Thank you. I thought it was important to write about more than just a guy trying to being funny and failing. It stabs deeper than just that.

Thank you, and what a perfect dilemma to lay at this article’s feet. A lifelong Chicago fan in northeast Pennsylvania holds the only asset this entire racket can’t relocate: the allegiance. The owners can move the team, keep the name, and mail the mortgage to whichever taxpayers blink, yet the affection travels only where you carry it, and you get to make them bid for it. If the ledger in the piece is your guide, shop carefully. Buffalo just charged its own faithful $260 million in seat licenses for the privilege of fewer, colder seats, obstructed views, Pittsburgh’s stadium rode in on public money too, and Philadelphia’s owner at least reached deeper into his own pocket than most. The team that earns you should know they’re on a year-to-year deal. That’s the healthiest ownership arrangement in professional sports, and it belongs to you alone. Grateful you read, and gladder still you wrote.

Excellent article: thank you!

I'm a lifelong Chicago sports fan, but now live in NE Pennsylvania. The Bills, Eagles, and Steelers are all viable options if I need to change my allegiance. 🏈 🐻 😉

Thank you! It can be an uncomfortable conversation with some eager students and the temptation to “self-give” yourself a sign name is difficult for some to overcome, but learning to understand, and wait, always pays off for them later.

Here’s where your outline crossed into my beat. I just wrote about Ord, Nebraska (a small town in a deep red MAGA state) where the town council voted 5-0 to remove its FLOCK license plate cameras, the first town in the state to do it. Your anarchist plank, “criticises all unnecessary authorities,” just got its best recent American demonstration from a town that would spit out all four words of that label.

Your whole structure hangs on a single word: “unnecessary.” That’s where Chomsky’s anarchism and your Nordic welfare state collide, because the welfare state is the largest authority most citizens will ever stand in line before. So who draws the line, and where, between the authority that feeds the widow and the one that files her away?

And mind your own witness: Foucault spent a career arguing that the institutions that care for us control us most gently and most completely. I genuinely want to hear how the compound holds those two planks together, and this thread is the place for it.

Gospel first, politics downstream, arguments always welcome.