The story about female athletes is more relevant than ever with recent changes to college sports. Now that student-athletes can get paid for their likeness, there's a boom in some female athletes getting paid for social media popularity that is only tangentially related to the sport. This substacker wrote it up pretty well and there's a link to the NYT.
As shown in the NYT article and its comment section, people don't really know what to make of college women using NCAA sports to help careers that previously could have included cinemax. The positions are unclear enough that I don't think that the Onion would have anything to satirize. After all, the Onion seems critical of the revealing outfits, but for some of the biggest beneficiaries of NIL rules the outfits would help their brand.
One of my favorite parts of your write-ups is revisiting the controversies of yesteryear. Amazing how many are still floating around in a slightly different way.
such a great point, Robert! And that link is interesting, too. I forgot Suni Lee was simultaneously the reigning Olympic champion and a college athlete.
And yeah, like, The Onion could figure out some kind of satire now, but it wouldn't be so straightforward as it was in 2004. I think in 2004, you could reference Maxim-FHM-Playboy, the fame of Kournikova or Sharapova (and Acuff a couple weeks after the Olympics) and count on 90% of the audience getting it. Not sure how that's possible now. As you mention, revisiting this stuff is a lot of the fun (and also takes up most of the hours of writing and research!).
That calling shotgun article is great I don’t think I’ve seen it before. I like the little details like not suggesting the driver be asked how he wants to do it, or what the others think of his smoking in the car. Good planning to print out Mapquest before leaving, back in the day not something could do on the fly.
Yeah, I'm not sure if I remember this article or it meshes well with other "life situations from growing up in the 1980s/1990s" articles The Onion has done.
And great catch on Mapquest -- completely skipped over it, and I remember printing out mapsin the late 2000s when I had to drive around upstate NY. (I feel like Mapquest had a better print version of map routes than Google for a while, too)
Jason Vorhees supports Harris…
The story about female athletes is more relevant than ever with recent changes to college sports. Now that student-athletes can get paid for their likeness, there's a boom in some female athletes getting paid for social media popularity that is only tangentially related to the sport. This substacker wrote it up pretty well and there's a link to the NYT.
https://www.houseofstrauss.com/p/the-kournikoving-of-college-sports
As shown in the NYT article and its comment section, people don't really know what to make of college women using NCAA sports to help careers that previously could have included cinemax. The positions are unclear enough that I don't think that the Onion would have anything to satirize. After all, the Onion seems critical of the revealing outfits, but for some of the biggest beneficiaries of NIL rules the outfits would help their brand.
One of my favorite parts of your write-ups is revisiting the controversies of yesteryear. Amazing how many are still floating around in a slightly different way.
such a great point, Robert! And that link is interesting, too. I forgot Suni Lee was simultaneously the reigning Olympic champion and a college athlete.
And yeah, like, The Onion could figure out some kind of satire now, but it wouldn't be so straightforward as it was in 2004. I think in 2004, you could reference Maxim-FHM-Playboy, the fame of Kournikova or Sharapova (and Acuff a couple weeks after the Olympics) and count on 90% of the audience getting it. Not sure how that's possible now. As you mention, revisiting this stuff is a lot of the fun (and also takes up most of the hours of writing and research!).
That calling shotgun article is great I don’t think I’ve seen it before. I like the little details like not suggesting the driver be asked how he wants to do it, or what the others think of his smoking in the car. Good planning to print out Mapquest before leaving, back in the day not something could do on the fly.
Yeah, I'm not sure if I remember this article or it meshes well with other "life situations from growing up in the 1980s/1990s" articles The Onion has done.
And great catch on Mapquest -- completely skipped over it, and I remember printing out mapsin the late 2000s when I had to drive around upstate NY. (I feel like Mapquest had a better print version of map routes than Google for a while, too)