Since today is the Ides (Ide?) of March, let’s begin with the Ides of March …
… an outstanding example of brass rock.
Today in 1955, Elvis Presley signed a management contract with Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, an illegal immigrant from the Netherlands who named himself Colonel Tom Parker.
The number two single that day:
The number one British album today in 1969 was Cream’s “Goodbye,” which was, duh, their last album:
The texting shorthand term “smh” (“shakes my head”) didn’t exist in 1955 because texting didn’t exist in 1955.
But surely “smh” was invented for things like this: Today in 1955, CBS talent scout Arthur Godfrey made a signing decision between Elvis Presley and Pat Boone.
Godfrey chose Boone.
The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1960:
Today in 1965, Eric Clapton quit the Yardbirds because he wanted to continue playing the blues, while the other members wanted to sell records, as in …
The number one single today in 1965:
Today in 1967, the Beatles hired Sounds, Inc. for horn work:
The Badgers are once again on the hunt for a new head coach.
Wisconsin fired head coach Jonathan Tsipis on Tuesday after the Badgers were blown out in the first round of the Big Ten Tournament by Illinois, 67-42.
The Badgers put up just two points in the first quarter of the game and were unable to mount a comeback, losing to an Illini squad that had won just four games all season. The loss ended Tsipis’ tenure with a 50-99 overall record.
“I appreciate Coach Tsipis’s efforts during his five years with us, but we feel it is time for a new direction for our women’s basketball program,” director of athletics Barry Alvarez said in a press release.
While Wisconsin looked to be making progress in Tsipis’ third season after going 15-18, the Badgers failed to build on that momentum. They went 3-15 in Big Ten play the next year and won just one B1G game this season.
Wisconsin is now one decade and two head coaches removed from their last winning season.
As the oft-applied logic of college program building goes: who you hire is important, but the coach you hire after that is who really matters. But what if a program’s expectations grow too lofty too quick?
For the Badgers, that second hire was Lisa Stone, in 2003. Stone succeeded Jane Albright, who had just finished a 7-21 season with the Badgers.
But Albright was only one year removed from a 19-12 record and a first-round appearance in the NCAA Tournament. She had turned the Badgers program around immediately in her first season at UW in 1994 and amassed a 154-86 record, a WNIT title and five NCAA Tournament appearances before her final year.
The down year, however, was enough to convince Wisconsin’s leadership — who had agreed with Albright at the beginning of the season that she would either get a long-term extension at year’s end or be out of a job — that Albright wasn’t worth the investment. Albright resigned at the end of the season when the extension didn’t come.
“The on-court success for our women’s basketball program has been clearly inconsistent with the resources we have committed to this program, and we have not achieved our desired goals of a Big Ten conference championship and deep penetration into the NCAA tournament,” then-UW senior associate athletic director Jamie Pollard said at the time.
Stop me if this sounds familiar.
Stone, Albright’s successor, struggled in her first three seasons at Wisconsin, but then made the WNIT three years in a row, including a Finals appearance. She hit pay dirt a year later after a 21-11 season landed the Badgers in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in almost a decade.
Only a year after Stone received the Big Ten Coach of the Year award for her efforts, she was fired in 2011 following a 16-15 season and a WNIT second-round exit. Alvarez echoed the words of Pollard eight years earlier and said the “program has not reached and maintained the level of success I believe is possible.”
Wisconsin nailed the first part of their program rebuild back in 1994. They found a coach who was successful right away, who established a clear basketball identity in the program and who even made it to the second round of March Madness a couple times.
But Wisconsin’s leadership had drawn their line in the sand, and the newfound success Albright had brought the Badgers wasn’t enough.
Truth be told, Wisconsin still did well to hire Stone despite the self-inflicted circumstances. Stone continued some of Albright’s success and kept Wisconsin relevant in the Big Ten. Even if she wasn’t the coach to take them to the next tier, few coaches are, and sustained competitiveness is worth a lot in college basketball, especially when you’re not a blue blood.
Now, rather than searching for that second coach in the program building equation, Wisconsin is back to where they were all those years ago. Let’s just hope they’re lucky enough to land the next Jane Albright or Lisa Stone.
Note how well Albright and Stone did compared with other UW coaches:
After having been fired following her fifth consecutive UW winning season, Stone is now the coach at Saint Louis, where she has had six consecutive winning seasons, including an 11–3 record this season. Albright was fired after a 7–21 season, and went on to Wichita State and Nevada, where she had losing career records. That 7–21 season, however, followed back-to-back NCAA tournament trips.
Whatever progress Albright and Stone made was erased in Kelsey’s tenure. Her nadir, and the road to her eventual firing, came when she was asked a question about Barneveld native Hannah Whitish, who had a great career at Nebraska:
That is the sort of thing you say to your team in practice or in a team meeting, not to the press. (Though I’m sure the assembled reporters and the Madison sports media loved this.) Throwing your team under the bus in public has not been shown to improve their performance. Players insufficiently motivated to work to improve themselves should be a high school issue, not an issue for student–athletes on scholarship. Did Kelsey recruit the wrong players, or did she insufficiently motivate her own team well before this? Either way, the responsibility ends up in the same place.
So UW replaced two coaches with winning records with two coaches who had records deep in the Loss column. I’m a little surprised Tsipis got fired, especially after this COVID season, but evidently UW athletic director Barry Alvarez wasn’t seeing the kind of progress he wanted to see.
To some extent, though, this is Alvarez’s fault. UW has had a decades-long problem of failing to get the state’s best players, from Janel McCarville (Minnesota) to Whitish, to play at UW. They did have one of the state’s best players, Estella Mosckkau, this past season, but that was after she played at Stanford for three seasons. She averaged 5.8 points a game this season.
One list of non-Badgers from Wisconsin includes Megan Gustafson (Iowa), Arike Ogunbowale (Notre Dame), Natisha Hiedeman and Allazia Blockton (Marquette), Chelsea Brackmann (Bradley), and Sydney Cooks (Michigan State, then Mississippi State).
The state’s top recruit, Beaver Dam’s Matyson Wilke, is reportedly coming to Wisconsin. But UW–Green Bay, coached by Kevin Borseth (whom UW should have hired but did not because he was the wrong gender), has the second-, third- and fourth-ranked recruits.
That list of non-Badgers is not like, say, Diamond Stone spurning UW for Maryland (and then playing in Europe after failing in the NBA following one season as a Terrapin) or Tyler Herro rejecting UW for Kentucky (and then the NBA), or the Hauser brothers getting Minnesota coach Richie Pitino to give them a package deal that was half-unwarranted. Everyone knows that Wisconsin men’s basketball isn’t about one-and-done players. The list one paragraph ago constitutes players that either weren’t recruited by UW, or found UW wanting. Alvarez needs to find out why and change that if he expects the next coach to be better than the previous two.
It would also be helpful if the new coach could build a wall around the state as Alvarez managed to do with his football team. (For that matter it would be interesting if UW were to contact those non-Badgers and ask them why they didn’t come to UW.) The problem doesn’t seem to be girls basketball talent in Wisconsin; it seems to be girls basketball talent in Wisconsin that doesn’t want to play for the University of Wisconsin.
There is a template for success. That is the UW women’s volleyball team, currently ranked number one in Division I, with several NCAA tournament trips over three coaches (the first of whom, Steve Lowe, died of lung cancer not caused by smoking). I suspect UW succeeds in volleyball because of sufficient resources, and UW fails in women’s basketball because of insufficient resources. (Apparently not in coach pay, though, based on this interesting conparison.) A more successful program would attract more fans (UW ranked 25th in Division I and ninth in the Big T1e4n in attendance in 2019–20, averaging not even 4,000 in the 17.287-seat Kohl Center) and therefore more money.
At this point it also might be time to change coach hiring models. It seems unlikely that UW will promote one of its assistants, as the Badgers did with men’s basketball coach Greg Gard (after Bo Ryan quit in midseason, which reportedly did not make Alvarez happy at all) or Alvarez’s successor Bret Bielema (which worked, his personality notwithstanding, until Bielema’s ego reached the size of his stomach). As with any coach hire, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t (see Brad Soderberg, who replaced Dick Bennett after his midseason resignation, only to be ushered out the door after a disastrous NCAA tournament appearance, and football coach Jim Hilles, who replaced Dave McClain after his death, then was not hired for the full-time job after three wins).
Stone, Kelsey and Tsipis were all assistants from successful programs hired to be head coaches for the first time. That worked with Alvarez and hockey coaches Mark Johnson and Tony Granato. (With former Virginia assistant Bill Cofield, not so much.)
The other model is to hire a head coach from a smaller school — for instance, football coach Paul Chryst (although he arguably was from both camps having been an assistant for Bielema), Ryan and his predecessor Bennett. Albright coached at Northern Illinois before heading north on Interstate 90. Of course, that model doesn’t always work either (see Morton, Don, and Andersen, Gary).
Since no one else seems to have compiled a list, here’s a possible list (based, by the way, on no inside information):
A year after the World Health Organization declared a Covid pandemic and government health authorities encouraged politicians to order societal shutdowns, America has only begun to pay the staggering cost.
Matthew Impelli writes at Newsweek:
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford University Medical School, recently said that COVID-19 lockdowns are the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made…The harm to people is catastrophic.”
…Bhattacharya, who made the comments during an interview with the Daily Clout, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, a petition that calls for the end of COVID-19 lockdowns, claiming that they are “producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”
Newsweek shares a more recent email from Dr. Bhattacharya:
We will be counting the catastrophic health and psychological harms, imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth, for a generation.
At the same time, [lockdowns] have not served to control the epidemic in the places where they have been most vigorously imposed. In the US, they have – at best – protected the “non-essential” class from COVID, while exposing the essential working class to the disease. The lockdowns are trickle down epidemiology.
Dr. Bhattacharya and the tens of thousands of other medical practitioners and scientists who signed the declaration have been arguing against lockdowns for months:
The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Adding insult to the injuries caused by politicians who rejected this sensible approach is that the relative risks were largely understood at the dawn of the lockdown era. It was already clear that for most people the virus was not a dire threat. A year ago today, the Journal’s Betsy McKay, Jennifer Calfas and Talal Ansari reported:
Roughly 80% of cases of Covid-19—the illness caused by the novel coronavirus—tend to be mild or moderate, and more than 66,000 people globally have recovered. But those who are older or have underlying health conditions, such as heart disease, lung disease or diabetes, are at a higher risk.
Instead of focusing on the protection of the elderly and those with particular vulnerabilities, credentialed government experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci continued to suggest school closures and broad limits on business activity as appropriate responses in areas where the virus was spreading.
This column’s March 10, 2020, edition warned about the cost of lockdowns and noted:
To this point the coronavirus has taken a heavy toll on the elderly but not so much on kids. Many children may have such mild cases that nobody ever even realizes they’re sick.
This column also suggested that “President Donald Trump should first ask his economic team to estimate the costs and benefits of coronavirus countermeasures” and noted that the “unintended consequences of such interventions are not just financial.”
Pro Publica’s Alec MacGillis writes this week about adolescent mental-health disasters in the small town of Hobbs, N.M. He notes that across the U.S., while the lockdown was catastrophic, the virus was never a huge threat to the young:
The median age for COVID-19 fatalities in the U.S. is about 80. Of the nearly 500,000 deaths in the U.S. analyzed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of early March, 252 were among those 18 or younger — five hundredths of a percent of the total.
Mr. MacGillis then describes a number of local tragedies in Hobbs, including the story of 11-year-old Landon Fuller, who took his life after riding his bike to a field near his house:
“I think the big question we all have is why, and we will never know the reason why,” his mother, Katrina Fuller, told an Albuquerque TV talk show in July. “The only thing that I was able to find was in his journal, was that he had wrote that he was going mad from staying at home all the time and that he just wanted to be able to go to school and play outside with his friends. So that was the only thing that I can imagine what was going through his head at that time.”
At the same time, shutdowns necessitated massive government spending of borrowed money to offset the loss of normal economic activity. So U.S. children were handed a massive additional debt burden at the same time their ability to generate future income was reduced.
In the last year the United States has added more than $4 trillion in federal debt, and that doesn’t even count the historic Biden spending surge, which kicks off today with his signature on the massive new stimulus plan.
Yet as the country was locking down last spring, Dr. Fauci described the impact on Americans as “inconvenient” and later acknowledged that he did not do cost-benefit analysis and really had no idea what the consequences were for students: “I don’t have a good explanation, or solution to the problem of what happens when you close schools, and it triggers a cascade of events that could have some harmful circumstances.”
In March of last year, Dr. Fauci told National Public Radio that the U.S. “would not have a vaccine available for at least a year to a year and a half—at best.”
Thank goodness he was wrong about that. Dr. Fauci’s other errors have been much more painful for Americans to bear.
I know three people who died from COVID. Freeman’s conclusion is nonetheless absolutely correct. The federal and Wisconsin government’s performance against COVID ranks among the worst government failures in history. Educators say it will take years for children to recover from the lost fourth quarter of last school year. Some people — for instance, those whose businesses were ordered closed because they were “nonessential,” and then their businesses closed for good — will never recover.
The number one single today in 1966 (which means that it predated the movie by two years):
The Beatles had an interesting day today in 1969. Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman …
… while George Harrison and wife Patti Boyd were arrested on charges of possessing 120 marijuana joints.
The number one British single today in 1965:
The number one single today in 1967:
Today in 1968, this song went gold after its singer died in a plane crash in Lake Monona in Madison:
Today in 1956, RCA records purchased a half-page ad in that week’s Billboard magazine claiming that Elvis Presley was …
Ordinarily, if you have to tell someone something like that, the ad probably doesn’t measure up to the standards of accuracy. This one time, the hype was accurate.
Today in 1960, Britain’s Record Retailer printed the country’s first Extended Play and LP chart. Number one on the EP chart:
Jonah Goldberg, whom I have read dating back to the 1990s:
Let’s talk about blogging.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to take a seat on the porch next to my rocking chair as I regale you over mint tea about the Golden Age of Blogging. Suffice it to say it was a big deal for a short period of time. The first big disruptor of traditional media was probably Craigslist because it derailed the classified ad gravy train. But, on the content side, blogging was almost as significant.
I have a lot of fond memories about the blogging era. I’m very proud of the fact that The Corner over at National Review was my idea. But then, earlier this week, I had the opportunity to record an episode of Jay Nordlinger’s Q&A (coming out soon-ish, probably). It was a fun conversation, and it continued for a good while after we stopped recording. During the post-pod discussion, I had a small epiphany: Blogging deserves its fair share of blame for much of the craptacularity out there in the media space today.
For people of my generation, this is pretty counterintuitive. The debates of the blogging era feel like witty intellectual badinage around the Algonquin Roundtable compared to the poo-flinging, boorish brabble of the Twitter age. But if you think of “microblogging”—the dumb technical term for sharing your worthless thoughts on platforms like Twitter—as a natural evolution from blogging, its sins become apparent.
Imagine a chart of how people receive news, broadly defined to include everything from tabloid gossip to punditry. If you start just after the first ice age, people received news in intervals that could literally be measured in lifetimes. If you start with the first American newspaper, the Boston News-Letter, those intervals, for some, were weekly. But if you’ve seen the Tom Hanks movie News of the World, you know that this is a bit misleading.
Well into the 19th century, people—particularly non-affluent, non-city-dwelling folk—got their news monthly or even seasonally. And the interval has been shrinking ever since. Even taking into account radio, TV, and cable news, most people in the pre-internet age got their fill of journalism in the morning and then got a brief update at the end of the day with the nightly news, or maybe the evening edition of a newspaper.
The internet filled up a lot of that space. When I started National Review Online, we were considered to be evidence of the hyper acceleration of the news cycle because we would post pieces that responded not only to the content of the morning newspapers, but to stuff that was happening in real-time on cable. Even so, we tended to publish pieces mostly in the morning and then again around lunchtime. For a while, this was considered a blistering pace.
I came up with the idea for The Corner for several reasons. One of them—though not the chief one— was to fill the “dead air” for all the people who wanted more content throughout the day (including my then-boss Rich Lowry). Again, there was a lot of good stuff in blogging. But there was a dilemma. The supply of actual news couldn’t keep up with the demand for “content.” This encouraged a certain style of commentary—a style, I confess, I think I excelled at: the take.
Takes come in many forms. The “hot take” is the most famous. Simon Maloy of The New Republic offers one definition of a hot take as “a piece of deliberately provocative commentary that is based almost entirely on shallow moralizing.” That’s not bad, but I think there are other forms of hot takes, and myriad other forms of takes more broadly. By a “hot take,” I don’t simply mean an unconventional or surprising opinion. Rather, I mean a style of commentary that parasitically feeds off someone else’s argument or work almost instantly.
Media criticism was the bread and butter of blogging for one simple reason: It’s easy. I’ve often said that if the New York Times didn’t exist, conservatives would have to create it, because much of the right is more interested in howthe Times covers the news than the news it delivers. Jay likes to say there are two kinds of writers: those who write about the world, events, issues etc., and those who write about the people who write about such things. Blogging was made for the latter type.
The majority of takes are intended to reassure readers that an argument they don’t want to be right is in fact wrong—and not just wrong, but stupid, evil, ridiculous, and in some instances worthy of canceling the author of such an argument. Bloggers, myself included, stared at their screens like dogs groaking a butcher, waiting for someone to be wrong. Again, some takes are good, some bad. But the bad form has been systematized, corporatized, and institutionalized.
All poisons are determined by the dose. For example, Slate started as a home for very interesting takes. But over time, as I wrote in 2006 (to their credit, I wrote it for Slate), a site that once provided spice in small doses soon began to provide it in large, toxic amounts. Slate became addicted to take-ism, which is why “Slate pitch” jokes used to be a thing. With the exception of Will Saletan, I don’t read many writers over there anymore, but my sense is that the site is now just another organ of the left, dedicated to explaining why progressives are right about everything. The charming contrarianism is gone.
Then there’s the right. Conservatives were complaining about liberal media bias decades before Spiro Agnew was decrying “pusillanimous pussyfooters” and “nattering nabobs of negativism.” But in the blogging age, the complaints metastasized into cancerous obsessions. Yes, part of the story is the way in which the mainstream media often strived to earn much of the contempt conservatives have for it (a development that also has a lot to do with the influence of blogging). But part of it was simply structural. Blogging encouraged writers to focus less on the news than on the way it was presented and those who presented it. Commenting intelligently and quickly on actual news is pretty hard. Finding fault in others is much easier—and more fun.
Just as Starbucks educated the consumer to think it was normal to spend $3 (and then $5 or $6) on a cup of coffee, blogging educated the consumer to think this kind of stuff wasn’t merely fun, but deadly serious. The mainstream media is weaker than it has ever been. Yet many conservatives today would have you believe it isn’t just powerful, but tyrannical.
Finally, there’s Twitter. The term “microblogging” is more apt than I previously thought. When you miniaturize something, you often purify it, distilling it to its purest form. Twitter is like someone took the practice of blogging, put it in a centrifuge, and reduced it to its essence. At least good blogging requires making arguments, marshaling facts, etc. Twitter at its worst, and most effective, strips that stuff away like discarded corn husks. Twitter is the fentanyl of blogging.
I don’t want to go all Marshall McLuhan here, but the medium really has become the message. There are young journalists who think reading Twitter is like covering a beat. “Look at how wrong so-and-so was.” “Look who ‘destroyed’ what’s-his-name.” People, including politicians, think a persuasive argument is defined by a tweet that goes viral among people who already agree with you—or, worse, that goes viral among people who think you’re an idiot. Because when that happens, it’s proof you “owned” or “triggered” the libs or the cons.
The other day, Jim Geraghty lamented the conservative “habit of showing up and opening with the tenth step of a ten-step argument.” I think that’s very apt. But I also think it describes a broader phenomenon. I’d be okay with people doing this sometimes, if they could explain, when asked, how they reached the tenth step. Take discussions of socialism these days. The vast majority of people flinging around the word “socialism”—positively or negatively—didn’t reach their conclusion after working through a 10-step argument, or even a 10-tweet Twitter thread. They just know socialism is good or bad because the people they hate are for it or against it.
Cancel culture exists on both the left and the right for a lot of reasons. Personally, I think left-wing cancel culture is worse for reasons we can discuss another time. But one of the things that fuels cancel culture is the way social media convinces people that their “side” is indisputably right about everything, to the point where your tribe becomes a kind of transcendent corpus mysticum. What I mean is that, in a populist age, your group isn’t just better, it’s sacred. In such an environment, being “wrong” isn’t just wrong in some factual or analytical sense. It’s sacrilegious. Being wrong—even in the most theoretical sense—at, say, the New York Times or (if you read my email) Fox News is an outrageous form of desecration, like when Napoleon’s army used conquered churches for stables. Social media fuels this dynamic because social media provides the virtual comfort of the mob.
Of course, the evolution—or devolution—continues. Just as Twitter supplanted blogging, Instagram and TikTok are grabbing attention from Twitter because images are even more viscerally pure than tweets. At this rate, Matt Gaetz could soon post a video that opens with a photo of AOC taped to his belt buckle and ends with him bludgeoning his own crotch with a ball peen hammer. As long as he got 100,000 responses from “socialists” making fun of him, he’d declare it a huge success.
Today in 1963, the Beatles appeared in a concert at the East Ham Granada in London … as third billing after Tommy Roe and Chris Montez.
Today in 1964, Capitol Records released the Four Preps’ “Letter to the Beatles.”
The song started at number 85. And then Capitol withdrew the song to avoid a lawsuit because the song included a bit of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 