The Ringer - The Ringer’s All-2018 Team2018-12-28T06:30:03-05:00http://www.theringer.com/rss/stream/179032632018-12-28T06:30:03-05:002018-12-28T06:30:03-05:00The Future of Soccer Is Running at Kylian Mbappé’s Pace
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<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://idrawforfood.co.uk/" target="_blank">Dan Evans</a></figcaption>
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<p>The past decade of world soccer was dictated by short passing and slow buildups. At the 2018 World Cup, a lightning-quick French teenager gave fans a blueprint for the game’s next phase.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="CZRrxa">There was a moment in this summer’s World Cup when I questioned my eyesight. Broadly speaking, human vision is remarkable. We can see in three dimensions, both near and far, whether we’re staring or just merely glancing. The speed at which items become invisible to the human eye is something like 38,000 miles per hour—which is to say that short of attempting to eyeball a particle of light, nothing should be fast enough to escape our view. In the opening minutes of France’s round of 16 match with Argentina, Kylian Mbappé attempted to challenge that notion.</p>
<p id="1qVsD5">About 11 minutes into the game, he collected a loose ball near the center of the pitch and darted past five Argentine defenders before being ripped down in the box to earn a French penalty. A few moments later, he received a pass from Paul Pogba and, in similar fashion, sprinted by helpless opponents before his run was ended by another foul. Each movement was a demonstration of speed; at 19, Mbappé was the youngest man on the pitch, and also the quickest.</p>
<p id="U0lI68">One week earlier, against Peru in the group stage, he became the youngest goal scorer in French World Cup history. Against Argentina, he scored twice, first by weaving through a pileup in the box to slide home a go-ahead goal and then by collecting another pass on the break minutes later for the insurance tally in a 4-3 French victory. The pair of goals made him the <a href="https://www.theringer.com/soccer/2018/6/30/17521160/2018-world-cup-kylian-mbappe-lionel-messi-france-argentina">youngest footballer since Pelé in 1958</a> to score more than once in a World Cup knockout game. He earned wide praise for his performance and was rightfully named the tournament’s Best Young Player. It wasn’t just that he so thoroughly decimated world-class opponents but the way in which he did so. </p>
<p id="Kc5Xdv">For a decade, soccer has been stylistically defined by patience in passing: the tiki-taka, death-by-a-million-cuts strategies that allowed players to wear down central defenders and lull opponents into a false sense of security before seizing on missteps to deftly guide the ball into the net, capping sequences of perfectly choreographed beauty. The practice, shepherded by Pep Guardiola and his disciples at Barcelona, was used by an array of teams to win a handful of Champions League trophies, two European Championships, and two World Cups. The archetypes of the model—midfield maestros like Andrés Iniesta and Xavi—gained great fame and accolades, as did successors like Sergio Busquets and Thiago.</p>
<p id="TAJIod">Mbappé’s accomplishments haven’t come from a landscape dominated by thousands of passes and slow buildups. Deft as his touches are, he’s Ricky Bobby in a field of lesser racers: He wants to go fast. And he does. Watch him on this opening run against Argentina. Look how, even when saddled with keeping possession of a rolling ball, he outpaces each and every opponent who tries to chase him down.</p>
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<p id="8grj7g">In retrospect, it shouldn’t have taken as long as it did to recognize that the calendar would be dominated by a teenager from Paris. The World Cup was a coming-out party, but Kylian Mbappé is not an unknown. He did not appear from the far reaches of the bench, for club or for country, to shock the world with his surprising gifts. He’s been here for a while, since a breakout season with Monaco in 2016-17 led to one of the richest transfers in history when he was shipped to Paris Saint-Germain for a cool £121.5 million. In his first season at Parc des Princes, while still a teen, he scored 13 goals and added nine assists, finishing third in expected goals plus expected assists per 90 minutes behind teammates Neymar and Edinson Cavani. This year—20 years old as of December 20 <a href="https://twitter.com/babuyagu/status/1075209959346978817?s=21">and still somehow not yet entering his prime</a>—he leads Ligue 1 in goals and is second to only Neymar in xG + xA. He is, by all definitions of the word, a superstar. But more than that, he’s the best picture the sport has of its future.</p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="ibSSxL">Reliance on a counterattack isn’t a new strategy. At its core, it’s a simple tactic: Wait for your opponent to make a mistake and then pounce. The scheme has always been effective, but for much of the past decade, it’s been executed most prominently by less-talented squads on the global stage, while the elite teams played the beautiful game. In 2004, Greece performed a version of it by sitting back on defense and allowing teams to flail at their parked bus before they found an opening. They stole enough goals to win the European Championship. At the 2014 World Cup, Costa Rica topped a group with Italy, England, and Uruguay thanks to a steady dose of counterattacking before bowing out on penalties in the quarterfinal round. But their version, too, wasn’t quite the one that’s gained popularity.</p>
<p id="bLH2OA">Today, with the <a href="https://www.theringer.com/soccer/2018/9/14/17857706/soccer-premier-league-liverpool-tottenham-fullbacks-preview">emergence of fullbacks</a> as secondary wing attackers, teams relying on the counter have been able to evolve the strategy from one used primarily as a defensive tactic to much more of an attacking one. Three of the four semifinalists in Russia relied on transitional play to generate goals. <a href="https://www.theringer.com/soccer/2018/7/15/17573766/france-world-cup-final-croatia-dynasty-mbappe">France used Mbappé and Paul Pogba</a> to flip the field on opponents en route to a World Cup victory. <a href="https://www.theringer.com/soccer/2018/7/6/17539328/luka-modric-ivan-rakitic-good-enough-to-overcome-croatia-tactics">Croatia countered up the wings</a> and reached the final before falling. And before Belgium exited the tournament in the semifinals against France, <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/7/2/17528828/nacer-chadli-goal-belgium-japan-world-cup-2018">they put together the most complete counterattacking run of any team this year</a>.</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">We dare you to find a better counterattack! <br><br>Chadli finishes off a beautiful team play to give Belgium the win late in stoppage time. <a href="https://t.co/lbUxZDzG0E">pic.twitter.com/lbUxZDzG0E</a></p>— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) <a href="https://twitter.com/FOXSoccer/status/1013874079114227712?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 2, 2018</a>
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<p id="qqLow0">Unlike their predecessors, though, France’s tactics were less “pure counterattacking” and more “winning without dominating the ball.” In years past, obliterating an opponent meant allowing them as few touches as possible and hoarding possession. Les Bleus flipped that script, holding more of the ball in just three of their seven World Cup games, but going undefeated on their way to a championship.</p>
<p id="gXM5BJ">In a way, it makes sense that the World Cup marked this global transition. National teams rarely practice or play together, stringing together a handful of gatherings per year into hopeful cohesion in the pitch. Precise, quick-touch, short passing requires an extraordinary amount of skill—ask Saudi Arabia what happens when you attempt it with what amounts to a JV team playing varsity squads—and a similarly impressive level of trust and understanding between manager and squad, as well as between defenders, creators, and strikers. Spain and Germany, the previous two world champions, were supremely talented, sure, but they also saw the majority of their rosters piped in from the two best clubs in their respective countries. Twelve of 23 representatives from Spain’s 2010 title came from Barcelona (under Guardiola) or Real Madrid. Eleven members of Germany’s 2014 team played domestically at Bayern Munich (also under Guardiola) or Borussia Dortmund. And so the eventual cup holders could implement tactics that required perfect communication between their field players because rather than attempting to marry 11 individuals intellectually, they had to link two already cohesive groups. </p>
<p id="dW00dX">The same couldn’t be said of Spain and Germany this year. Spain saw their quest for a second title in three tries hindered before the tournament began when days before their opening match, manager Julen Lopetegui was unceremoniously sacked after word leaked he’d been hired to oversee Real Madrid. Their summer ended a few weeks later when they tiki-taka’d their way out of Russia, out-passing the hosts by a whopping 1,008-192, but never creating any real chances. Spain still moved the ball, but without purpose, and without a singular vision. With Germany eliminated in the group stage, fatally divided by the <a href="https://www.theringer.com/soccer/2018/6/27/17511596/2018-world-cup-germany-south-korea-mexico-sweden-elimination">“bling-bling gang” and the Bavarians</a>, La Roja’s exit in the round of 16 also marked the loosening of tiki-taka’s vice grip on the strategic hierarchy. </p>
<p id="n1WplD">The seeds of the transition are evident throughout Europe’s top leagues. Soccer, like most sports, is getting bigger, faster, and stronger. And more importantly, more aggressive. Almost all of the most watchable and most successful teams on the continent <a href="https://www.theringer.com/soccer/2018/8/30/17797912/the-2018-2019-ringer-soccer-watchability-rankings">have recorded above-average PPDA</a> (passes allowed per defensive action) numbers this season. The metric measures how quickly a team allows opponents to circulate possession before attempting to win the ball back. Essentially, it’s a method used to calculate how aggressive a team is <em>without</em> the ball. Last season, Guardiola’s record-setting Manchester City squad led the Premier League in total passes per match by a wide margin, but also topped Europe in PPDA. And their toughest competitors for the crown this season, Liverpool, may be the single strongest example of the success of transitional play at the club level.</p>
<p id="V9FyIR">As my former colleague <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/5/24/17387198/liverpool-champions-league-final-jurgen-klopp">Ryan O’Hanlon wrote</a> on the eve of the Reds’ Champions League final appearance in May, Jürgen Klopp’s signature Gegenpressing tactic “creates offense through attackers and midfielders that swarm the opposition as soon as they lose possession.” The strategy unlocked Liverpool’s hydra of attacking talents, headlined by Mohamed Salah and supplemented by Sadio Mané and Roberto Firmino. The strategy is, as Klopp has suggested, a playmaker in and of itself, as his squad are constantly in motion, and can break up the pitch at will.</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Liverpool's best counter-attacks this season: <br><br>Unstoppable <a href="https://t.co/SXg1SXzcfD">pic.twitter.com/SXg1SXzcfD</a></p>— Harry (@HS_10Ftbol) <a href="https://twitter.com/HS_10Ftbol/status/996054707280994304?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 14, 2018</a>
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<p id="Sfhysf">In practice, his claim is true. In 2017-18, Salah set the Premier League record for goals in a 38-week season—almost all of which came from open play. Mané added 10 domestic goals and 10 more in the Champions League, while Firmino threw in 15 and 10 of his own. Manchester City scored more goals than any team in England’s history, broke triple-digit points, and wrapped up the title sometime around Christmas. And still, the only chance any team had of breaking them was through the press.</p>
<p id="Lul0iq">The new blueprint for success is clear: Play in transition, and the points will come. Some of the best teams have already learned it. Paris Saint-Germain, the team that employs Mbappé on the wing, is third best in Europe in PPDA, second in watchability and has a 13-point cushion atop the French table. Liverpool is atop the Premier League table. And across the sport, the most exciting players are the ones who play fast and on the break. That isn’t to say tiki-taka is dead. Barcelona still leads La Liga in passes per game and is a good bet to win their fourth title in five years and their eighth in 11 years. But their grip on the global aesthetic is slipping.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="cuQwcP">This was the year of Kylian Mbappé and his brand of play. Of explosive runs up the wing, quick-strike scoring, and the honest-to-God beauty of watching a perfectly executed counterattack. 2019 may see a reversal of form. Maybe a new generation of 5-foot-8 central midfielders with glacial pace and beautiful touch are rounding out their time in the academies as we speak. But more likely than not, the speed revolution will continue, with Ousmane Dembélé and Jadon Sancho making waves across Europe and Mbappé, only 20, still improving weekly. As he grows, both in skill and in stature, he’ll carry the next stylistic era of the sport on his shoulders. With each blistering run, he cements transitional play as the defining tactic of the coming years. And if that trend continues, 2018 won’t be the only time Mbappé finishes on top.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/soccer/2018/12/28/18156748/the-future-of-soccer-is-running-at-kylian-mbappes-paceShaker Samman2018-12-27T11:28:18-05:002018-12-27T11:28:18-05:00Travis Scott Was 2018’s Biggest Music Attraction
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<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://idrawforfood.co.uk/" target="_blank">Dan Evans</a></figcaption>
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<p>From his first no. 1 hit to a trio of Grammy nominations and a face-melting tour, rap’s consummate showman conducted his greatest year yet</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="CZYGXp">Should we start with how Travis Scott looks? He’s tallish and ropey, nowadays usually draped in the expensive versions of the things people wear to cybergoth dance parties. His hair on <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/R1323_COV-Travis-Scott.jpg?w=844">a recent <em>Rolling Stone </em>cover</a> simultaneously defies explanation and really completes his look. If you consider <em>that </em>concert photo from last year, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/complex/videos/heres-the-origin-of-that-hilarious-travis-scott-meme/10156368436364367/">the one where he’s holding the mic stand above his head</a>, and then consider the way he herks and jerks and leaps around on stage, he’s<em> </em>like a character in his own claymation Tim Burton movie: Cactus Jack Skellington in <em>The Rager Before Christmas</em>. </p>
<p id="Qyhk5R">Speaking of ragers before Christmas, last week, I watched Travis Scott part a red sea. </p>
<p id="imXoeT">Not <em>the</em> Red Sea—this was at the Forum, in Inglewood, where the seawater inlet of the Indian Ocean is not. The outstretched hands of concert goers shouting themselves hoarse and dizzy in excitement, bathed in the glow of red LEDs, just sort of <em>looked</em> like a sea. He opened up the mosh pit, but he didn’t jump in. It was the second of back-to-back sold-out shows for Scott’s Wish You Were Here<em> </em>Tour at the 17,505-capacity venue, propping up his third and most accomplished album to date, <em>Astroworld. </em>Later in the show, Scott asked his longtime DJ OG Chase B to scratch off the music, and the crowd to extend their middle fingers in vindication. “We celebrating <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/grammys/8489348/travis-scott-2019-grammy-award-nominations-sicko-mode-astroworld">three Grammy nominations</a>.” Those are: best rap album, best rap performance (“Sicko Mode”), and best rap song (also “Sicko Mode”). If you take the almost-accolades for his August release, and add his <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2018/12/03/travis-scott-hits-no-1-for-the-first-time-with-sicko-mode/#119151b52253">first no. 1 single</a>, <a href="https://people.com/parents/kylie-jenner-stormi-baby-photos/">the birth of his daughter</a>, and the city of Houston’s recent <a href="http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2018/11/travis-scott-astroworld-day-houston/">proclamation</a> that every November 18 henceforth shall be known as “Astroworld Day,” 2018 was, inarguably, the biggest year of Travis Scott’s career. </p>
<p id="IJG8gC">Let’s just say the brain-conquering delirium of “Sicko Mode” was a culmination. Of Travis Scott’s rap-as-Instagram-Explore-page ethos, but also of a strange and disjointed year for pop music in general. In May, <em>Billboard</em> <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/8427967/billboard-changes-streaming-weighting-hot-100-billboard-200">locked in some tweaks to its chart metrics</a> as part of “a global push to measure [digital] streams in a revenue-reflective and access-based manner.” This means, in English, that radio play isn’t as important as it once was, and, functionally, that hits will continue to bubble up from strange places, for reasons that won’t be easy to pin down. “Sicko Mode” is decidedly un-hit-like: its runtime exceeds five minutes, there’s no hook, and it features three discrete ideas loosely stitched together. It does however, feature Drake. And just as the Drake-featuring intro picks up into a full gallop and the wonky fun-house trill ticks over, the song lurches forward into even weirder territory, and morphs two more times after that. In some ways “Sicko Mode” is the full realization of a concept that took root on “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OENLtQnxbk">Drive</a>,” from Scott’s 2013 mixtape <em>Owl Pharaoh</em>—a jumpy scan through the local rap stations while doing 30 mph over the speed limit on surface streets. In other ways—the aforementioned Drake verse, the death-drop transitions, Tay Keith fucking these niggas up<em>—</em>it’s one of the most exciting rap songs of the decade, even if it felt a lot like cheating. LeBron James, who skipped onto the stage alongside Travis and Drake at the Staples Center in October, didn’t seem to mind. </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Drake brought out LEBRON and TRAVIS SCOTT for SICKO MODE (via mellany_sanchez/IG) <a href="https://t.co/aeqRFQUlEA">pic.twitter.com/aeqRFQUlEA</a></p>— Overtime (@overtime) <a href="https://twitter.com/overtime/status/1051472639041163266?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 14, 2018</a>
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<p id="dvPy6P">What you think of as pop music—pure pop music—is now a subgenre. “Today’s rising generation of pop stars,” critic Jon Caramanica <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/20/arts/music/new-pop-music.html">wrote in a recent <em>New York Times </em>essay</a>, “has never known a time in which Kanye West—or really, Drake—wasn’t the most progressive, creative, and meaningful performer working in the mainstream.” Hip-hop is what pure pop was, and the old guard is beginning to phase out. This year, a Jay-Z and Beyoncé surprise drop was upstaged by a 5 Seconds of Summer album, Nicki Minaj’s <em>Queen</em> came in at no. 2 behind <em>Astroworld</em>, <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2018/08/nicki-minaj-travis-scott-feud-explained.html">which was spending its second week at no. 1</a>. Kanye West … <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2018/10/11/17966616/kanye-west-donald-trump-white-house-music-modernization-act">I’m a little tired of talking about</a>. So who are the new superstars? Music is as divided as ever by variant understanding of what music is supposed to be like, and maybe only Drake really transcends that variance on a consistent basis. There’s a tier of stars beneath that, the ones that rule our attention for weeks or months at a time, for whom eventual <em>super</em>stardom is up for debate. </p>
<p id="PGx9Tw">People<em> love</em> Travis Scott and, if you’re looking at it sideways, it’s easy to discount just how much. The critical line on Scott has been, at least since 2014’s <em>Days Before Rodeo</em>, that it’s strange that his influences are also his peers, and that he is, at best, decent at the things Quavo or Young Thug or Swae Lee are great at. There’s also the matter of his politics, which are well, not good. 2014 is also when Scott <a href="http://balleralert.com/profiles/blogs/twitter-uncovered-a-2014-travis-scott-interview-where-he-said-mike-brown-deserved-to-pay-for-consequences-he-probably-inflicted-and-discussed-the-problem-with-black-people/">claimed</a> to know “the problem with black people” and said that Mike Brown—an unarmed teenager who was shot and killed by Darren Wilson that August—deserved to “pay for consequences that he probably inflicted.” (Kendrick Lamar would <a href="https://www.complex.com/music/2015/01/kendrick-lamar-ferguson-comments-reaction">say similarly dumb things</a> in a marginally less dumb way a year later.) Before <em>Astroworld</em> was released, transgender icon Amanda Lepore was removed from the cover, which reportedly resulted in Frank Ocean filing a cease-and-desist to have his vocals taken off of “Carousel,” although Ocean then <a href="http://frankocean.tumblr.com/post/178089649721/i-think-the-song-sounds-cool-i-did-it-in-like-20">wrote on his Tumblr</a> that the two resolved their differences weeks before the report went out. Reverend Al Sharpton <a href="https://pagesix.com/2018/12/24/al-sharpton-slams-travis-scott-for-super-bowl-performance/">castigated</a> Scott last week for agreeing to perform at halftime of February’s Super Bowl while the NFL continues to shun Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid is still being “randomly” drug-tested <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2018/12/23/nfl-players-union-order-report-drug-program-administrator-eric-reids-allegations/">on a consistent basis</a>. But it’s tough to know what anyone expects—Scott did stump for Beto O’Rourke in the 2018 midterm elections, but did so because “Beto … [was] on some shit.” We don’t need him to be a thought leader, we’d just like for him to not fuck up royally. </p>
<p id="HHXznq">He is a shithead, but he’s so good at being one that it’s almost disarming. There’s something Scott has been doing in recent late-night talk show spots, where he recounts putting on a production of <em>Kiss Me, Kate</em> in grade school. He trails off into “Too Darn Hot,” and stands up from his seat, snapping, singing, and smiling. It gets big applause. He is a performer, first and foremost, and history will likely remember him for that. </p>
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<p id="1FO7ww">Everyone knows what a <em>performer</em> he is, but this year, more than in years past, it was tough to deny Travis Scott’s powers as a curator, and likewise the value in making music that <em>feels </em>good, regardless of whether it’s trying to communicate, with words, anything important. Music critic Lawrence Burney <a href="https://noisey.vice.com/en_uk/article/a3q44g/you-cant-deny-travis-scott-anymore">called</a> Scott “one of the genre’s best conductors,” and I think it fits. He managed to make Kevin Parker, the Weeknd, and himself make sense on one song, and on another, James Blake, Philip Bailey, and Stevie Wonder’s harmonica. This curatorial skill extends to his live show: he creates strange alternate realities for his guests to be amazed or confused by, to wander around in. For 2017’s Birds Eye View<em> </em>Tour, he rode in on a fucking <em>animatronic eagle</em>,<em> </em>and this year, in tribute to the defunct Six Flags AstroWorld theme park, his mode of transport was an inverted ferris wheel. Also, a roller coaster suspended from the rafters overhead. The few stray fans who could wriggle over the barricade and past event security were allowed to strap themselves in and rap along as Scott performed. </p>
<p id="Nc9bhM">“Stop Trying to Be God,” <em>Astroworld</em>’s fifth track, didn’t happen until over an hour in, after the set change. Kanye West was there at the Forum—I know because he arrived to huge chants and camera flashes. It was tough not to think of the stripped-down performance of the song (just Travis’s Auto-Tune and Mike Dean’s synth organ) as sort of personal. Especially since you can interpret the lyrics as being about how world peace is not, strictly speaking, Kanye’s business. One week hence, Kanye tweeted <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/12/19/18148137/kanye-vs-drake-part-infinity-and-underrated-rap-releases-of-the-year-feat-alphonse-pierre">for a full business day</a> about apologies owed and feeling threatened by Drake’s second verse on “Sicko Mode.” This was doubly awkward and hurtful, since Travis ad-libbed all over that verse, and he and Kanye are apparently soon-to-be brothers-in-law. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="LJrT4O">By the time “Sicko Mode” came around, for the encore, Kanye had reportedly left to beat the traffic. Scott was of course sweaty and shirtless, looking less like Cactus Jack Skellington than his own action figure, which appeared on the cover of his debut album, and was of course sold separately. (It’s <a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/La-Flame-Entertainment-Presents-Travis-Scott-Collectible-Action-Figure-Limited-/263301789640">going for $1,000 on eBay right now</a>, if you’re interested.) I was struck by the sense that the third time really is the charm, as Scott was lowered from his roller coaster to the stage. The fireworks went off. “Thank you for coming to Astroworld!” he yelled. “Good night!”</p>
https://www.theringer.com/music/2018/12/27/18157639/travis-scott-astroworld-wish-you-were-here-tour-2018Micah Peters2018-12-26T10:46:59-05:002018-12-26T10:46:59-05:00Tua Tagovailoa Is the Quarterback of Both the Future and Present
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<img alt="Tua Tagovailoa" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/7c83I1-1rBso6pZmadvBRGGPMtc=/0x0:2400x1800/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62738050/end_of_year_essays_tua.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://www.adamvillacin.com/" target="_blank">Adam Villacin</a></figcaption>
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<p>Over the course of 2018, the Alabama QB has emerged as a player who could secure a spot on the college football pantheon—and who offers a glimpse into the future of his position. His meteoric rise has made it easy to overlook all that he brings to the table right now.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="QiXJjZ">My dreams for Tua Tagovailoa kept growing in 2018. At the beginning of the year, I merely wanted the Alabama freshman to see significant playing time. By the end of the year, I told anybody who would listen that I believed he could <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/12/6/18129080/heisman-trophy-race-kyler-murray-tua-tagovailoa">go on to become the greatest quarterback of all time</a>. </p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="v3zLUr"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Top Prospects Skipping Bowl Games Has Gone From Radical to the New Normal","url":"https://www.theringer.com/2018/12/17/18144071/top-prospects-bowl-games-nick-bosa-will-grier"},{"title":"The Completely Logical, Financially Prudent Argument for Kyler Murray Choosing the NFL","url":"https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2018/12/19/18147692/kyler-murray-heisman-nfl-draft-oakland-athletics"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="dQGXQ2">I’m a pretty rational guy. I’m the author of such scorching hot takes as “Hey, LeBron James and Michael Jordan are both really good” and “You know what, I’m fine with people calling Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, or Drew Brees the GOAT—they’re all great in different ways!” And yet with Tagovailoa I find myself drawn to hyperbole. I can’t help it. Everything about him is so different and so radical. </p>
<p id="wksBQc">It seems fair to dream of a ridiculous future for Tagovailoa, because everything he’s done to this point has been objectively ridiculous. He received his first meaningful playing time during last season’s national championship game, subbing in for starter Jalen Hurts at halftime after Georgia shut out Alabama in the first half. Turning to an unproven true freshman QB in the national title game seems like a stunningly bad idea, but Tagovailoa rallied the Crimson Tide to 20 second-half points before <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/1/9/16867180/tua-tagovailoa-alabama-georgia-national-title-game">winning the contest with a walk-off 41-yard touchdown pass in overtime</a>. </p>
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<p id="P2JctJ">Since then, Tagovailoa has reshaped college football’s reigning dynasty in his image. A program that spent a decade coasting to wins with suffocating defense and conservative offense now blows opponents to smithereens with one of the two best offenses in the nation. This Alabama team ranks <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/11/6/18068878/2018-alabama-crimson-tide-best-team-ever">among the greatest in the history of the sport</a>, going 13-0 with an average margin of victory of 33.1 points. He’s thrown 37 touchdown passes and only four interceptions and has posted <a href="https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/leaders/pass-rating-player-season.html">the second-best passer efficiency rating</a> and <a href="https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/leaders/pass-yds-per-att-player-season.html">third-best yards per attempt</a> of all time. </p>
<p id="tQGY67">In Atlanta last January, Tagovailoa changed a game—the biggest game of the year, sure, but still just one game. Over the course of this season, it seems like he’s changed the whole damn sport, revamping a program that had previously never tinkered with its formula, mainly because it didn’t need to. </p>
<p id="yIpbSb">Sometimes, in between deciding whether to call Tagovailoa the greatest college quarterback ever or simply the greatest college quarterback right now, I remember something: Tua Tagovailoa has still never played four full quarters of a college football game.</p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Auburn v Alabama" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/T9GqJgGyv7sLan0uo4u0aAbJIW8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13650645/1064897490.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Tua Tagovailoa</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="25kU3K"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="VxGB71">Tagovailoa is the best college quarterback I’ve ever seen. He treats every near-sack like he treated a 13-0 deficit in his national title game breakthrough. Yes, the odds can seem stacked against him, and yes, the choices he makes can be unusual and risky. But the bewildering decisions only he would make yield unforgettable successes only he could achieve. </p>
<p id="rv31lK">Just think about the decisions Tagovailoa made on this play from Bama’s season-opening 51-14 rout of Louisville. Don’t worry about the execution. Simply focus on what Tagovailoa must have been thinking at each instant during this sequence, and you’ll realize that Tagovailoa would be strapped to the bench if he weren’t on the fast track for the Hall of Fame.</p>
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<p id="HhCTVf">Same thing here, from a 59-0 demolition of Vanderbilt in 2017. </p>
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<p id="WkJLvU">Tagovailoa reminds me so much of Patrick Mahomes II, the quarterback currently tearing apart the NFL with his ludicrous skill set. (Ahem: The quarterback I <a href="https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2018/1/31/16955022/patrick-mahomes-chiefs-alex-smith-trade">predicted would tear the NFL apart</a> with his ludicrous skill set.) I haven’t seen the two compared often, but every great thing I see in Mahomes I also see in Tagovailoa. He has the effortless arm strength. He has impossible accuracy throwing into minuscule windows. He has the rare vision to see those windows—and the foresight to anticipate others opening, often throwing to covered receivers who become open mere moments after the ball goes in the air. He uses his mobility not as a tool to pick up 10 yards on the ground, but to keep plays alive and then to complete 30-yard passes. He has the uncanny ability to hit throws regardless of how fast he’s moving. He can do all of this while using a variety of arm angles—a skill that seems best suited for trick-shot videos, until he throws from an unusual angle to connect on a pass that devastates a defense. He combines a Sam Bradford interception rate with a Brett Favre mentality. </p>
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<p id="XaCzD5">I genuinely believe that the reason Oklahoma QB Kyler Murray edged out Tagovailoa in this year’s Heisman Trophy vote is because Tagovailoa was too good. In most of Alabama’s 2018 games, it took him about five plays and two minutes to <a href="https://twitter.com/KirkHerbstreit/status/1055527074230951936">score his first touchdown</a>. Follow-up touchdowns didn’t take much longer. Bama won its first 12 games by at least 22 points, and the Tide were typically in mop-up time by early in the second half. Tagovailoa played in the fourth quarter of only three games all season, attempting a total of eight passes. Meanwhile, Murray sometimes needed to rally his team late because Oklahoma’s garbage defense left him chasing points. Murray finished the season with more than 4,000 passing yards and 51 total touchdowns; Tagovailoa had just 3,353 yards and 42 scores. Murray was a deserving winner, but plenty of Heisman voters can be swayed by counting stats, and Tagovailoa’s three-quarters season was somewhat short on those. (To be fair: While Tagovailoa had the second-best passer efficiency rating and third-best yards per attempt of all time, Murray set the record in both of those categories this season.)</p>
<p id="RzOEsn">Even taking this season’s Heisman out of the equation, Tagovailoa has a chance to put together one of the greatest careers in the history of the sport. Tua won the national championship as a freshman, is the favorite to win it again as a sophomore, and should be the runaway favorite for next year’s Heisman and a potential third straight national championship as a junior, after which he’ll probably leave campus to be the no. 1 overall pick in the 2020 NFL draft. It might sound ridiculous to say, “I think this guy is gonna win three national championships, plus a Heisman, and then be the top pick in the draft,” but none of those things sounds remotely absurd with Tagovailoa. This isn’t a Finebaum caller fever dream. This is all possible, maybe even likely. </p>
<p id="EJzhF0">There’s just one problem with my Tua fanfic: the permanent buzzkill of real life. Tagovailoa’s impossibly perfect career hit its first snag in December’s SEC championship game, when the quarterback aggravated the ankle injury that bothered him for much of the second half of the season. Even with a bum ankle, Tagovailoa kept trying to play like he always does, and it burned him. He was still attempting daring escapes and needle-threading throws, but neither his scrambles nor his passes had the zip necessary to create classic Tua highlights. He went 10-of-25 passing with two interceptions—by far the worst outing of his Alabama career, and the first in which he threw multiple interceptions. Hurts came in to replace him and <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/12/1/18121628/jalen-hurts-leads-alabama-to-sec-championship-over-georgia-tua-tagovailoa-nick-saban">led the Tide to a dramatic 35-28 win</a>, downing Georgia in the same stadium where Tagovailoa had replaced Hurts to down Georgia in January. Word is that Tagovailoa <a href="https://www.si.com/college-football/2018/12/17/tua-tagovailoa-injury-update-alabama-crimson-tide-quarterback-nick-saban">should be good to go for Alabama’s Orange Bowl matchup against Oklahoma</a> (and Murray) in the College Football Playoff semifinal, but who knows; head coach Nick Saban’s injury reports can be misleading.</p>
<p id="6wRxgn">After Tagovailoa’s first setback, I began rewriting the career summary I had prewritten for him. Maybe instead of racking up national championships, Tagovailoa should just sit out his junior season entirely. He’d be the presumptive no. 1 pick in the 2020 draft regardless—why risk injury? Over the past 12 months, he’s evolved from being Alabama’s best-kept secret to being the best player in college football to being on a path that could lead him to leave Tuscaloosa as the greatest college football player of all time. But Tua remains a 20-year-old kid with arms and legs that can falter. Nothing about his future is promised—not even his next game.</p>
<p id="FnkS65">I’m done imagining what Tagovailoa could have done in the fourth quarters he didn’t play, or crafting elaborate scenarios about where his career could go. That seemed essential when he was a backup with a wow-filled high school mixtape and a few “did that really happen?” moments in garbage time, but now he’s the best player for the best team in college football. In real life, right in front of us, a left-handed Hawaiian leapt off the bench to win the most thrilling championship game of the College Football Playoff era, then molded old-school Alabama into a futuristic points machine. This will go down as the Year of Tua, no matter what happens in this year’s playoff.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="cmMbkk">There is only one thing better than dreaming about Tagovailoa’s limitless possibilities: enjoying the stunning reality he has already created.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/2018/12/26/18156309/tua-tagovailoa-alabama-quarterback-year-in-reviewRodger Sherman2018-12-24T06:10:08-05:002018-12-24T06:10:08-05:00Shohei Ohtani and Reframing the Way We Think About Sports
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/UosPEJ6RePvFsB9Ir_3XGmK8EFo=/256x0:2461x1654/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62732760/end_of_year_essays_otani_2.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://www.adamvillacin.com/" target="_blank">Adam Villacin</a></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Angels’ hitting and pitching sensation wasn’t just a unique baseball phenomenon as a rookie: He forced fans and analysts to abandon established heuristics of evaluation to wrap their minds around his brilliance </p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="SZkyDx">The year of Shohei Ohtani began with home runs and strikeouts, but in the wrong order. Instead of crushing homers at the plate and whiffing every batter in sight from the mound, as had been expected from <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2016/10/17/16043796/the-postseasons-true-revelation-is-a-two-way-mystery-man-3e2e8585e6ba">Japan’s Babe Ruth</a>, Ohtani spent his first MLB spring training enacting the ruinous reverse.</p>
<p id="CWJQJk">As a pitcher, the 23-year-old Angels rookie faced two major-league lineups and allowed nine runs (eight earned) while collecting just eight total outs; as a hitter, he posted the second-worst OPS among 535 players with at least 30 at-bats in spring training, collecting just four singles, three walks, and no extra-base hits throughout the exhibition schedule. <a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/verdict-shohei-ohtanis-bat-not-good-023611674.html">Article</a> <a href="https://theathletic.com/277172/2018/03/16/as-ohtanis-struggles-continue-is-starting-the-season-at-triple-a-a-possibility/">after</a> <a href="http://www.espn.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/85545/does-shohei-ohtani-belong-on-the-angels-opening-day-roster">article</a> <a href="https://www.mlb.com/news/could-shohei-ohtani-start-2018-in-the-minors/c-269340374">after</a> <a href="https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/angels-say-its-too-early-to-judge-struggling-ohtani-but-he-could-start-in-minors/">article</a> wondered whether Ohtani was ready for the majors, or outright proclaimed he wasn’t; one scout <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7xmBRi_dQA">told ESPN</a> Ohtani belonged in single-A.</p>
<p id="1oZQjj">Those alarmist reports will make for excellent montage fodder in the eventual Ohtani movie as one of the early hurdles he needed to surpass en route to major league stardom. In retrospect, those articles seem wildly overreactive. But in the moment, even though samples were small, concern suffocated and overwhelmed all manner of reason. We as a baseball-watching audience had no real concept of what Ohtani would look like in the majors as he attempted to become the <a href="https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2018/3/27/17166588/babe-ruth-shohei-ohtani-two-way-lessons-100-years-later">first two-way star since Ruth</a>, and after a frenzied free-agent search and his surprising selection of the Angels, the early returns looked as discouraging as possible.</p>
<p id="zymCBJ">And then he hit a home run in his second regular-season game as the Angels’ designated hitter, and then he hit <a href="https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2018/4/4/17200518/shohei-ohtani-corey-kluber-home-run">another home run</a> in his third, and another in his fourth; and then he struck out 12 and took a perfect game into the seventh inning of his second start on the mound the following weekend. As late as mid-May, Ohtani’s OPS as a batter was north of 1.000, and in his last five pitching starts before suffering an elbow injury in June, he never allowed more than two runs in game.</p>
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<p id="1rp0QA">By September, Ohtani’s two-way shine had given way to temporary one-way excellence because his torn elbow ligament meant he was destined for Tommy John surgery, but the rookie continued to make highlights. He was an easy choice for the AL’s Rookie of the Year award, and his final staggering numbers—22 homers, 10 stolen bases, and one of the <a href="https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=300&type=8&season=2018&month=0&season1=1919&ind=3&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&sort=18,d">20 best batting lines</a> for a rookie in the past century, plus a 3.31 ERA and 11 strikeouts per nine innings—fail to encompass just quite the thrill he brought to the sport each night. </p>
<p id="ymRTvI">All the early doubters certainly looked foolish, yet while excessive fretting isn’t unusual in sports discourse, Ohtani’s overall situation was. As fans and analysts and (hopefully) intelligent thinkers about sports, we rely on past precedent to help map the present and future. At <em>The Ringer</em>, for instance, our <a href="https://nbadraft.theringer.com/">annual NBA draft guide</a> includes a “Shades Of” line for each player, listing three benchmarks to help readers understand a prospect’s likely outcomes. <a href="https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/2019-zips-projections-boston-red-sox/">Various</a> baseball projection <a href="https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/projecting-the-prospects-in-the-giancarlo-stanton-trade/">systems</a> do the same by triangulating statistical comps for every player in the majors and<em> </em>minors; we have so many numbers, we might as well use them all.</p>
<p id="DQqRzG">But sometimes, our irrepressible need to place the present and future in context can limit the imagination. We can chart likelihoods and predict outcomes because of what came before, yet while this human tendency is useful and aids understanding of the game, it can simultaneously suffocate and overwhelm pure enjoyment on its own terms. This side effect is especially apparent in baseball, a sport inextricably wedded with its past, and whose Hall of Fame sparks the most vociferous debates and various round-number statistical milestones garner the most celebration.</p>
<p id="hSGCSl">Ohtani breaks this analytical system—both the natural impulse and the very statistical methodology that buttresses it. Consider, for instance, Baseball-Reference’s similarity scores, which list for every MLB player with at least 500 plate appearances or 100 innings pitched the 10 <a href="https://www.baseball-reference.com/about/similarity.shtml">most similar players</a> to the player in question, grouped by career, age, and individual season by age. This tool illustrates that because so many people of all shapes and sizes and skill sets and statistical indicators have played baseball, everybody in the modern game, Ohtani excepted, looks a lot like other people who have played baseball. Even the best players are updated versions of past greats or close to contemporaries beside whom they sit on leaderboards. Clayton Kershaw’s most similar pitcher through his age-28, 29, and 30 seasons is Pedro Martínez. One reigning MVP (Christian Yelich) is the <a href="https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/b/bettsmo01.shtml#all_ss_other">top overall comp</a> for another reigning MVP (Mookie Betts). Mike Trout is the best player alive—the <a href="https://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/shareit/KMkwU">best ever</a>, in fact, for a player through his age-26 season—but he’s also not so different from Mickey Mantle, Frank Robinson, and Ken Griffey Jr.</p>
<p id="OZPM4Y">Those players are still all individuals with their own paths to follow, of course, and we enjoy the speculation and debate about their futures. No two players are <em>exactly</em> the same, but they’re close enough that when Kershaw signed his contract extension with the Dodgers last month, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/sports/dodgers/la-sp-dodgers-kershaw-future-20181102-story.html">analysts could point</a> to Pedro’s 30s as a predictive or instructive map for Kershaw’s next decade.</p>
<p id="MBRFIF">Yet just as Ohtani forced <a href="https://www.sports-reference.com/blog/2018/03/2018-war-update/">Baseball-Reference</a> and <a href="https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/instagraphs/updated-combined-war-leaderboard/">FanGraphs</a> to tweak how they calculated or presented player value models, and just as he plunged the sport’s <a href="https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/shohei-otani-will-break-the-mold-in-fantasy-and-video-games-when-he-gets-to-mlb/">fantasy infrastructure</a> into chaos, he will also require individual accommodations for B-Ref’s simple similarity scores tool. Although he won’t reach both 500 PA and 100 IP for a while, as he won’t pitch at all in 2019 after undergoing Tommy John surgery this fall, the site’s developers know they’ll have to make changes in the future. “I suspect we’ll want to do something special for Ohtani’s page once he has both sets of similarity scores to show so that users can see both” Ohtani’s hitting and pitching comps, Kenny Jackelen, who oversees the site’s day-to-day operation, writes in an email.</p>
<p id="f0zBSt">“Something special” is an apt descriptor of Ohtani himself, too, as he and he alone fuses two disparate skill sets into one. Pitchers as a collective have never <a href="https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=p&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=0&type=8&season=2018&month=0&season1=1901&ind=0&team=0,ss&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&sort=16,a">hit as poorly</a> as they did in 2018, continuing a <a href="https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2018/6/7/17437016/national-league-pitcher-hitting-dh">perpetual decline</a>, and on the rare occasion that a position player pitches in a non-blowout (i.e., when a full staff has already been used in a long extra-innings game), he almost invariably <a href="http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/24364647/are-position-players-actually-good-pitchers-yes-definitely-no">does terribly</a>. Yet Ohtani last season was a <a href="https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=200&type=8&season=2018&month=0&season1=2018&ind=0&team=0&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&sort=17,d">top-10 hitter</a> and threw the majors’ <a href="https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2018/9/14/17858936/los-angeles-angels-shohei-ohtani-rookie-season-success">fastest and most unhittable pitches</a> when he was able to take the mound between injuries. For next season, the Steamer projection system thinks Ohtani will be one of the sport’s dozen best batters (the names immediately after his on the <a href="https://www.fangraphs.com/projections.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&type=steamer&team=0&lg=all&players=0&sort=22,d">projected wRC+ leaderboard</a> are Paul Goldschmidt, Joey Votto, Aaron Judge, Manny Machado, José Ramírez, and Freddie Freeman) and that he would be a <a href="https://www.fangraphs.com/projections.aspx?pos=all&stats=pit&type=steamer600&team=0&lg=all&players=0&sort=19,d">top-25 starter</a> if he were able to pitch. (Although he likely won’t be ready to start the season due to his recovery, he will be able to return as a batter <a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/shohei-ohtani-can-play-2019-even-undergoes-tommy-john-surgery-061654070.html">far sooner</a> than as a pitcher.)</p>
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<p id="wBKYqE">As Ohtani’s success perhaps <a href="https://www.latimes.com/sports/angels/la-sp-angels-20180620-story.html">paves the way</a> for more two-way experimentation, “something special” will still apply, too, with all other attempts posing as <a href="https://geology.com/gold/fools-gold/">mere pyrite</a> to Ohtani’s genuine gold. Matt Davidson, a DH for the White Sox before being non-tendered last month, is reportedly considering that path. Reliever Michael Lorenzen might play some outfield for the Reds. The Mariners added utility man Kaleb Cowart with a two-way intention. But they were non-tendered, thrust into middle relief, and used as a utility player, respectively, for a reason: None of them can match Ohtani at <em>either</em> pitching or hitting, let alone both. And the uninspiring likes of Anthony Gose, Christian Bethancourt, Micah Owings, and Brooks Kieschnick have tried and largely failed to maintain a two-way presence in the recent past. They played both ways to try to maintain a roster spot; Ohtani plays both ways because he’s twice a star.</p>
<p id="CagUtX">He’s a hitter with a triple-digit fastball and knee-buckling splitter, and he’s a pitcher with a titanic swing and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpMQY8AYz10&feature=youtu.be&t=67">terrific speed</a>. That fact bears so many repetitions because it’s so extraordinary; let it marinate; let it soak into your skin. <em>Ohtani last season was a top-10 hitter and threw the majors’ fastest and most unhittable pitches</em>. The worry now is not that he might not hit well enough to do double duty in the majors—it’s that he might hit <em>so</em> well that a strong showing at the plate in 2019, as his pitching arm recovers from surgery, might lead the Angels to question his two-way future. Ohtani’s schedule last season meant he hit just 3-4 times a week while he was pitching; his club might not want to sacrifice so many at-bats—plus increase his risk of missing time due to injury—if he evinces staying power as one of the majors’ best hitters. From a strict WAR perspective, it could be worth more to give Ohtani a full season at the plate rather than let him take so many rest days that the pitching value he gains fails to compensate for the hitting value he loses in the tradeoff.</p>
<p id="TQJyNL">That very set of complicated factors is why even Ruth didn’t do the double for long. For the Red Sox, he played both ways in only one and a half seasons before departing the rubber almost for good; he stopped pitching midway through the 1919 season, when he set the single-season home-run record, and after moving to the Yankees the following winter, he pitched in just five more games, spread across four separate seasons, in his career.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="aOwRut">Ohtani’s most valuable deployment might not jell with his most entertaining deployment; the former is still unclear, yet the latter is easy: We want the Ohtani who can collect both home runs and strikeouts, please. That Ohtani is a <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2017/6/12/16036576/2017-mlb-draft-hunter-greene-brendan-mckay-two-way-players-4c0331305280">baseball dream made manifest</a>; that Ohtani brings a new kind of exhilarating magic to the sport and renders Angels games watchable in a way that even the <a href="https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/t/troutmi01.shtml">best offensive player</a> and <a href="https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/s/simmoan01.shtml">best defensive player</a> on the planet couldn’t accomplish as a pair; that Ohtani is unprecedented in living memory, making him sheerly, enjoyably different not just as a baseball player but as an athletic phenomenon in 2018.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2018/12/24/18154386/shohei-ohtani-los-angeles-angels-pitching-hittingZach Kram2018-12-21T06:20:07-05:002018-12-21T06:20:07-05:00 Naomi Osaka Is Between Worlds
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Gh_2I_TX9e9uzmzkSAMufPj2aww=/139x0:2351x1659/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62721082/osaka_2.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="https://www.ericfosterstudio.com" target="_blank">Eric Foster</a></figcaption>
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<p>The 21-year-old was born in Japan and raised in America. She’s the future of tennis and plays like stars past. In a way, she’s different than anyone her sport has ever known. So why does Osaka feel so familiar? </p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="MuzvUP">In his 1969 book <em>Levels of the Game, </em>author John McPhee leans on one word when describing tennis player Clark Graebner’s serve: <em>crunch</em>. “Graebner’s big frame rocks backward over his right leg, then rocks forward over his left as he lifts the ball for his first serve of the match. Crunch. Ace. Right down the middle at a 130 miles an hour.”</p>
<p id="1YtmeY">When I imagine <em>crunch</em>, I see Graebner’s knees bent, his left arm reaching toward the sky and his right clutching his steel frame. I see everything locked at tight angles, jaws paused, waiting to snap shut. I hear the metallic clunk that rings out as the serve leaves his racket, the whistling path of the ball as it spikes down the T, the low boom as it hits the back wall. If <em>crunch</em> is a feeling and not a Graebner-only attribute, it has been passed through the years. It’s revealed itself in Boris Becker and Pete Sampras, in Andy Roddick and Lindsay Davenport. Now, you can see <em>crunch</em> in the next generation. It is here in Naomi Osaka. </p>
<p id="agKngx">There is a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJzYpJBNOh4&t=2m58s">snap to her game</a>. There is a bite on the end of her strokes. They spark and clang. There is not much need to describe why it is fun to watch power tennis. <em>Crunch</em> is, and always has been, deeply satisfying to watch.</p>
<div id="Q8vSY3"><div style="left: 0; width: 100%; height: 0; position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.2493%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WReMZZbgr0I?rel=0" style="border: 0; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; position: absolute;" allowfullscreen="" scrolling="no" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media"></iframe></div></div>
<p id="8FIjoc">If you spend any time around tennis, you probably know a handful of things about Osaka: Her father is Haitian American and her mother is Japanese. She took part in a <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/9/8/17836004/naomi-osaka-serena-williams-us-open-final">dramatic, controversial final</a> at this summer’s U.S. Open that ended with her accepting the winner’s trophy in tears. She is 21 years old and can <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/08/sports/tennis/naomi-osaka-us-open.html">generate screaming power</a>. Now ranked fifth in the world, she’s become the brightest young hope in an aging game, the promise of a generational star who could take the mantle from the Rogers, Serenas, and Rafas to emerge as tennis’s representative for the culture at large. Osaka is not just the owner of a beautiful game, but the bearer of expectation for a sport and a nation. She’s a representative of the misunderstood.</p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="BNP Paribas WTA Finals Singapore presented by SC Global - Day 4" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/bKgh4An4_63pZBdHIdjM-jXtt4M=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13643186/1052926946.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Yong Teck Lim/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Naomi Osaka</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="XzrI6G"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="4HQCv1">Osaka was born on October 16, 1997, in, as it so happens, Osaka, a massive city in the center of the Japanese archipelago. Her parents met in the early 1990s in Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island. Tamaki Osaka, Naomi’s mother, had been sent to Sapporo from her small, homogeneous hometown of Nemuro for high school. It was there that she met Leonard Francois, a Haitian college student who had roots in New York. </p>
<p id="ByIQip">The pair dated in secret for years. When Tamaki told her parents that she was planning on marrying a foreigner, she was called a disgrace and didn’t speak with her family for years after. It was in this climate that Naomi and her older sister, Mari, were born.</p>
<p id="5OkDKa">In 2000, when Naomi was 3, the family moved to Long Island, where Francois’s parents lived. Inspired by watching the Williams sisters on television, Francois decided that his daughters would play tennis too. In 2006 the family moved to Florida, where many American-based tennis professionals and prodigies train, and homeschooled Naomi and Mari at night while training them during the day. As the Osaka daughters left their tweens, Francois decided that they would play under the Japanese flag; while the United States Tennis Association had not been particularly eager in developing them, the Japanese federation did not need convincing.</p>
<p id="lciw66">Since then, Naomi has understandably been between worlds. She’s grown up in the United States the way most American tennis prodigies have, but isn’t in sync with that identity. “I don’t necessarily feel like I’m American,” she <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/magazine/naomi-osakas-breakthrough-game.html">told <em>The</em> <em>New York Times</em></a> in August. “I wouldn’t know what that feels like.”</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="lB3IDh"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Jimmy Pitaro and the Soul of the New ESPN ","url":"https://www.theringer.com/sports/2018/12/20/18149517/espn-jimmy-pitaro-politics-sportscenter-jemele-hill"},{"title":"The Mayor of the Internet Has a New Mission","url":"https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/12/20/18149187/alexis-ohanian-reddit-industrialized-year-in-review"}]}'></div></aside></div>
<p id="NFpT6L">And though Osaka represents Japan, she is not the typical Japanese athlete. She is still growing comfortable with the language and looks different than the majority of the country’s competitors. Had she represented the United States, there might be less confusion about who Osaka <em>is</em>. Though this country has shown it is far from comfortable with a malleable idea of what it means to look or sound American, the United States has at least proved that it can embrace a superstar athlete who’s the child of a black father and an Asian mother: take the wildly popular <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/9/23/17894100/tiger-woods-win-tour-championship">face of the other country club sport</a>. </p>
<p id="bM3fMq">Biracial athletes from Japan, though, have been few and far between. Japanese people who don’t have two Japanese-born parents are sometimes referred as <em>hafu</em>, meaning “half.” Chicago Cubs pitcher Yu Darvish, who’s half-Iranian and half-Japanese, is probably the most high-profile example. While Darvish’s vicious slider and MLB success have granted him fame and praise throughout Japan, many of his biracial compatriots haven’t received the same treatment. In 2015, Ariana Miyamoto, a woman who is half-black and half-Japanese, won Miss Universe Japan. It <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/9/9/hafu-in-japan-mixed-race.html">ignited a firestorm</a> among people enraged that a biracial person would be awarded the honor. </p>
<p id="IaWI1c">Earlier in Andy Murray’s career, before he won his first Wimbledon, it was often joked that he was British when he won, but Scottish when he lost. For athletes in Japan, there is a similar saying, <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/japan-needs-foreigner-blood-like-naomi-osakas">albeit with a darker edge</a>. “If you win, you’re Japanese. If you lose, you’re a <em>hafu</em>.” In victory, now, Osaka is embraced, but there is work to be done. “Even as a new generation starts to embrace a broader sense of what it means to be Japanese, a conservative strain in the country clings to a pure-blood definition of ethnicity,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/09/world/asia/japan-naomi-osaka-us-open.html">Motoko Rich wrote for the <em>Times</em></a> after the U.S. Open. “Still, the Japanese media warmly welcomed Ms. Osaka’s victory as the country’s own.”</p>
<p id="cKxEkh">This dissonance, this lack of clarity about what <em>should be</em>, is what draws me most to Osaka. </p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="2018 US Open - Day 13" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/o_MYEN98uKQPp8mvnE1JvTJnMZ8=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13643173/1029467858.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Al Bello/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Naomi Osaka</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="WHn7lL"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="OU9Fuk">I have a brown face, brown eyes, and black hair. I have a Portuguese last name. My parents speak with accents that can drift between Indian and other inflections I can’t identify; mine is unmistakably American with some DMV-specific quirks, or so I am told. Sometimes people will approach me speaking Spanish and I’ll do my best to respond with an elementary grasp of the language. Sometimes people will approach me speaking Hindi, and I’ll generally frown and shake my head. Sometimes, though not so much anymore, I’ll be asked if I celebrate various holidays connected with Hindu culture, but associated with India as a whole. I’ll respond that my family is Catholic. My Indian friends sometimes say I’m not <em>really</em> Indian. My non-Indian friends do their best to tread lightly while trying to make sense of exactly what my deal is.</p>
<p id="uy4HcR">To be honest, I can’t tell you what my deal is. Identity comprises myriad factors: physical traits; linguistic, religious, and culinary traditions; geography; and some undefinable but seemingly ubiquitous sense of belonging. I often find it hard to determine where I fit on the spectrum of Indianness or Catholicness or Americanness, and have just as much trouble parsing whether these things are in some state of conflict. For many communities across the United States, part of identity is a feeling of mutual discomfort, an understanding of one’s own otherness that can bring groups together. I have always been unclear on what makes me like or unlike people around me. I’ve spent so long unsure of whether I fit in or not that I don’t fully know how to distinguish between the two.</p>
<p id="UL3pKn">Profiling Dwayne Johnson, who is half-black and half-Samoan, <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/dwayne-johnson-for-president-cover">for <em>GQ</em> last year</a>, Caity Weaver wrote that the actor’s “uncommon ethnic background means that, in the right light, he can read as Pacific Islander, Latino, Middle Eastern, Native American, Southeast Asian, undead Scorpion King from an ancient civilization, black, white, or any combo thereof. … In other words, pretty much anyone can find themselves, or a slightly tanner or paler version of themselves, in Dwayne Johnson if they look hard enough.” I feel the same way about Osaka. </p>
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<p id="vtTMdi">The first time I saw Osaka play tennis, I did a double take. In the fall of 2016, I was sitting on a couch in Los Angeles and watching the early stages of the U.S. Open when I saw a black woman with orangey hair hitting the living hell out of the ball and cruising through a match on an outer court. Then I heard the announcers refer to her by name, and saw “JPN” on the scoreboard. I was confused. I had never before encountered a multiracial Japanese athlete. I realized that I’d unthinkingly formed an idea of what it meant to “look” Japanese, failing to recognize that this need for categorization was exactly what had grated against me in my own life. I was not alone. When she first appeared on the professional circuit, Osaka <a href="https://racquetmag.com/2018/03/19/the-thousand-autumns-of-naomi-osaka/">told <em>Racquet</em></a> that she could “see the shock on people’s faces.”</p>
<p id="p6jqEI">From that point forward, it was easy to root for Osaka. She was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx_wybs9-vc">funny</a>, charming, and had a divine rapier for a forehand. When she won her first tournament at the so-called fifth slam in Indian Wells, I hoped it would not be a flash in the pan. Then she went on a tear to win the U.S. Open, and in beating Serena Williams—who inspired the Osaka family’s turn toward tennis—the match felt, in a way, like a passing of the torch.</p>
<p id="gdDkiU">Osaka enters 2019 as the potential face of the next generation of tennis. And her ascendance in the sport isn’t just meaningful because it will help stave off the tour’s aging star problem, but because it could double as a widely broadcasted prompt for a more flexible understanding of identity. “When I look 15 years into the future, I see Naomi having a great tennis career,” Osaka’s agent, Stuart Duguid, told <em>The</em> <em>Times</em>. “But I also hope that she’s changed cultural perceptions of multiracial people in Japan. I hope she’s opened the door for other people to follow, not just in tennis or sports, but for all of society. She can be an ambassador for change.”</p>
<p id="1FlfyD">“Maybe it’s because they can’t really pinpoint what I am,” Osaka has said, “so it’s like anybody can cheer for me.”</p>
<div class="c-wide-block"> <figure class="e-image">
<img alt="2018 US Open - Day 13" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/xHYtoyif8ngMwDzjuaPos4oa0HY=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13643182/1029473212.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Chris Trotman/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Naomi Osaka</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p id="l2658a"></p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="0vSUz4">In late September, Osaka made a run to the finals of an indoor tournament in Tokyo. Probably still recovering physically and mentally from her run through the Open draw weeks earlier, she lost the match. Yet in the lead-up to the final, in which she didn’t lose a set, her game shone. Returning the serve of the 6-foot-1 Karolina Pliskova in the first set, Osaka showed all of the tools in her arsenal, moving around the court, blocking back potential winners, then turning defense into offense, touching both lines. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvE4XEI7ekk&t=1m42s"><em>Crunch</em></a><em>. </em></p>
<p id="JpORjD">“I don’t feel any extra pressure playing in Japan,” <a href="https://www.sport24.co.za/Tennis/WTATour/osaka-beats-strycova-to-reach-pan-pacific-open-semis-20180921">she said during the tournament</a>. “I’ve improved a lot of things in the last few years and I feel excited playing here.”</p>
<p id="L9rX93">Osaka is only one athlete in her generation to force onlookers to reconsider their expectations. There’s also Rui Hachimura, the Gonzaga forward who’s the son of a Beninese father and a Japanese mother. Last month he torched Zion Williamson and Duke to signal his arrival, and he’s widely projected to become a 2019 NBA lottery pick. As they continue to excel, Hachimura and Osaka could take on exponential importance in Japan; Kei Nishikori, the product of the “<a href="https://www.atptour.com/en/news/atp-heritage-2008-project-45-nishikori-feature">Project 45</a>” national initiative to mold a top tennis player, earns more from endorsements than anyone on tour save Roger Federer. Nishikori is a fine player ranked ninth in the world, but his popularity in Japan is outsize; the country is enamored of its stars and hungry for more. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="xiDN9r">At the start of 2018, Osaka was largely an unknown. By the end of it, she’s begun to feel familiar. She’s between worlds and the center of a changing universe all at once. Identity is what we make it.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/2018/12/21/18150938/naomi-osaka-tennis-future-identity-year-in-reviewChris Almeida2018-12-20T06:30:06-05:002018-12-20T06:30:06-05:00The Mayor of the Internet Has a New Mission
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/G_wUKQBZsXs3Z5Qbq_1x42lOU2g=/299x0:2699x1800/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62713924/alexis_1.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://www.adamvillacin.com/" target="_blank">Adam Villacin</a></figcaption>
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<p>In a year when tech giants have loomed larger and more menacing than ever, Alexis Ohanian has rebranded himself as Business Dad. Can the Reddit cofounder really evolve into a leading advocate of empathy in Silicon Valley?</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="LgjF7a">“Grandkids on demand,” the tagline for a new Florida-based business called Papa, has a cheerfully dystopian ring. And so it makes sense that when the entrepreneur and venture capitalist Alexis Ohanian explains why he invested in such a company, he, too, sounds like he’s living in a dramatized, if familiar, future. “Empathy,” he says, speaking by phone from the Bay Area on a recent Thursday morning, “is not something I believe robots will be able to possess.” </p>
<p id="iKvmQC">In October, Initialized Capital, the early-stage VC firm Ohanian cofounded with Garry Tan in 2011, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/11/yc-grad-papa-raises-2-4m-for-its-grandkids-on-demand-service/">was part of a $2.4 million seed round for Papa</a>, which connects college students with seniors looking for companionship or nonmedical assistance. The “Papa Pals,” as the designated whippersnappers are called, are like if the Boy and Girl Scouts merged with TaskRabbit: They might set up an Apple TV, provide a ride to an appointment, gofer at the grocery store, or just sit and listen. (Andrew Parker, the company’s founder, tells me that a Papa Pal recently accompanied an older client to a wedding and cut a rug on the dance floor.)</p>
<p id="SY0IpW">There were a number of things about Papa that made it a compelling investment. This summer, Papa’s founders went through the famous accelerator program at Y Combinator, where Ohanian first hatched the website Reddit with his cofounder Steve Huffman in 2005, and where he met Tan a few years after that. The startup is based out of Miami, which Ohanian likes: He has been outspoken about the benefits of operating outside the Silicon Valley bubble, and a Florida base is a no-brainer for any strivers in the so-called “elder tech” space. But what Ohanian keeps coming back to when he talks about Papa is that the business harnesses something—kindness, basically—that “humans are uniquely good at,” he says. “It’s something we don’t have to worry about AI automating away.” </p>
<p id="zTr8dO">For years, as he built, left, and rejoined Reddit and did a zillion other things on the side, Ohanian had a front-row seat to many of the thrills and chills that can come from humans being uniquely good (“good”) at things. With Reddit, he watched passionate communities form around shared interests like skin care or Phish, buzzing with the collective purpose of a hive; he also presided over a business that teemed with racism, misogyny, and snuff films. He marveled at the growth of a startup that once felt like his baby; he recoiled at, yet enabled, that baby’s maturation into a troublesome punk. </p>
<p id="Krl1JY">Now, Ohanian has entered a new phase of his life, one revolving around an actual baby. “He has this whole Business Dad aesthetic, this whole Business Dad philosophy,” says Kim-Mai Cutler, a partner at Initialized. “Like, being great at being an investor, being great at being supportive of companies, and then also being a great father, and having that be a very visual part of his identity.” In early January he and his wife, the tennis all-timer Serena Williams, <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/serena-williams-vogue-cover-interview-february-2018">shared with <em>Vogue</em></a> the startling particulars of Williams’s harrowing and life-threatening postpartum experience following the birth of their first child, a girl named Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. In February, Ohanian stepped down from his day-to-day role at Reddit to focus his time and energy on seeding and advising startups through Initialized Capital, which has amassed portfolios valued at $22 billion. (He <a href="https://www.cnet.com/news/reddit-cofounder-alexis-ohanian-steps-aside-but-will-remain-on-board/">remains on the Reddit board</a>.) </p>
<p id="RDVycC">Throughout 2018, Big Tech has <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/12/19/18148701/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-year-in-review">loomed larger than ever</a>, casting shadows over anyone who has ever idly taken a quiz on Facebook or hopped in an Uber with friends. Faced with increased scrutiny over their practices and societal impact, businesses like Google and Twitter have responded by becoming even less transparent. Amazon’s <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/11/13/18092064/amazon-hq2-arlington-virginia-long-island-city">yearlong quest to find its second headquarters</a> accentuated <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/11/30/18118211/amazon-hq2-search-cities-left-behind">the company’s almost incomprehensible influence</a>, reexposed its unsettling working conditions, and served as a reminder of the vast gulf between the average person and the technological entities they rely on. </p>
<p id="clzW58">Ohanian certainly doesn’t exist independently of this; he is, after all, a venture capitalist. Still, he lately seems to be moving in a very different direction: loudly seeking and preaching life balance, advocating for paid family leave, urging young founders to take care of themselves before changing the world, and being perceptive toward the feelings and opinions of others. “I’ve heard from founders who are walking out of investors’ offices because they went to an all-partner meeting and didn’t see a woman,” he <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/alexis-ohanian-jewel-burks-startups-san-francisco-bubble/">remarked in November to <em>Wired</em></a><em>.</em> “You could say they are more woke than we were 13 years ago.” Ohanian comes across like a concerned parent in his public life because, well, that’s exactly what he has become. </p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="XLYLtj">Recently Ohanian retweeted Bill Gates, who had <a href="https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Silicon-Valley?WT.mc_id=20181119182826_SiliconHBO_BG-TW&WT.tsrc=BGTW&linkId=59864219">written a short musing</a> about the HBO series <em>Silicon Valley</em>, a satire that sometimes seems like more of a documentary. Gates wrote that, of the characters on the show, he most identified with the squirrely, on-a-different-wavelength Richard Hendricks. I ask Ohanian whether there’s a member of the Pied Piper braintrust who resonates most with him. “Maybe—” he says, then interrupts himself. “No, no, I got nothing.” I continue to press him, and he says, “I was thinking: ‘Who’s the vest dude?’”</p>
<p id="UkIlU9">Jared?</p>
<p id="PFNrCf">“Jared,” he says. “There’s moments where I definitely … I feel like the suit guy. I feel like the corporate dork.” (Of Reddit’s two cofounders, Ohanian was decidedly not the one who wrote the code. In 2017 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20171026154206/https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=545635014">he told NPR’s <em>How I Built This</em> podcast</a> that, in addition to coming up with Reddit’s name and doodling its logo, his duties included haggling over cellphone bills and ordering pizza.) “And there’s a little bit of the—who’s the jackass who got kicked off the show?”</p>
<p id="XhQzZS">Erlich?</p>
<p id="MYya1T">“It has been said that there was inspiration there, but I don’t see it at all,” Ohanian says. He explains that <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/06/who-are-the-real-life-models-of-silicon-valley-characters-we-have-them/">some viewers drew parallels</a> between Erlich Bachman’s fictional travel-booking startup Aviato and Huffman and Ohanian’s real-life endeavor, the <a href="https://medium.com/the-mission/the-launch-story-of-hipmunk-9957300ded87">travel site Hipmunk</a>. “I was like, ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’” he says. “I don’t see that at all, but whatever.” (The character comparisons he <em>does</em> see: that the late Peter Gregory character is part Paul Graham, one of Ohanian’s first supporters, and part Peter Thiel, Tan’s former boss.)</p>
<p id="oJwgS7">Ohanian’s actual personal arc is far too dramatic and silly even for a <em>Silicon Valley</em> script anyway; it’s like something out of an earnest “By age 35 you should …” meme. His rise to prominence was so sudden—Reddit was only 16 months old when Ohanian and Huffman sold it to Conde Nast and became multimillionaires at age 22—that his success feels both wildly aspirational and weirdly achievable, at least in a “well, if <em>he</em> can do it …” sort of way. Even his early setbacks felt relatable to media types: In 2010, when he left Reddit and spent a few months living in Armenia, it was practically a rite of passage. You haven’t truly made it in New York City, after all, until you’ve quit a Conde Nast job during a recession and headed abroad.</p>
<p id="FQgywy">And then there was his relationship with Williams, whom he met in 2015. One minute Ohanian was just some nerd visiting Rome to speak at a tech conference; the next he was the type of guy who attends a <a href="https://ftw.usatoday.com/2018/05/serena-williams-alexis-ohanian-adorable-goofy-funny-instagram-story-royal-wedding-video">royal wedding</a>, is followed around by <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2018/5/25/17394000/serena-williams-french-open-return-motherhood">HBO cameras</a>, and sits down with Stephen Colbert. (Ohanian points out that his appearance on<em> Late Night</em> in May, while “rad,” wasn’t the first time he’d met the host: Back in the day he went on <em>The Colbert Report</em>, an experience that he remembers being “the hardest interview I’ve ever done … they’re like, ‘Don’t try to be funny.’”) </p>
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<p id="L99qpV">Ohanian has always had a flair for the dramatic: In <em>We Are the Nerds</em>, a book published in October that details the rise, fall, and rise of Reddit—the title refers to something Ohanian once hollered in a fit of happiness at a mid-aughts party—Ohanian is referred to by a colleague as “Chief Bullhorn.” Cutler says that when it comes to the two Initialized founders, “Alexis likes to say that Alexis is the sizzle and Gary is the steak.” In a <a href="https://thefinancialdiet.com/6-awkward-money-questions-with-alexis-ohanian/">recent interview about personal finance</a>, Ohanian sheepishly revealed that he used to bring elaborate flower bouquets to every first date. As it turned out, this unapologetic corniness turned out to be an asset when it came to Williams. The couple’s origin story is circuitous and cute, involving a cameo by Kristen Wiig and a poolside rat hoax, but hinges almost entirely on Ohanian’s bold decision to treat an offhanded “you should totally come see me play sometime” courtesy offer from Williams—“an L.A. invitation,” as he calls it—as a legit excuse to actually show up in Paris for the French Open.</p>
<p id="bCAEHY">Still, during this time, Ohanian managed to piss off many of the people around him. After returning to the increasingly mutinous Reddit as executive chairman in late 2014, Ohanian oversaw a troublesome time for the company. “The second act really helped me see what it would take,” he says, “to bring a company not from zero to one, but from one to 10.” When he unceremoniously fired Victoria Taylor, a popular community manager, in July 2015 it was bad enough. It was worse that Ellen Pao, the embattled interim CEO, shouldered <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/yishan-wong-says-alexis-ohanian-failed-ellen-pao-2015-7">much of the blame</a>.</p>
<p id="U7kVlu">“It was my decision,” Ohanian <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_old_team_at_reddit/csz2p3i/">later wrote in a Reddit comment</a>. “And the transition was my failure and I hope we can keep moving forward from that lesson.” Sam Altman, the head of Y Combinator and a Reddit board member, answered <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cudmx/i_am_sam_altman_reddit_board_member_and_president/">questions from users the same day</a>. “Free speech is great and terrible,” he wrote in response to one question. “I think figuring out how technology can encourage empathy is one of the more interesting and important open research problems in the world right now.”</p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="Oe4Kbb">Ohanian grew up in Columbia, Maryland, and long before he was watching his wife play tennis and naming his baby daughter after himself, he was watching the Washington Redskins and making plans to name a future baby after a different man. “Son or daughter,” he wrote in the acknowledgements of his 2013 book <em>Without Their Permission</em>, “I’m naming him or her Robert Griffin Ohanian.” When I remind him of this almost instantaneously dated reference and ask his thoughts on the current state of the franchise, he sounds legitimately aggrieved. “I don’t even want to talk about it,” he says. “I’m so over it.” </p>
<p id="gJrA4h">Once upon a time, Ohanian’s first big purchase upon selling Reddit was to upgrade his father’s longtime nosebleed tickets to four sweet seats near the 50-yard line. Now, annoyed at both the team and <a href="https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/999508055887892480">the league</a>, they have let the ticket subscription lapse. “I was raised a diehard,” says Ohanian. “I would have never imagined after 25, 30 years of indoctrination, feeling this ambivalent about it, but I really do.” When the Redskins signed Mark Sanchez in mid-November, <a href="https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/1064605670035648513">Ohanian weighed in</a>: “Am I too late to make the obvious @Kaepernick7 tweet?” Growing up, Ohanian thought the coolest thing in the world would be to own a pro football team. “And now, actually, instead,” he says, “I just own an esports team.” </p>
<p id="Kw8D4w">Over the years Ohanian and Initialized have been a part of some extremely successful investments, like the crypto trading platform Coinbase and the increasingly omnipresent Instacart. But Cloud9 might be the objectively coolest venture they’ve backed. Cloud9, which counts among its properties the Overwatch League champion London Spitfire, was named the year’s top esports organization <a href="https://twitter.com/espn_esports/status/1074732976376819713?s=21">by ESPN.com</a> and was also figured by <em>Forbes </em>to be <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2018/10/23/the-worlds-most-valuable-esports-companies-1/#31780e876a6e">the most valuable player in the growing esports ecosystem</a>, based in part on its youth-focused strategy and its successful merchandising arm.</p>
<p id="C5O9bA">Cloud9 isn’t the only Initialized portfolio company to have racked up big wins in 2018; there was also a major victory in San Francisco’s hectic scooter wars when Skip, a scooter-share business, was <a href="https://mashable.com/article/e-scooter-skip-scoot-san-francisco/">awarded one of just two contracts to operate in San Francisco</a>. For much of 2018, the standard operating procedure among competing scooter companies had been, basically, just to show up and deal with the details later, that tried-and-true ask-forgiveness-not-permission startup model. The result was sidewalks littered with devices and swift action by <a href="https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article216596135.html">city board of supervisors</a> to pass a law requiring permits. </p>
<p id="dP6ygo">“Three companies—Bird, Lime and Spin—unloaded hundreds of motorized scooters across San Francisco,” wrote the city’s irritated <a href="https://www.sfmta.com/blog/sfmta-offers-two-permits-one-year-powered-scooter-pilot">Municipal Transportation Authority</a> in its decision to grant permits to none of the three. “I looked at this with delight,” says Ohanian of his competitors’ failed attempts to move fast and break things. “For a product and a business that requires you to work with governments and communities, it just seemed so obviously self-destructive.” </p>
<p id="tjtI33">Skip’s deliberately collegial approach, sitting down with city planners to draft policy and incorporating community feedback into their scooter design, wasn’t rogue or cool, but it got the job done.</p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="dPUmem">As an early-stage venture capital investor, Ohanian loves to be the guy who swoops in to write the “first check” to the enterprising souls behind some compelling new startup. But earlier this year, when Ohanian agreed to liaise with one particularly passionate group, it wasn’t because he had visions of hockey stick growth or tangible return on investment dancing in his head. “Working with Alexis was really a big deal for a small little startup organization,” says Katie Bethell, the founder of <a href="http://paidleave.us">a nonprofit called PL+US</a> that is dedicated to fighting for paid family leave in the United States. </p>
<p id="W01TYb">Bethell knew that getting a response from Ohanian, to whom she reached out via a friend who had once met him at a dinner, was a long shot. But she also knew that Ohanian was a proud new dad with interest in the subject of paid leave, and wanted to see whether the famous founder would participate in a speaking engagement about fatherhood and family. He said yes, and the two chatted on stage for more than an hour this summer in San Francisco. “The thing I was most excited about,” says Bethell, “was his willingness to call for up to a year of parental leave in the U.S. I think as a business leader, that’s really bold, and shows how much he is putting kids and family at the center of his analysis.” </p>
<p id="ONJzHe">Having seen firsthand how debilitating the aftermath of a delivery can be, Ohanian gets riled up when he discusses the subject. “The statistic that was most alarming,” he says, “was that one in four American women are back to work after two weeks from having a kid. And that seems—it’s unconscionable.” Ohanian has engaged in various forms of political activism in the past, though the issues were typically technology-based: In 2012 he <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/06/05/how-reddits-alexis-ohanian-became-the-mayor-of-the-internet/#4221bfc35aa1">protested the federal privacy bill SOPA</a>, which would eventually die in the house, and in 2014 he lobbied for net neutrality. “He’s got credibility both in the private sector but also just, like, at a national scale in terms of advocacy,” Cutler says. And he plans to use it: “You’ll probably be seeing me in a suit in D.C. next year, making the case for [paid family leave],” Ohanian says. “I really do think there are folks on both sides of the aisle in office who want this.”</p>
<p id="sn09Uk">For much of the year, Ohanian has also been delivering an adjacent message about mental health, burnout, and perspective. In March,<a href="https://medium.com/initialized-capital/zero-lives-remaining-f60e909b5d6a"> ruminating about the 10-year anniversary of his mother’s death</a> from brain cancer and the depression he’d felt as a result, he wrote: “As entrepreneurs, we are all so busy ‘crushing it’ that physical health, let alone mental health, is an afterthought for most founders.” He further expanded on this idea in November, speaking at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon. “Hustle porn!” <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-alexis-ohanian-hustle-porn-toxic-dangerous-thing-in-tech-2018-11">he yelled</a>. “This is one of the most toxic, dangerous things in tech right now,” he said. “This idea that unless you are suffering, grinding, working every hour of every day, you’re not working hard enough.” </p>
<p id="U5N2Yk">Humans trying to be robots: It’s an instinct Ohanian can certainly understand, which is why he knows how damaging it can be. Last week, when the 34-year-old founder of HQ Trivia was found dead of a suspected drug overdose, another young founder, <em>The Athletic</em>’s Alex Mather, fired off <a href="https://twitter.com/alex3780/status/1074373741163929600"> a bunch of tweets about the importance of self-care</a>. “[I] want to talk about founders, failure, and mental health,” he began. “I’ve been so happy to see @alexisohanian talk about this at length.” </p>
<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="QP1Bth">In February, Ohanian pulled off one of his characteristically grand gestures. With Williams returning to tennis at the tournament in Indian Wells in Southern California, Ohanian welcomed her back to the game by setting up four billboards along I-10 that featured pictures of Olympia and Williams along with the words, “GREATEST MOMMA OF ALL TIME.” It was a touching tribute, and also happened to be a great way for Ohanian to do his ongoing due diligence on an Initialized portfolio company called AdQuick. By using the product for himself, he was engaging in a practice that is known as “dogfooding.” (Classic Business Dad move!) </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Hah. Even Venture Capitalists can be romantic.<br>Dogfooding a portfolio co, @adquick_! <a href="https://t.co/GPqVQQAsPL">https://t.co/GPqVQQAsPL</a></p>— Alexis Ohanian Sr. (@alexisohanian) <a href="https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/968525321531047938?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 27, 2018</a>
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<p id="7jGAni">There’s a certain shameless beauty to much of Ohanian’s strat. Earlier this year, when he and his friend <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee">Jennifer 8. Lee</a> led a petition for interracial relationship emoji, the effort was also <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17057694/tinder-interracial-family-emoji-petition-unicode-jennifer-8-lee">spearheaded by Tinder</a>. Around Father’s Day this summer, Ohanian made the rounds to talk about fatherhood and fitness in a media blitz sponsored by Johnnie Walker, which led to <a href="https://www.menshealth.com/fitness/a21239447/alexis-ohanian-workout-routine/">some casual, normal statements like</a>, “When I see that first little outline of a six-pack, I’ll be raising a glass and toasting a little bit of Blue Label to celebrate.” Ohanian’s daughter, who is mostly known as Olympia, although he usually calls her “Junior,” has <a href="https://www.instagram.com/olympiaohanian/">more than half a million followers</a> on Instagram; the account for Olympia’s baby doll, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/realqaiqai/">Qai Qai</a>, has amassed 60,000-plus since late August. “It’s kind of silly,” Ohanian says, “but even watching the way that people interact with our child’s doll, there are these moments of real humanity that I think people have been really hungry for this year.”</p>
<p id="XhGfIs">It can be hard to hear that and not cynically wonder about Ohanian’s motivations, or scoff at the idea of the Reddit cofounder waxing sentimental about humanity. It can be hard not to side-eye Ohanian when he gets into full “as a father of a daughter …” mode. Even the company Papa—sweet, pure, empathic Papa—exists not to make intergenerational friends, but to make money. (Insurance companies find the business compelling because, by reducing isolation and loneliness, Papa has positive health benefits. This sounds like a win-win until you envision a future in which some poor soul has a health care claim denied because she didn’t spend enough hours relaxing with a Papa Pal that month.) When I describe “hustle porn” to Bethell, she has a thought-provoking perspective. “I think working moms,” she says, “have been operating under the tyranny of hustle porn since the ’80s.” She paraphrases the writer Amy Westervelt, noting that women are expected to parent like they don’t work and to work like they don’t parent. And viewed that way, it’s possible that Business Dad is just what happens when hustle porn reaches middle age.</p>
<p id="D00sGQ">Still, Ohanian is someone who has real social and economic clout, and he generally wields it thoughtfully. (In the cutthroat world of startups and seed money and overnight millionaires, even just the appearance of propriety can feel welcome.) At Initialized, 40 percent of the investing partners are women, and one of the fund’s recent investments was in an organization called <a href="https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1074783666490884097">The Mom Project</a> that helps lapsed employees reenter the workforce. Initialized recently set up a panel discussion about mental health for its employees. New mothers and fathers alike are encouraged to take their full 16 weeks of leave, as Ohanian did when his daughter was born.</p>
<p id="jAHpmL">Ohanian hasn’t seen his wife and daughter in person for days, but when I ask what’s new with Junior he describes, in great detail, a video he just watched of the toddler performing her latest silly baby trick: summiting her high chair, solo. “She’s got a good little kick where she can handle stairs,” he explains of the curly-haired girl. “She’ll kick that leg up over the side no problem,” he repeats, “but I’d never seen a full climb, because you’ve really got to go vertical. It’s not just kicking your leg over the side, it’s lifting your knees straight up ahead of you and climbing up that high chair.” </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="rewVtp">I recognize his tone: Like most parents, Ohanian speaks of his offspring’s escapades in a manner that falls somewhere between a coach evaluating a quarterback and a mechanic admiring a sweet rig. Maybe at some point a machine will learn how to replicate that exactly, but it hasn’t happened yet. For now, it feels like a uniquely human thing.</p>
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https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/12/20/18149187/alexis-ohanian-reddit-industrialized-year-in-reviewKatie Baker2018-12-20T06:00:04-05:002018-12-20T06:00:04-05:00All Hail Thanos, Mad Titan of Nihilism and Memes
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<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://www.adamvillacin.com/" target="_blank">Adam Villacin</a></figcaption>
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<p>The genocidal purple alien from ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ isn’t just a dynamic comic book movie villain, he’s a stand-in for fascist idiots and an inspiration to internet geniuses. How 2018.</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="PmoSYt">As we ferry ourselves home for the holidays, standing in neverending airport lines or sitting in standstill highway traffic, as we venture out into malls to knock shoulders and trade sneezes with other shoppers, as we see the endless, indistinguishable, soulless Instagram Christmas tree photos, and read the same smarmy tweets about seasonal awkwardness repeated ad nauseum, I believe there’s one thing we’ll all be thinking: Maybe Thanos had a point. There are too goddamn many people. </p>
<p id="Iw88aF">It’s a testament to Thanos that he’s more than a punch line. He’s giant and armorclad and purple and speaks in self-serious mantras that would sound silly coming out of any other set of CGI lips, and the majority of real human ones too. But every successful villain has to have a believable motivation, and so respect must be given to the Russo brothers, who directed <em>Infinity War</em>, and screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, and obviously Josh Brolin, and Kevin Feige and the rest of Marvel Studios, and of course Jim Starlin, who created Thanos, and the rest of the comics writers like Jason Aaron and Jonathan Hickman and Donny Cates and Keith Giffen and Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning who breathed dimension into him. Come to think of it, that’s a goddamn lot of people too. Thanos would probably have some thoughts about that.</p>
<p id="yolozy">But let’s back up. Before he was a major movie star, before he was a universe-trotting supervillain, Thanos was an angsty kid like you and me. In the comics, he had a bad relationship with his mom (she tried to kill him), and as a child he was a pacifist. But in his teenage years he became obsessed with death, or rather Death—<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TrIr3Aug-A">Mistress Death</a>—with whom Thanos fell in love. It was Death who took him sweetly by the hand and steered him into the life of genocide. Death begets love begets death—“perfectly balanced, as all things should be,” as the man said.</p>
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<p id="5ZlRpW">In <em>Avengers: Infinity War</em>, Thanos is obsessed with a plan to eliminate half of the universe’s population in order to save it—his home planet Titan was destroyed, see, because of overpopulation and resource depletion. It’s a thankless job—“Fun isn’t something one considers when balancing the universe,” he says—but in his eyes a necessary one. (He accomplishes this by seeking out six “Infinity Stones,” and it’s hard to imagine any other actor, CGI or not, making MacGuffins so compelling.) Let’s be honest: It’s a bonkers plan, the kind of intellectual experiment most of us left behind in freshman philosophy. There’s some charm in the fact that for all of his grumbly majesty, Thanos is an emotionally stunted head case. And despite the <a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d35nm7/an-economist-explains-why-thanos-is-wrong">obvious wrongness</a> of his plan, Thanos exposes that in our current era of political division, any argument made in earnest can be seductive—as long as the tyrant in question is on your team.</p>
<p id="XASQnB">In his <em>New Yorker</em> review of the film, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/avengers-infinity-war-reviewed-the-latest-marvel-movie-is-a-two-and-a-half-hour-ad-for-all-the-previous-marvel-movies">Richard Brody groused</a> that “Thanos wreaks havoc and leaves a trail of misery in his wake, and the most powerful impression left by the movie overall is its sense of bewilderment and betrayal, of mightily mournful and unreconciled desolation that feels, inescapably, like an allusively emotional transcription of the current American political landscape.”</p>
<p id="4uhnYm">And sure, there’s a little [<em>insert world leader here</em>] in his nihilistic strut. But there’s a post-truth argument in there too: “Reality is often disappointing. That is, it <em>was</em>. Now, reality can be whatever I want.” </p>
<p id="J1yq9d">The movies make room for philosophy—strained as it may be—where the early comics let the villainy do the talking. And there’s some merit to that—as <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/5/3/17313486/thanos-avengers-infinity-war-villain-marvel-movies">my colleague Micah Peters put it</a> back in May, “Thanos’s genocidal mission makes more sense when he’s the leader of a death-worshiping cult.” If his mission in <em>Avengers: Infinity War</em> isn’t quite so on the (purple) nose, Thanos was nonetheless inspirational: He has inspired a <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/thanosdidnothingwrong/">real-world cult</a> of nihilistic online meme-makers, so ironically dedicated to his cause that they <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/7/10/17553864/reddit-thanosdidnothingwrong-mass-ban-dusting">chose to self-purge</a> half of their members at random to emulate their messiah. </p>
<p id="iCxJkR">All due respect to the Infinity Stones, it’s in the memes where true power lies. In the comics, Thanos has achieved immortality, and while that part is uncertain in the movies, out here on planet Earth he’s achieved the everlasting life of meminess. Power in the modern era is memory—memorableness—and every time Thanos got <a href="https://www.popbuzz.com/tv-film/news/avengers-infinity-war-thanos-meme-photoshop/">that Impact font</a> laid over his face, his timelessness grew. </p>
<p id="OM8xso">But importance in 2018 is more than just memes—it’s the ability to keep us waiting. Thanos did that too, postponing his inevitable comeuppance for the sake of drama (and box office bonanza). I know, I know—everything that Marvel does feels like an obvious win in hindsight, but let’s pause to admire the gall of this: building to a movie for a decade and then shoving the ending off for a year later. A year! “The hardest choices require the strongest wills” and all that. Folks have spent $17.5 billion at the box office to see these movies! The fact we didn’t have full-scale riots in the streets is amazing. And probably in no small part because keeping Thanos in our lives a little longer isn’t the worst thing in the galaxy. By the time <a href="https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/12/7/18130518/avengers-endgame-first-trailer"><em>Avengers: Endgame</em></a> comes out, Thanos might be the most popular member of the MCU.</p>
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<p id="8YUcgp">If the MCU has succeeded in large part due to self-awareness and self-deprecation, Thanos is its perfect foil: the space operatic straight man, Sartre green-screened into eternity. It’s Thanos’s earnestness that makes him such a poignant target for postmodern deconstruction, and what his Reddit acolytes have learned from Thanos is perhaps Big Purple’s most poignant lesson: commitment to the bit. </p>
<p id="F9u5Q6">He’s not one-dimensional, though. He’s Thanos the supervillain, Thanos the eco-philosopher, Thanos the plot device, knocking off actors who have aged out of their roles, Thanos the avatar of highbrow film critics, purging the cinematic landscape of its overabundance of superheroes. </p>
<p id="tMPVcd">Is that last one overkill? Probably, but one imagines that Thanos would find common cause with their ilk. In the end, though, I think we’re all on the same side. Just as other heroes in the past are defined by their arch nemeses—the Joker, Magneto, Lex Luthor—Thanos is the only baddie who has successfully anchored a Marvel movie (all apologies to Mr. Hiddleston). Marvel movies are perfect escapism at a moment when we desperately need it, and Thanos is the opposing force we need to justify the entire experiment. Without him, we might be forced to pay attention to the real world. </p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="4wXv3a">“I can simply snap my fingers, they would all cease to exist,” he says. Yes, please, my giant, purple, thumb-faced overlord, just make them all be quiet for a while. “I call that mercy.” Amen.</p>
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2018/12/20/18149150/thanos-avengers-infinity-war-genocide-villain-memesDavid Shoemaker2018-12-19T13:00:31-05:002018-12-19T13:00:31-05:00The Cost of Living in Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet Empire
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<img alt="Mark Zuckerberg" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/HOHrvxL3jutUliAKIAs6brPJ9xg=/276x0:2481x1654/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62709743/end_of_year_essays_zuck_2.0.jpg" />
<figcaption><a class="ql-link" href="http://www.adamvillacin.com/" target="_blank">Adam Villacin</a></figcaption>
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<p>A year of staggering revelations is a reminder of how much Facebook has corrupted life online, with the effect of making the internet seem a little less bearable and a little less human</p> <p class="p--has-dropcap" id="CBrpYn">What’s on your mind? Right now, as I’m writing this, <em>The</em> <em>New York Times </em>is breaking the news that Facebook, after a year of staggering revelations concerning everything from <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/18/us/cambridge-analytica-facebook-privacy-data.html">misuse of private data</a> to enabling <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/russia-ira-propaganda-senate-report/">Russian election interference</a> to knowingly providing inflated <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccurate-video-metrics-inflation-lawsuit">metrics publishers used to remake the media landscape</a>, has been caught giving other big companies access to its users’ information <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-privacy.html">outside the framework of its normal privacy rules</a>. “Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent,” the <em>Times </em>reports. It gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read users’ <em>private messages</em>. It allowed Yahoo to view real-time feeds of friends’ posts, despite the fact it publicly claimed to have ended that kind of snooping years ago and despite the fact the feature in whose service Yahoo supposedly required this information had been discontinued in 2011.</p>
<p id="cF58cu">What’s on your mind? I keep thinking that as bombshells go, this one has the distinction of being both outrageous and utterly unsurprising. When someone shows you who they are, believe them, as Oprah used to say. (Oprah might not be famous as a tech analyst, but she knows a thing or two about getting people to share their personal data.) Facebook has long since shown itself to be a conspiracy of moral ghouls harvesting human intimacy for ad dollars; as sickening as it is to imagine Netflix browsing your private messages, these new disclosures don’t change your basic understanding of the operation any more than, say, a snowstorm changes your understanding of December. But each new Silicon Valley betrayal has the effect of making the internet seem a little less bearable, a little less human.</p>
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<p id="kpbBCY">What’s on your mind? That’s the question that appears in Facebook’s status box before you start typing, and it’s an essential question of the moment: What’s on your mind is either a commodity for Mark Zuckerberg to sell or it is something else, something that belongs to you alone, and which of those alternatives you choose will go a long way toward defining the next decade of life on the internet. I mean not only in terms of a regulatory framework that I do not believe is forthcoming, but also literally in terms of how you imagine what it means to a human being—how mechanized you’re willing to allow your conception to become, how in thrall to a handful of apps. Since I believe that almost everyone actually hates almost every interaction with almost every algorithm online (when was the last time a discovery feature didn’t surface an uncanny-valley parody of not quite your taste or when you loaded Instagram without the photo you were looking at disappearing when your feed reordered itself after a tenth of a second?), the issue here seems to go quite a bit deeper than mere consumer choice. It was possible for a long time to tell ourselves we could have everything, that we could be humanists with highly accurate recommendations for Belgian cop dramas on Netflix. But one of the real cultural shifts of 2018, I think, is that we are facing the end of that particular delusion.</p>
<p id="PwRPZm">What’s on your mind? I can tell you only what’s on mine. What’s on my mind is that I miss the human internet with an intensity that borders on homesickness. The first time I ever went online, it was the fall of 1995. I had been in college for three days, and I felt lost and terrified. We were the first incoming class at Harvard to be assigned email addresses automatically; they were available before that, but you had to go somewhere and register. This was the period when AOL CDs were just starting to show up in people’s mailboxes, when phrases like “the World Wide Web” (always capitalized) and “the Information Superhighway” were beginning to feature in TV ads aimed at a mass audience. I didn’t know what email was, exactly, but long-distance phone calls cost 25 cents a minute, and I thought it might be a way that I could talk to my friends back in Oklahoma. So I went to the computer lab in the basement of the Science Center.</p>
<p id="f9hvdF">What’s on your mind? I remember the sound of dot-matrix printers, blaring away like little robot trombones. Plastic bins full of torn-off sheet edging. Some surly upperclassman behind the help desk, who, surliness aside, must have shown me how to log on, what a username was, how to change my password. (I picked “bledsoe,” because I was trying to give it a go as a Patriots fan; the poor Patriots, who never won anything, seemed like they needed me.) I have no memory of what I saw on the looming beige CRT monitor—physically enormous, though it probably had a 9-inch screen—or of the first website I visited. I have no idea how I even found out about websites. It all would have been slow and blocky and text-based and frustrating, full of Matrixy green status messages about mailer daemons and server handoffs, but I don’t remember any of that. I remember only feeling, immediately, that this was a place where I would not be lost and terrified, and that here, on the web, was where I would be living from now on. </p>
<p id="vcXigt">What’s on your mind? I am thinking about that phrase, “living on the internet.” It was certainly how I felt that year, and for many years after it. I never felt quite at ease in the real world, and I never got over my first alienation from Harvard—where I ended up in the same dorm as Mark Zuckerberg, though less profitably and not at the same time—but none of that mattered so much, because online I could live an actual life. The internet of 1995 and 1999 and 2001 and even 2007 was a backwater by today’s standards, but to me, it was the most wonderful thing. It was strange and silly and experimental and constantly surprising, and it made you feel good about other people, because online, away from corporate media and every channel of established culture, other people turned out to be constantly surprising too. They translated Anglo-Saxon poetry and posted photographs of Victorian ghosts and told you, to your eternal benefit, about what it was like to be someone other than yourself (in my case, to be a woman, to be a person of color). They wrote fascinating, charismatic diaries. And all of this, this faster, weirder, more forgiving universe, was right there, at your fingertips, for free. This sounds like nostalgia, but it was how I really felt at the time. We were making this thing together. </p>
<p id="BVPtdm">The fact that I cannot remember the last time the internet made me feel, on balance, less anxious and better about other people tells you something about how much has changed online since 1999, 2001, and even 2007. </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="4brCj6">This is supposed to be a piece about Mark Zuckerberg, and so far I’ve barely mentioned him. Yet everything I’ve written here is about him. This is true partly because he’s the CEO of Facebook, and thus ultimately responsible for dehumanizing much of the internet, but in a broader sense I think that Mark Zuckerberg has himself become a kind of atmosphere, a context for online disillusionment. And that atmosphere, the translucent Zuckerberg hologram now flickering across most of the internet, says more about the mood of 2018 than anything Zuckerberg himself could do. </p>
<p id="RUFHNv">Here’s what I mean by that. It drives me wild when tech reporting unthinkingly assumes the perspective of people with power in Silicon Valley. <em>Facebook faces new accusations. Sheryl Sandberg has been dealt a new setback. Will Zuckerberg be able to recover? </em>This kind of coverage presumes that what really matters is the drama of the moguls’ own experience, as though they were the protagonists of a movie. I can speak only for myself here, but personally, my interest in the moguls’ experience is vanishingly dim; what matters to me is the internet itself and the people who use it. Before I started writing, I did a Google search for “Facebook” and “annus horribilis,” which showed that dozens if not hundreds of media outlets—<em>The Guardian</em>, the BBC, <em>El Mundo</em>, <em>Die Welt</em>, <em>The Atlantic</em>, the <em>Silicon Valley Business Journal</em>—used this phrase, Latin for “horrible year,” to describe Facebook’s 2018. But 2018 wasn’t an annus horribilis<em> </em>for Facebook. It was an annus horribilis<em> </em>for us, the people who actually faced the surveillance and dishonesty and abuse. It was an annus horribilis<em> </em>for us because of Facebook. </p>
<p id="Ph5I2T">This is what I mean when I say that Mark Zuckerberg is a context. No one short of President Donald Trump did more to define the online experience in 2018. But 2018 wasn’t the year of Mark Zuckerberg because of the things he did in his office or the way he dodged questions when he testified in Congress. It was the year of Mark Zuckerberg because almost everyone I know who spends time on the internet feels as though they have lost something. It was the year of Mark Zuckerberg because people who were once thrilled by the internet now talk about it in a tone that combines gallows humor, weary resignation, and a kind of cynicism toward the possibility of mercy. It was the year of Mark Zuckerberg because people in their 20s have stopped being ironic when they talk about what they make as “content.” It was the year of Mark Zuckerberg because half the good writers I know are out of work. It was the year of Mark Zuckerberg because I can’t think about the love I feel for other people without wondering how it’s being used to sell me shaving cream. It was the year of Mark Zuckerberg because we don’t even talk about how absolutely, hideously sad all this is, since talking about it would mean questioning why we still spend so much time online, and, after all, we’re the people who live here. It was the year of Mark Zuckerberg because our jadedness toward the internet is really a form of grief. </p>
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<p class="p--has-dropcap" id="r3h8kJ">What’s on your mind? For some reason, maybe because of the Latin of annus horribilis, I’m thinking of the Roman emperor Augustus. No one could have less to do with anything I’ve been talking about here than the Roman emperor Augustus. But one thing I’ve always loved about the internet is that it’s a place where meaning can come from the most surprising non sequiturs. And it turns out that Mark Zuckerberg does love the emperor Augustus, and has said so publicly; this is some of the personal data he has <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy">chosen to share online</a>. One of his daughters is named August. Another one is named Maxima. He has said that Latin is “very much like coding,” which, sure. It’s possible that he sees Augustus as a model for his own career. Augustus “had to do certain things,” Zuckerberg has said, but “basically, through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace.” </p>
<p id="X2PNkx">You can almost see how this metaphor works, if you’re looking at it from the perspective of a shatteringly arrogant tech mogul. After all, Augustus moved fast and broke things (Antony and Cleopatra’s fleet). He disrupted (centuries of republican government). Egypt having essentially been the Instagram of the first century BC, he preserved Rome’s dominance through strategic mergers and acquisitions. His corporate culture surfaced useful life advice for his subject peoples. Bowing is leaning in. </p>
<p id="aIJBPN">It’s here where the metaphor gets just a little historically dicey. Augustus “had to do certain things,” Zuckerberg says. What things? But those things were fine, whatever they were, because they led to “200 years of world peace.” Which is absolutely true, if you leave out all the wars.</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="UM8ox2">From Zuckerberg’s perspective, the whole point of Facebook has always been to bring people together. Well, nothing brings people together like an empire. Talk about engagement with a platform! The question, for those of us who would prefer to remain barbarians (and who hold out hope of someday sacking Rome), is how does he imagine an empire expands its borders? Who is Facebook making war on, if not us?</p>
https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/12/19/18148701/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-year-in-reviewBrian Phillips