figure it out at year’s end).

In politics, 2015 is shaping up to be a throwback year as Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton explore, and likely announce, their 2016 presidential bids. Will Bush or Mitt Romney or someone less aligned with the party’s business wing (Rand Paul, Ted Cruz?) be ahead in the GOP’s polls as 2015 comes to a close, on the eve of primary season? Write down your prediction on a Post-it (eschewing email for obvious reasons). And, if it is Bush riding high, will the dynastic hue of the contest affect how voters view Clinton?

The appeal of the familiar is understandable: The country has had a hard time settling into a semblance of normalcy pretty much since the start of this millennium, buffeted by a series of booms and busts, not to mention wars. Now the Federal Reserve, the institution wielding the greatest (if underappreciated) power over our financial affairs, is coaxing us to be OK with going back to normal. 2015 is when the Fed plans to put an end to its emergency measure of keeping the important benchmark interest rate it charges financial institutions at essentially zero. One defining story line for the year is whether this is seen as a vote of confidence in the economy, or whether it spooks markets addicted to artificial stimulation. Use a third Post-it note to guess whether the Dow Industrials Average will crack 20,000 and end 2015 above that level, which is slightly more than 10 percent higher than it is today.

In either case, the United States will look like a safe haven compared to much of the world. Our lead in all aspects of information technology keeps growing. We’re experiencing a manufacturing renaissance. We are well on our way to becoming one of the world’s lowest-cost (and self-sufficient) energy producers. 2014 started with a barrel of oil costing some $20 more than a share of Apple. The year closed with a surging share of Apple costing almost twice as much as a plummeting barrel of oil ($114 to $60). Go ahead and forecast on your fourth Post-it which of these two (Apple share or barrel of oil) will cost more at the end of 2015, and what the spread will be.

It should become clearer in the coming year that America has gotten its mojo back. It isn’t only our economic prowess. There’s also a renewed acceptance of American power and influence in much of the world, courtesy of Vladimir Putin’s antics, China’s extraterritorial assertiveness, the implosion of the anti-American left in Latin America, and all the global challenges—climate change, pandemics like Ebola, the persistence of radical Islamist terrorism—that still require U.S leadership.

This desire on the part of many countries for closer ties, coupled with America’s renewed economic confidence and domestic political trends, might make possible an ambitious trans-Pacific trade deal. And that would signal to the world that America is no longer stuck in the Middle East. On your fifth Post-it forecast a ranking of Iraq, Ukraine, Mexico, and China, according to the number of times each is mentioned in 2015 in The New York Times.

Meanwhile, information technologies continue to empower us. But now the revolution turns inward, as the next frontier of the Information Age that brought the outside world to our fingertips—the next great unseen that we will see—will be within ourselves. 2015 will be the year of the iWatch and other tracking and diagnostic technologies—some wearable, some in your medicine cabinet, others like cheaper, faster, and less intrusive blood tests at the nearby drugstore—that will allow us to acquire unprecedented self-knowledge.

This will keep the topic of inequality alive, as we talk about how such technologies create a new “digital divide.” I don’t have a clever forecasting prompt here for your last Post-it, but rather a question worth jotting down and contemplating: What does it mean for a society to have some people walking around with sophisticated dashboards measuring their well-being, while many others don’t, and remain in the dark? That seems qualitatively different than having the divide be defined around one’s access to knowledge of China or finances.

As bullish as I am on 2015, I should caution readers that I am usually optimistic at the start of every new year. It must be a personal flaw. And that’s why “See the unseen in 2015” is a perfect personal slogan, and not just as an exhortation to climb a mountain or go on safari or avail myself of these self-tracking technologies. The slogan is an antidote to my own complacency, a cautionary admonition to be on the lookout for the unexpected shocks that can upset my rosy scenarios.

After all, no one has ever said that, when it looked like nothing could go wrong, nothing went wrong. Happy new year.

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