Culture

It’s been about thirty years since Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, an essay about the declining civic and community engagement among Americans. The title of the essay came from Putnam’s observation that although more people were bowling than in the previous twenty years, fewer people were members of bowling leagues. It suggested to him that people were more frequently engaging in individualized activities, which could decrease social ties. In the years since, there has emerged another threat to community-based bowling: the monopolization of the bowling industry by corporate conglomerates.  A couple of weekends ago my husband and I went on a double date with another married couple. We grabbed dinner and then went bowling.

In 2024, right-wingers are facing a doddery, often incoherent Democratic president, an even more incoherent VP (who doesn’t have the excuse of being eighty-one) and a host of oil-leaking charlatans like Gavin Newsom. Why, in this target-rich environment, are some conservatives focusing their ire on Taylor Swift? Don’t get me wrong — America is a free country. You can criticize who you like. Me, I happen to think that Ms. Swift’s music is annoying and tedious. But to see the most popular singer in the world as an avatar for everything you hate politically seems misguided from a tactical perspective, no? Sure, it might be annoying to see her on TV at NFL games. It might vex you that she opposes Donald Trump.

Jim Harbaugh made a surprise appearance at the annual March for Life in Washington, DC last Friday, just a couple of weeks after he won the college football national championship as the head coach of the University of Michigan Wolverines. Harbaugh marched alongside about 100,000 other pro-lifers in the snowy cold and gave an impassioned speech to the crowd while introducing former NFL player Benjamin Watson.   “Thank you all for being here. It’s a great example that you’re setting. It’s testimony for the sanctity of life.” Harbaugh said. “It’s a great day for a march... This is football weather!” “You know, we all talk about human rights.

Take a look at the side-by-side above. Which woman do you find more attractive? They are both photos of Erin Moriarty, an actress on Amazon Prime’s The Boys. The comparison went viral this week for obvious reasons. The first photo appears to be from 2016. The second photo was posted on Moriarty’s Instagram a few days ago. She is twenty-nine years old in the second photo — the same age as I am.  Most people would say that the woman on the left is objectively more attractive. She looks healthier, for one, but more importantly, she looks human. Faces are not supposed to be perfectly symmetrical. In the photo on the right, Moriarty looks uncanny. Even if you didn’t have the photo on the left as a reference point, you’d know that something was “off.

The 2023 Golden Globes awards took place this past weekend, and although I never really watch these things live, I am a woman and thus biologically and socially wired to inhale red carpet photos and the celebrity gossip that inevitably springs out of award show season. This year’s Golden Globes were shockingly free of politics, and so the focus was really on the movies and the celebrities — as it should be.  That brings us to Taylor Swift, the twelve-time Grammy Award-winning country singer turned pop star. Although it seemed none of the celebs were too keen on Golden Globes host Jo Koy’s comedy routine, Swift’s reaction to a light-hearted jab made in her direction left many viewers with a bitter taste in their mouths.

Welcome back to Culture Shock! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and is gearing up for the big winter storm that is supposed to hit the east coast this weekend. The latest models in the DMV suggest we’re mostly getting sleet, which is a bit disappointing after years of mild winters and very little snow. This was my first Christmas since getting married, and it’s tough to figure out how to divide time between your family and your in-laws. We decided to spend Christmas Eve with my family and then flew to Florida on Christmas morning to see my husband’s family for a couple of days. I am very lucky in that pretty much all of my family members are conservative, so our political arguments are limited in scope.

There are many things in short supply these days, but cheapness and vulgarity are not among them. They’re everywhere right now — in politics and pop culture, among the royals, within the legacy media and across social media. Most obscene is the cheapness and vulgarity that has pervaded the conflict between Israel and Hamas and its accompanying explosion of global antisemitism.  It would be easy to attribute this collective rot to mere coincidence, but it’s more a case of compounded indecency. And nowhere more so than at the top. The coarse bravado of then-candidate Donald Trump a decade ago metastasized during his presidency into the corruption and cravenness that now dominates — and could possibly derail — his third stab at the White House.

The number of parents choosing to homeschool their children has risen sharply since the Covid-19 pandemic. There are plenty of reasons for this trend, but the overarching issue was that parents simply lost trust in the public education system, whether because of the adoption of illogical Covid policies pushed by teacher’s unions or the introduction of controversial, politicized content into curricula. It became clear over the past few years that school boards and teacher’s unions mostly don’t have the best interests of students in mind, are resentful of parental involvement and are willing to lie if it means avoiding accountability for their bad decisions. The effect of liberal control over public education? Math and reading scores in the US are at their lowest level in decades.

It’s officially Spotify Wrapped season! For the uninitiated, this is the time of year when Spotify subscribers receive their year-end data on what they listened to the most throughout the previous twelve months. The streaming app tells you your top songs, artists, albums, genres and any other cookie they’ve been tracking. Every user’s Spotify Wrapped is packaged up nicely into an immensely shareable infographic that dominates social media for days. I do not share mine because my music listening habits when no one is watching are completely embarrassing! But a lot of people do, usually to show how cool or niche their music or podcast tastes are.

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I plopped on the couch for a quiet evening in and turned on the new Netflix comedy special Natural Selection by Matt Rife. We were both vaguely aware of Rife because he’s posted some videos of his crowd work that have gone viral on social media. Young women in particular seem to like him because he can be quite charming on stage and will openly flirt with female audience members (Gen Z would describe Rife’s charisma as “rizz,” I think). The set was fine but not super memorable, so I was caught by surprise when I recently saw an article on BuzzFeed explaining that Rife’s fans were furious with him over a joke he made regarding domestic violence.

You shouldn’t make a habit out of watching the daily White House press briefings unless you want to get much dumber, but every now and then they are good for some cheap entertainment. On Monday, for example, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre decided to dedicate precious podium time to “Transgender Day of Remembrance.” GLAAD, an LGBTQ+ activist organization, says that Transgender Day of Remembrance is meant to commemorate “transgender people whose lives were lost in acts of anti-transgender violence.” TDOR (they really like their acronyms, huh?) was started in 1999 by a transgender activist in memory of Rita Hester, a transgender woman whose murder remains unsolved. I found it a bit interesting that the catalyst for TDOR was an unsolved murder case.

All of my ladies out there who read this newsletter are probably familiar with the food blog “Half Baked Harvest.” Tieghan Gerard, the thirty-year-old founder and owner of the blog, has posted a cozy and delicious recipe nearly every single day since 2012, inspiring women everywhere to dust off their crockpots and grease their baking pans. Fellas, if the woman in your life suddenly decided to try her hand at pumpkin cinnamon rolls or made white chicken chili for game day, there’s a good chance she snagged the recipe from Half Baked Harvest. Gerard has millions of loyal followers and naturally this has led to criticism from bitter, jealous losers. The New York Times recently managed to snag an interview with Gerard (no, Tieghan, run!

When this newsletter launched in June, it opened with my exclusive report on the disturbing nature of the New York Times’s kids section. Across a handful of issues, which are sent out monthly and tucked into the Sunday edition of the NYT, the NYT for Kids encouraged children to explore their gender identity in online chatrooms, cheered on a child drag queen who had money thrown at him by grown men, insisted that “gender-affirming care” for children is totally safe and saves lives and instructed children to ignore adults who reject the left-wing propaganda in its pages. I’ve still been reading the New York Times for Kids every month and am happy to share that subsequent issues following my report were mostly free of agitprop... until now.

Allow me to introduce you to Sabrina Carpenter, a former Disney actress (red flag #1) and current rising pop star. Carpenter has had two songs on the Billboard Hot 100 this year and opened for Taylor Swift on her history-making Eras Tour. Carpenter’s latest single, “Feather,” has nearly 90 million streams on Spotify. She released the track’s accompanying music video, which already has 2.3 million views on YouTube, on Halloween. Carpenter is petite, blue-eyed and blonde-haired, and her performance outfits leave little to the imagination. Her artist persona is somewhat dependent on the profane; live performances of Carpenter’s song “Nonsense” went viral among Gen Z fans for her ad-libbed, often R-rated outro lyrics.

I’m back! As I mentioned in my last newsletter, my husband and I recently set off on our ten-day honeymoon to Morocco. We went to Casablanca, Meknes, Fez, Marrakesh, the Agafay Desert and Essaouira. I didn’t travel much growing up and so this trip was really special for me. We toured one of the largest mosques in the world and a fifteenth-century synagogue that is still active today, visited the Roman ruins of Volubilis, trekked through the Medinas, haggled in the souk, watched artisans create their handmade crafts with techniques handed down for centuries, rode camels and enjoyed traditional Berber food and music. Before we left for our trip, we fielded a lot of safety concerns.