My kids and I mostly had fun with those insults—although we were taken aback by a few misogynistic, homophobic comments, like the question above. But now even the president is taking me on. Not me, personally, of course, but in The New Yorker last week, he said that the long-term risks of serious brain injury taken by NFL players—the reason for my boycott—haven’t affected his interest in the game. “There’s a little bit of caveat emptor,” he argued. “These guys, they know what they’re doing. They know what they’re buying into. It is no longer a secret.”

But although many folks are expressing serious concern about football’s impact on the brain, opting out of the country’s largest fan base isn’t easy. For me, who watched some part of about five games—and up to six hours—a week of pro football in years past, it was like quitting an addiction. You find yourself having relapses, hanging out with other addicts who are still using, making all kinds of rules to excuse a few hits.

So, how did it go? In a sign of how badly I did, I’ll use the trusty Monday morning sports columnist scorecard:

Offense: B-
On your average Sunday this past fall, I watched zero hours of professional football. Sounds like cold turkey, but read on. I have no NFL fans in my house, so the peer pressure was low. I did seek out the NFL once—for the conference championship games that decided which team would advance to the Super Bowl. While I watched neither game live, I recorded them and watched parts of both the next day while working out. I can report that the high just wasn’t as intense—but man, the stuff was potent: the historic Broncos offense, the Manning-Brady rivalry, Silicon Valley against Seattle. But even all that didn’t produce the unique neural combination of relaxation and excitement that it once did. Then again, part of the reason I stopped watching in the first place was to reduce demand for a damaging product. In that, I failed. I stayed up to get the scores online and, hoping for a contact high, listened every week to The B.S. Report, a podcast during which Bill Simmons, the ESPN columnist and Grantland editor, discusses the week’s action. It’s a funny podcast, but all those clicks to download were telling the NFL, “Keep it going, Fuzz is still a fan.”

Defense: C
Most addicts have an out—a back door that lets them get what they crave without blaming themselves. My out was something I called the “hospitality rule”: I’d watch football if it would be rude not to. I had 36 family members coming to my house for Thanksgiving this year. I couldn’t deny them their tradition, right? As a result of my “hospitality,” I caught a good bit of the Cowboys game and some of the other two games. Of course, plenty of those 36 Hogans never saw a play, because they didn’t go into the TV room. At another family gathering, this clause let me see one of the Coolest Plays of the Year, when an Indianapolis Colts running back in the playoff game against the Kansas City Chiefs fumbled on the one-yard line, and the ball bounced off a teammate’s helmet into the hands of his quarterback, whose name is actually Luck. Luck then leapt into the end zone, helping sustain one of the most remarkable comebacks of the year. Not only did I get that same old high: This play brought me back into the community of fans who retell the same amazing play for the rest of the week, brag to those who missed it, and get to feel like they were part of a special moment.

Special Teams: F
I watched a ton of college football. So not only am I supporting kids putting their brains on the line, but also, much like a cocaine addict in America helping ruin a town somewhere in a foreign land, my participation in today’s football economy means some college athlete is putting himself at risk and not being properly compensated. (Some of my fellow Northwestern Wildcats are now asking to join a union, which could change that.)

Sadly, I can’t report that I did anything particularly special with my newfound free time. I now cook dinner on Sunday nights, have been able to help more around the house, and caught all the Oscar contenders on the big screen. But it’s not like I trained for a marathon or re-landscaped the backyard. My tools are still disorganized, and my pile of unread books is just as high.

My scorecard shows obvious room for improvement, but the big questions are: Did my abstention make any sort of difference? And, will I relapse?

If you’re old enough, you remember when boxing matches were on regular TV and dominated both the sports and news pages. At some point, watching retired champs slur their words and lose their memories caught up with the sport, and the cultural spotlight and the fans turned away, reducing boxing to a small but dedicated group of spectators who pay big bucks per fight. If enough people choose, as I did, not to watch football, is that where the NFL is headed? Doubtful.

The difference is that boxing requires so little upfront investment: All a match takes are two boxers, their small team, and some gear at a gym or small arena. Football, however, requires dozens of men to be flown all over the country weekly, equipped from head to toe, and prepared by a huge coaching and training staff that works nearly 24/7.

So, if enough of us stop watching, or if enough moms don’t let their sons play, could the NFL just die? Don’t count on that, either. As a young columnist on my high school paper, I predicted soccer would overtake football (even though I was a bigger fan of football) in the U.S. by the year 2000. That was 32 years ago, and that prediction seems even sillier now than it did then. You could just as soon wish away cocaine.

The NFL has promised to take care of its retired players, and the president is right that the league’s players are grown men who, now at least, know the risks. But, do I have to watch and enjoy them taking those risks? Like any addict, I’ll take it one season—maybe even one week—at a time. As for this Sunday, some friends invited us over, and I don’t think it was just to watch the commercials.

The post Can a Football Addict Quit the NFL? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Over where? Into oblivion. Into awkwardness. Into, well, I didn’t know, because my smartphone didn’t tell me to “go over there.” For all I knew, we were going to be robbed, car stolen, and left for dead somewhere “over there.” Still, we followed the dirt road, guided only by worn signs pointing to a hotel.

Of course, you know how this ends. After a half-mile, we found ourselves at a postcard-ready Tuscan hotel with spectacular, unspoiled views and a lonely but exceptionally helpful waiter who served up two sandwiches and glasses of wine, even though it was between meals and he should have been pressing napkins. We had an entire veranda to ourselves for the afternoon. It was lovely … over there.

This happens a lot on our vacations: “Hey, let’s go there,” says she, with no guidebook, no Yelp, no Google Maps. No, say I—we should follow the schedule, consult a book, go online, anything to ensure that I don’t have an unexpected experience. I want to know what I’m getting myself into. Isn’t that what makes travel in the Facebook age so great? To fly thousands of miles on a plane only to stay in the curated bubble of your social graph? The wisdom of my crowd can guarantee a good experience. Sure, I don’t know the folks who post reviews on Yelp or even those who pen the Frommer’s guides. But I have trusted those sources because, over time, I have recognized they like the same things I like. I don’t log on to the travel site smokers-united.com, because I don’t smoke. I don’t buy any of the Haunted Travels of the … books because I don’t like haunted anything, anywhere. I’ve self-selected my guides to make sure they will bring me the familiar, free of surprises, free of mystery, free of accidents.

That, you should be thinking by now, is not exploring. That’s two steps removed from a cruise, the pinnacle of mystery-free travel. Technology does make it easier for us to travel; my GPS saved us countless hours and lots of gas money (though it did navigate into a few Clark Griswold moments, like the time I was lurching my stick shift through an 11th-century piazza filled with gelato-eating tourists pushing strollers). But if you can write it all down in Evernote before you leave your house, and then slavishly follow the Yelp recommendations, are you missing out on the serendipity of travel and life? Imagine telling your friends upon your return, “Yep, went exactly as planned, nothing we didn’t expect.” They’d look at you like you were a project manager, not someone on vacation. Memories are made by war stories like that Clark Griswold story above, not from flawless checklist itineraries.

Of course, you could use money, instead of technology, to guarantee certainty. Stay at a first-class hotel, ask the concierge to buy you special access tickets to all the attractions and book the best tables at the best restaurants. But that’s not much of a quest, either. That’s never leaving Eliteistan, the rarefied, and to some degree monotonous, world in which the wealthy walk from business-class cabin to town car to top-tier-but-still-chain-because-they-know-it-and-get-points hotel to Starbucks (because no one else can make a double-vanilla chai latte the way they can, and why risk it?). Forget the social graph bubble; that’s the same daily routine of brands whether they’re in Rome, Buenos Aires, or San Diego. The perfect-English tour guide who whisks you to the elephant farm in a cushioned Range Rover doesn’t connote “exploration” so much as “theme park.” I met one very nice American couple moving so fast on a here-today-gone-the-next-minute guided tour that I doubt they even knew which town they were in. If it’s 2 p.m., it must be San Gimignano, or wait, is it Florence?

OK, sure, sometimes you just want to veg out and read on the beach. But we travel to travel, to see new things, get out of our routines, and expand our brains. Little more than a century ago, only the rich traveled, and normal people like me flocked to World’s Fairs, which brought the Earth’s rare charms to the United States. It was a zoolike atmosphere, but those folks were craving the unfamiliar sights from around the world. Your inheritance of that spirit shouldn’t be buying a ticket to a theme park safari. To meet people who weren’t expecting to see an American today is a rare joy, an authentic moment when two cultures share and grow.

When we talk about exploration travel, we typically conjure up an image of a cave in Belize or a Himalayan peak. But equally important, if not more, is the bowl salesman in Bangkok who knows just enough English to tell you about his America-bound niece and ask a lot of charmingly uninformed questions, and you provide the kind of guidance to save him money and his niece embarrassment. Or the waiter in Sunyani, Ghana, who complains about paying his local “king” rent, kicking off a long conversation about cultural differences and why it’s hard to get a business off the ground under those rules. If you’re just doing what everyone else is doing, then you might as well stay home. Even Mount Everest has been ruined by the crowd.

Not to say “Hey, let’s go over there” guarantees success. On the same trip, that sense of adventure put us in front of a gummy, gloppy plate of pasta in Rome. It also wasted a lot of time, with dead-ends and disappointments. Even that, however, is part of the exploration. As the travel writer Tim Cahill put it in Hold the Enlightenment, “boredom greases the cogs in the machinery of marvels.” While Cahill was talking about having to wait eight hours for a plane in Bujumbura, Burundi, it applies to the side streets in Florence, for us wussier travelers. If you want to see something amazing, there’s a price to pay in patience and occasional frustration, but it’s worth it.

The surprise-free life is a hallmark of the modern Web. Your entertainment can be self-curated. (Millennials find it absurd that there was a time when you had to watch whatever was on TV then, take it or leave it.) Your diet can be self-curated. (Why walk down a street and just pick a restaurant when Google Maps will give you the Zagat ratings?) And, of course, your news can be self-curated. As Cass Sunstein noted recently, that kind of self-curated news pushes us to extremes, echo chambers of our own making, whereas serendipity is a “social glue,” bringing us together by common, accidental experience.

It doesn’t have to be that high-minded. Getting over your instinct to structure your time leads to so much more fun. Accept that two of three times will be strikes, but if the third time is a hit, then it was worth going up to bat. The wonders of the world await your accidental arrival.

But I’ll still groan the next time my wife wants to go “over there.”

The post In Praise of Wandering ‘Over There’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I am here to report that I survived my first two NFL-free weekends (spare me the details of the dramatic Chicago-Minnesota finale). It was a strange experience, as if I’d delayed the sun setting for four hours. The rhythm of a fall Sunday—when to exercise, when to clean up the e-mail inbox and, in my case, when to fold laundry—had a gaping hole in it. Without the game to help make those mundane tasks enjoyable, how will they get done?

In fact, I was like an untethered time-management hose. I could work out whenever. I could take the dog to the vet, drive the kid to the afternoon party—even go the grocery store for a single tomato. That’s right, I’m suddenly Mr. Agreeable. A year ago I would have called into question the Family Inventory Management; the recipe’s actual need for tomato; the need to cook our own food; and the need for anyone, ever, to leave the television during the Monumental Game that Could Offer an Early Indication as to Who Might Win the NFC South Four Months From Now. Don’t you understand how insignificant a tomato is when compared to the week one Saints-Falcons saga?

News flash: Watching football is a time-suck. I’ve tried to convince myself that I can be productive during the game. But if there’s a tense sequence (and the play-by-play commentators are paid to make everything seem like a tense sequence), I’m suddenly folding one shirt every 10 minutes. Even when I think I’m saving time by watching on DVR and fast-forwarding through commercials, in fact I’m constantly interrupting my laundry-folding or e-mail-sifting! Studies have shown there’s 11 minutes of action in a game that takes three hours. That’s a lot of wasted time trying to not waste time.

So instead, on Sunday afternoon I cooked dinner—a real dinner, with different dishes and a complicated recipe, involving Heat Other Than A Microwave. I helped the kids with homework, with the attention span to actually help. I found out how the other third lives … the third that doesn’t watch the NFL. It was enjoyable.

But my newfound free time is merely a byproduct of my resolution. Why have I chosen to abstain from pro football? I have four downs’ worth of reasons:

First down: head injuries. The sad tales of retired NFL players who suffer brain trauma from repeated concussions are now legion. Yes, there’s been a new settlement for them—but that $675 million is going to be spread over 60 years and thousands of former players, with another $91 million going to research and medical monitoring. (And this is all just a fraction of one percent of the revenue the league will make in the next two decades.) Plus, the NFL gets to keep the information it’s compiled on brain injuries and football secret. What are they hiding? Should I be watching as entertainment a hazardous activity when its effects on its entertainers are being swept under the turf? I can’t be complicit in this anymore.

Second down: performance-enhancing drugs. Sure, NFL players use some of the same drugs you and I take to recover from injury. But they also rely on substances that are dangerous to them. Performance-enhancing drugs are so rampant now that players who don’t take something are arguably handicapping themselves.

Third down: If the NFL didn’t exist, would college football be so corrupt? And this is where I’ll admit it: My weekends have not been entirely football-free. My daughter is on her high school poms team, so I have a good excuse to catch the Not-Exactly-Friday-Night-Lights atmosphere of the D.C. suburbs. And more importantly, my college alma mater, Northwestern University, once a doormat, is now ranked and romping through their non-conference season. (No. 1 in interceptions! Go ’Cats!)

When I tell my friends I’m not watching the NFL, they say that college football is far worse, because you can add the slavery of uncompensated players and a corruption of academic mission to the head injuries and performance-enhancing drugs. True. But isn’t the NFL responsible for the dynamics of college football? It’s the league that forces players to go to college, essentially turning big-time college leagues into their farm team system and giving the NCAA a cudgel to keep collegiate athletes in line.

(There have been enough headlines this year to tempt me to add a point about off-field violence. But while this type of behavior elicits disgust and horror from just about everyone—especially when an All-Pro is accused of murder, or a Super Bowl hero has a murder trial in his past—the statistics suggest NFL players aren’t more likely to be arrested more often than other men their age, except for on weapons charges. So, give them this one.)

Fourth down: I’m pushing the demand curve in the right direction, just a little. So many of the arguments about the NFL end with a sigh of, “Well, it’s an unstoppable force, so let’s try to fix it rather than end it.” But that feels like surrender. Small actions add up, and you might as well start somewhere. I know my one hybrid car isn’t going to stop global warming, but I’m telling the auto industry that I’m willing to pay extra to help the planet. My refusal to watch the films of child-rapist-fugitive Roman Polanski won’t stop him from making films, but as the father of daughters, I’m not going to help him. We can either surrender to a demand curve, or we can try to make a small difference. Let others sue. Let others rant. I’ll just go for a bike ride on a beautiful fall day.

The post Why I’m Boycotting the NFL appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As long as I’ve known him, the skinny kid from Kansas has been cheery. We first met more than 20 years ago, when he was working with a friend of mine in Chicago. He was always the cheeriest guy at the party, quick-witted but never mean or bitter. Since then, we’ve seen each other a few times, and, as with most friends you meet in the crucible of youth, the friendship is well forged and picks up easily. He’s smiling even though I’ve asked him to meet me at a bar, rudely forgetting that he’s quit drinking.

The Backstage in Culver City looks like an outdated ’70s-style saloon from the neighborhoods of a Midwestern city, ripped and plunked into sunny L.A.—dark wood, dark leather, dark paneling, tiny pool table, karaoke machine, insufficient lighting, and all. It’s one of the few likable bars I have found in Los Angeles, and I spent many nights here escaping the media circus of the O.J. trial back in the ’90s. In honor of those times, I order a vodka and cheap beer. Lehr orders an O’Doul’s.

The post John Lehr appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When he checks in with the “site supervisor,” the CNN veteran who is running coverage for the network on the ground, this equally strong journalist greets your hero’s story hunt with a sympathetic “dude, who’s got the time?” shrug. They argue a bit. Your hero says he needs a crew to chase a compelling sidebar—the 80-year-old civil rights icon who hasn’t left her house during a hurricane since the 1970s—but the CNN veteran says no, he needs someone to shoot live shots of the anchor on the sunny beach, a full day before the storm hits. Walking away, your hero mutters, “Old goat doesn’t even know what a real story is.” The CNN veteran thinks, “Young punk doesn’t even know who pays the bills.”

The veteran’s right. Your hero’s finely crafted piece that lasts about four or five minutes, a custom fit within a well-designed program, will run once. But the crew that does live shots will service more than 100 affiliates (who pay for the service) and, between live shots, turn the camera on the myriad on-location guests booked by HLN (the channel formerly known as CNN Headline News), CNN International (CNNI), and CNN Español (CNNE), all of whom will sell ads against their programming. The simple “day wrap” piece that is edited from the press conferences and stock B-roll—like that hackneyed piece showing people boarding up their windows and stocking up on water—will run four times on CNN and more than a dozen times over CNNI’s regional feeds and CNNE. We haven’t even talked about CNN.com yet. Sure, your hero’s story might show up there; it’ll be nice. Once. Meanwhile, the live shot crew will play a role in several CNN.com stories. So who keeps his job?

Here’s a fact you may not know: CNN has been growing in profits every year since the last century. There’s a media-column narrative of CNN failure (with air cover attacks from Jon Stewart every few nights), but it stands in contrast to remarkable business success. Behind that success is, in the words of executives, “a steady hose of revenue,” which includes a slice of your monthly cable bill. Your cable company pays CNN for the privilege of having it on your cable box. Does that cable executive want your hero’s finely crafted piece of storytelling? No, he wants to be sure that the live shot crew is available for breaking news.

Every leader of the domestic network has tried to establish longer-form story telling; every effort has failed, mainly because that’s not why you, The New Yorker reader, turn on CNN. You turn it on to see if there’s huge breaking news, and to be able to say you saw it live when you go into the office tomorrow.

Which brings us to Jeff Zucker, the new top dog at CNN. Zucker became renowned as the wunderkind executive producer of the Today show years ago. Most of the coverage around him has focused on whether he would bring a morning-show vibe to the World’s News Leader. Arguably, he answered that question early on with a resounding “yes,” when he commissioned full day, all-in coverage of that stranded cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico. But you should know the type of news is the noise. As Nate Silver would tell you, focus on the signal.

CNN’s age-old dilemma is how to engage an audience when there’s not breaking news. For Zucker, the answer appears to be that there is no such time: Any and all “human drama” can be teed up to play the role of the breaking news you must follow. If there is not a Boston terrorist attack or a devastating tornado or a presidential election, then pretend that there is an equally significant story, even if it’s just a faux blonde on trial for murder in Arizona.

Will the conceit work? Will CNN’s brand and credibility suffer over time if it affords such blow-out coverage to tabloid fare, on a par with how it covers civil war in Syria?

Such questions have loomed over CNN ever since it became a major player after the first Gulf War. And all along, the internal battle has been between your hero journalist and the CNN vet who pays the bills.

Over the years, waves of idealistic executives and journalists have arrived from other broadcast networks and walked into the wall of CNN’s business model. The problem? Their previous jobs asked them to fill just a half hour a day (evening news) or even less. With 24 hours to fill, and umpteen ancillary mouths to feed (CNN.com, HLN, hundreds of affiliates, radio, mobile), the carefully crafted pieces they used to run on the networks don’t work. It’d be, well, like hiring a guy who runs Apple’s stores to run all of J.C. Penney.

Of course, plenty of journalists at CNN are doing superior work, some even telling great stories while covering breaking news. But it’s gotten harder and harder, especially as leadership of the U.S. network has changed every other year (on average) for the past 15 years. One advantage Zucker has is that he’s in charge of all of CNN, which remains profitable, even as most of the media headlines focus on the ratings of the domestic news channel. That gives him more power to use the entire company to help boost those ratings, as opposed to most of his predecessors, who, arguably, were working against their peers’ best interest when they tried to tell those more interesting, cost-intensive stories.

One way to bridge these two cultures is to hire a lot of good reporters to break little pieces of news rather than try to tell nine-minute stories that their audience has never really seemed to want. (Don’t tell me, “But people watch 60 Minutes.” That show has the NFL as a lead-in, and CNN has tried magazines repeatedly, to little success, even when they featured an interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997.)

The early returns on Zucker’s reign are good. Ratings have been up, especially versus MSNBC. But let’s revisit in a year, when we have more data, more waves of news cycles, and more politics. And Zucker’s not been immune to mistakes. He canceled a truly dopey all-talk prime time show just a week after it launched.

Here’s hoping Zucker’s unique power allows him to crack the code of high profits and high ratings while doing great journalism. There are tremendous people working inside the company, trying like hell to tell great stories and restore the brand to what it meant when we first heard James Earl Jones say, “THIS is CNN.” They deserve to succeed.

The post Why Can’t CNN Tell Good Stories? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Chaudhary was the official White House videographer during Barack Obama’s first term. In other words, he was like your annoying friend who is constantly taking photos and posting them to Facebook, except he was capturing history.

No matter your politics, it’s hard not to think, “Wow, hanging with the president all day and shooting YouTube videos. How’d he get that sweet gig?” The simple answer: By being a total nerd in his youth.

Chaudhary attended a Junior State of America summer session as a 16-year-old and stayed in touch with a girl he met there named Kate Albright-Hanna. Kate went on to become a producer at CNN, the first to shoot her own video, most famously footage of Howard Dean’s notorious “scream” on the evening of the 2004 Iowa caucus. Four years later, she signed up to work for the Obama campaign.

This is part of a storied but accelerating tradition, of course, of political leaders bringing in journalists to help shape their story. And in this age of social media, political campaigns and the White House often cut out the middlemen (the pack of journalists trailing politicians) and tell their stories directly to the American people.

To help in this effort, Kate called her nerd camp buddy, Arun, who’d been inspired by Michael Moore to combine his interests in film and political advocacy.

Arun was then teaching at New York University. He signed up, thinking simply, “I can help.”

At first, Kate and Arun were the official documentarians of the campaign. But when they were recording a simple birthday message Obama made for a volunteer (a video meant for an internal audience), they realized, as Chaudhary puts it, “that the in-between was more interesting.” They decided to focus less on formal events and more on the intimate moments that would make potential supporters feel like they were a part of the campaign.

Chaudhary would wait for the then-senator to be introduced at rallies, and when the crowd was at maximum volume, the candidate would turn to the camera to say hi. I asked if Obama, famously private, minded the ever-present camera. “No,” says Chaudhary, “he got it right away,’ recognizing the impact intimacy would have on his relationship to the voter.

Once in the White House, the job changed, as did Chaudhary’s wardrobe, up to a point. Typically a very casual dresser, Chaudhary wore a suit, but kept wearing his low-top sneakers, and his explosion of hair. He no longer reported to the communications team. He was official archivist, reporting up through the non-political staff.

As our second beer arrives, Chaudhary tells me that presidents can’t really say no to the White House photographer. Presidents have adjusted how they used those photos while in office. (Harding and LBJ made themselves more available; Nixon and Clinton were more controlling, though no less interested in trying to use images to their political benefit). But video was still so new that there were no rules, and President Obama could say no. That Chaudhary had been on the campaign made the president more receptive. Chaudhary, in the course of killing all my hopes for gossip about the president off-camera, says, “He’s the same guy in private and in public,” so he didn’t worry it would catch him doing something wrong.

The post Arun Chaudhary appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the same year, Spy magazine put snark to print. The magazine was mean, but it was also surgical, far more sophisticated than previous humor magazines. The establishment celebs, like Cher, who fell into its trap, blindly cashing the checks Spy sent to them for smaller and smaller amounts (until it was less than a dollar), didn’t see it coming. It was Cher, after all, who called David Letterman an “asshole” when Letterman was pioneering in the broadcasting of snark. As he established his offbeat style, Letterman was, at the time, snark’s pope.

Thus began a bull market in snark. As we ascended, Spy died, reopened, then died again in the late ’90s, partly because it was too mean-spirited for advertisers, but Slate picked up the trail, making snark smart, serious even. Jon Stewart honed snark’s edge and turned it into a weapon aimed at media and political elites. Stewart’s snark soon transcended entertainment, becoming a worthy source of news and commentary. Everyone else in late night was now copying Letterman’s shtick, but just for laughs, but Stewart was giving snark purpose. Stewart became snark’s new pope.

Snark went mainstream, but it stayed close enough to the sidelines to avoid running into itself. Maureen Dowd brought it to the Old Gray Lady. September 11th knocked it, and irony, off their heels for a while, but it came roaring back just as Downey returned to the big screen. Downey made Iron Man the first comic-book movie hero to be snarky. Snark now had crossover appeal. Snark could carry a weekend at the box office.

In late 2008, David Denby tried to call foul, decrying the effects of snark on our social discourse, in a book by that title. But few heeded Denby’s cry. New York Magazine decried Denby’s old-school earnestness: Snark, wrote Adam Sternbergh, was now necessary, a “clarion call of frustrated outrage” in “an age of double-speak.”

By this time, Gawker and Perez Hilton had joined the snark bull-market climb, expanding what was now a snark-industrial complex. My teenagers were flinging snark at me over the dinner table by then. I loved it. I admired it. But I also felt like Joe Kennedy (or Bernard Baruch, or any number of heroes in the same apocryphal tale), who supposedly started selling stocks short in 1929 after hearing stock tips from the shoeshine boy. The climb was clearly close to the peak; the bull market was getting frothy.

Four years later, four years after Denby’s futile fusillade, four years after an election that almost ended political cynicism, the president himself unleashed snark on the old-school, eminently snarkless Mitt Romney (“Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets”), right in the middle of a presidential debate. Today, snark has even gobbled up Twitter. What started out way back in 2006 as a teenager-connector and a smart read-in, by 2012, is, essentially, a snark-shooting gallery. Snark comes easily now, in 140 characters and at warp speed. It doesn’t take a genius like Letterman or Downey. Anyone can do it.

And everyone feels compelled to do it. Even the Oscars ceremony, where all edges used to go to die and where schmaltz used to rule, brought in Seth McFarlane to snark things up a bit, seeing how it’s the new social convention. The reviews were mixed—snarky, even—as snark turned on itself in the Twittersphere. The onslaught was so predictable Slate cleverly pre-packaged the snark like a supermarket pre-packages a meal, collecting all the snarky comics’ Twitter accounts in one handy place. By now, we’re just going through the motions, the path is so well-worn.

We still need someone to blow spitballs at the establishment, of course, but there’s not much left for snark to accomplish. It’s slumming in cable news. One of the few things The Rachel Maddow Show and Fox & Friends have in common is that they both use snark. Unfortunately, they deploy it in uninteresting, dogmatic ways, as another echo in their chambers. Stephen Colbert is doing something truly new, almost a parody of snark, showing that the edge now lies somewhere beyond snark. His alter ego Jon Stewart can still bring it, but he adds in a lot more sincerity now. Maybe, like Joe Kennedy in 1929, he’s cashed out and getting in early on the next bull market.

The post The Irrational Exuberance of the Snark Market appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.