America’s unbreakable fixation with football will only lead to more injuries like Damar Hamlin’s.
There was nothing remarkable about the play that led to Buffalo Bills defensive back Damar Hamlin collapsing on the field during Monday Night Football. A Cincinnati Bengals player caught the ball over the middle, ran upfield, and collided with Hamlin in a rendition of a play that football fans have seen countless times.
But this time, Hamlin staggered to his feet, wobbled, and dropped. We learned later that his heart had stopped. The game, between two of the NFL’s best teams, was suspended, but only after the teams reportedly balked at the league’s suggestion that they regroup and finish the game. (The NFL has denied this; the journalists who reported it stand by their reporting.) It felt like a seminal moment for a sport beleaguered by questions about the dangers it poses to its players.
But the odds are against any long-term impact. America’s most popular sports league will still conclude its regular season next week, followed by three rounds of playoffs, all leading to the Super Bowl on February 12, which will inevitably be the most watched TV show in the United States of the entire year.
That’s because the NFL’s grip on the American consciousness is ironclad. The worst-case scenario — a player dying after one of the violent hits that are football’s hallmark — nearly came to pass on Monday night, but Thursday Night Football will kick off unabated.
A uniquely American concoction of capitalism and culture has allowed football to continue to thrive, even as the dangers it presents to players, both professional and amateur, have become clearer. Football remains the biggest hit on TV.
It is dangerous. It is corrupt. It is also a visual spectacle and thrilling competition. Every season brings new and returning characters, dangling plot lines and out-of-nowhere twists, and a dramatic climax on Super Bowl Sunday.
To lose football would be to lose a part of ourselves. Rooting for the Ohio State Buckeyes and Cleveland Browns was integral to my childhood, as much as going to church and school. It was part of my identity.
Football is not inevitable. There are signs of slippage, if you look closely enough. But no precipitous collapse. And the NFL, ever mindful of maintaining its dominance, has worked tirelessly to keep it that way.
So the game plays on — with Damar Hamlin, another casualty, left in its wake.
Why Americans love football
Americans love television as much as any people in the world, and the NFL is our favorite show: 75 of the 100 most-watched television programs in 2021 were NFL games. The Super Bowl routinely pulls in 100 million viewers or more in the United States. For many of them, that might be the only game they watch all year. But they watch.
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The game we call football is fundamentally and uniquely American. It’s an amalgamation of what the rest of the world calls football (but what we call soccer) and rugby; the first recognized game was played in New Jersey between two college squads in 1898, and it evolved and grew in popularity from there.
But unlike the other signature American sports, baseball and basketball, football has not found quite the same success abroad.
That isn’t for lack of trying. The NFL now routinely holds regular-season games in London and operated a European offshoot until 2017. Some small fandoms are emerging in the United Kingdom and Germany. But there has been nothing comparable to basketball’s EuroLeague, which now regularly produces stars who move to the NBA, or Japan and South Korea’s baseball leagues. Even Olympic basketball has occasionally yielded to American dominance; football doesn’t have nearly enough international appeal to even be considered for a place in the world’s most historic and varied athletic competition.
Attempts have been made to explain why Americans seem so beguiled by this particular game. Europeans are more familiar with and attached to football’s predecessors, soccer and rugby, and the fandoms for those sports have their own dark underbellies. But in the United States, the fall calendar for many people revolves around high school football on Friday nights, College Football Saturdays, Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football. It is simply woven into our social fabric.
But it wasn’t always this way. Baseball was for a long time regarded as America’s pastime, the subject of wartime patriotism. Football’s preeminence requires more explanation than mere inertia and ubiquity. Murray Ross delivered maybe the best one I have read in his essay “Football Red and Baseball Green: The Heroics and Bucolics of American Sport” from 1971, published by the Chicago Review.
In his telling, football was a thoroughly modern game compared to baseball, a sport once so synonymous with America that it’s been said the country fought World War II to protect Mom, apple pie, and baseball. Football is a gladiatorial combat between demigods, defined by conquests and the finely tuned cooperation of its gameplay: 11 men on the field with their own specific task and working toward a common goal.
Baseball — which football overtook by the late 20th century — is, by contrast, pastoral and individualized, Ross wrote. And whereas baseball looked back to a time before industrialization, with its expansive setting and leisurely pace, football embraced the modern age of specialized toil under the pressure of a clock steadily ticking down.
I can’t say I was all that conscious of the ways football’s subtext mirrored that of the developed economy I was growing up in. What I remember are SportsCenter highlights and the 2003 Orange Bowl, when my home state’s Buckeyes triumphed in a nail-biter to win the national championship. I remember all the pain and the occasional bliss of my stolen-and-resurrected Cleveland Browns fandom. It has been a common touchstone with my friends and family, as I moved across the country and back again.
It can be fun to watch, too. Its gameplay is more methodical than basketball’s, allowing the viewer to catch their breath between plays, but faster-paced than baseball’s, with the 60-minute game time adding urgency to every action. It allows the game to maintain a clearer narrative: You don’t know if an RBI single in the first inning will really affect a game’s final outcome, but you can be more confident that a 4th-and-1 in the first quarter might prove important.
Every play is its own story in a miniature, each snap an adrenaline rush. The offense and defense burst into action when the ball is hiked. Sophisticated blocking patterns slowly reveal an open hole for the running back. Or the receiving corps runs finely tuned routes to break free of the defense’s coverage, while the quarterback withstands an assault from the defensive line before trying to uncork a pinpoint pass to his target. You might see a fake punt or a flea flicker, in which a running back takes the ball from the quarterback and then tosses it back to him to attempt a long pass. Or the defense could turn the tables by intercepting a pass or forcing a fumble, a plot twist that sends the action screaming in the other direction.
It is violent, yes. But it is also balletic and complex, every drive its own game of chess between two teams. The players must not only possess the kind of preternatural athletic ability that makes any high-level sports competition compelling but also act in unison to achieve their goal. It makes for beautiful and tension-filled television viewing, edge-of-your-seat thrillers in which the outcome has not already been predetermined by a screenwriter.
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The NFL has another advantage for fans: more parity. Unlike the MLB and NBA, where wealthy “glamour” teams can dominate because of their spending advantages or their locales, pro football distributes its revenue evenly among its 30 teams and strictly controls their payrolls, giving each a fairer shot at attracting and keeping talent. Even for my woeful Cleveland Browns, there is a real chance they could turn things around and contend for a Super Bowl, if only they find the right coach or the right quarterback. For lower-rung MLB and NBA teams, those hopes are much fainter because of the disparities in revenue and prestige.
And the NFL’s season demands appointment viewing by design. For your favorite team, there is one game a week, usually on Sunday. With only 17 games in the regular season, each individual NFL game carries more import than the typical game of an MLB (162 games) or NBA (82 games) regular season. There are no filler episodes.
Even today, aware as I am of the physical dangers and moral hazard for supporting owners who bilk cities for millions to build new stadiums they don’t need or coaches and players accused of all sorts of wrongdoing, I do still tune in more Sundays than I don’t.
How the NFL has staved off the death of football
That makes me part of the problem. The NFL continues to defy any claims of its impending doom, in part because people like me are still tuning in.
The league has worked hard to keep our attention. It has been desperate to stave off the brain damage backlash, which was driven deeper into the public consciousness by shocking stories involving star players, such as retired San Diego Chargers linebacker Junior Seau’s death by suicide (and the subsequent revelation he had CTE) and Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck’s sudden retirement in his prime to avoid any further injury. There have been enormous settlements in lawsuits involving former players who alleged the league hid the risks of playing football from them.
And football, the game, is facing a more uncertain future. Participation in tackle football among children ages 6 to 12 dropped by nearly 18 percent from 2008 to 2021, while baseball and basketball held steady and soccer soared. Half of US adults now say the sport is inappropriate for youths.
But football, the television show, is still thriving, and, barring a dramatic change, it will continue to do so. The product isn’t going away: The decline in youth participation has not been universal, and in some of its cultural strongholds like the Southeast, more kids have been playing football in the last decade. The NFL should continue to have a pipeline of new stars for the foreseeable future.
The league has been canny in keeping the game afloat. It has altered its rulebook and made an already cinematic game even more fluid and exciting, with the bonus of doing so in the name of player safety. It has instituted rules to protect quarterbacks, its biggest stars, from dangerous hits to their legs and head. If a wide receiver cuts across the middle of the field to catche the ball, defensive players are barred from hitting the other player in particularly rough ways, such as leading with their helmet.
That may make the game marginally less dangerous. But a notable side effect is that it makes the game easier for offenses. Defensive players have to think twice about landing punishing blows, unless they risk a penalty, and that shift along with new concepts in how offensive plays are designed has opened up the game. Quarterbacks are throwing more passes, for more yards, and teams are scoring more touchdowns than they did in the 2000s and earlier. League-wide scoring hit a record high in 2020, though it has dropped off a bit in the past two seasons.
The NFL has also long indulged in subtle marketing campaigns to entwine itself with the military (making football, by definition, patriotic) and to soften its image, such as previous breast cancer awareness campaigns that saw modern-day gladiators and their frumpy, grumpy coaches wearing dashes of pink.
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Scott Taetsch/Getty Images
Where gambling was once verboten in all professional sports after the Black Sox and Pete Rose scandals of the last century, the NFL, like the NBA and other leagues, has embraced it. First indirectly, via fantasy football (for which the league runs its own platforms), and now more overtly, including NFL deals with sportsbooks and partnerships with online betting sites.
All of which serves to have fans put skin in the game. Murray Ross wrote more than 50 years ago that, while we might be able to imagine settling under a major leaguer’s fly ball and catching it, it’s impossible to believe we could actually hold on to a pass from an NFL quarterback while absorbing a hit from a linebacker in the same way. The NFL has found a way to make us a part of the action. Fans are more invested than ever.
The game today looks very different from the game Ross was writing about. But at its core, it is still American football. Those reforms didn’t prevent Damar Hamlin’s injury. Enormous men running at breathtaking speed over very short distances and colliding with one another cannot be made entirely safe.
May Hamlin recover quickly. But he won’t be the last player to experience such a trauma. Until America stops watching, there will always be another game on.
Streaming isn’t going away, but go-go spending is going, going, gone.
Here’s a standard streaming TV joke/complaint: There are so many different services that someone should just put them all together, and then you’d just pay one monthly fee for everything. You know, just like cable TV!
Ho ho ho.
The thing is, none of the people running streaming TV services think there are going to be a ton of TV services in the future. They think they will eventually consolidate into a few big players.
We’re already seeing some of that, which is why Warner Brothers Discovery is getting ready to launch a yet-to-be-named service that will mash up HBO Max and Discovery Plus, which means you’ll be able to pay for White Lotus and Dr. Pimple Popper with one monthly bill. Careful what you wish for!
In the meantime, if you check out Wall Street earnings reports, you can see quite clearly why conventional industry wisdom is that the industry is going to get smaller, at least in terms of providers: It’s really, really expensive to run a streamer, especially at the start.
And if you don’t want to dig through public filings, don’t worry, we’ve done it for you. Here’s a quick snapshot of the money Netflix made in the first nine months of 2022, and the money many of the would-be Netflixes lost:
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There are some caveats here, including the fact that we’re using slightly different definitions of profits and losses for each streamer because they each use different ones in their filings. Add to that the fact that Warner Bros. Discovery’s total is lower than it should be because we only had two quarters of data available for this chart.
But the big picture is that there’s a ton of red ink, and there would be much, much more if we 1) went back further because some of these services have been bleeding money for multiple years and 2) could see the P&Ls of Apple and Amazon, which are burning big piles of money on streaming but are so big that it doesn’t matter to them or their investors (for now).
This chart also explains why shows you love (but other people don’t) are more likely to disappear now than they have in the past: A couple of years ago, Wall Street was telling media companies that they should emulate Netflix and worry about growth, not losses. That changed last year, for Netflix and for everyone else. Now, Netflix founder Reed Hastings preaches the merits of operating income, and his competitors are talking about rationalizing costs.
Streaming isn’t going away. Data firm Ampere Analysis predicts global content spending will hit $243 billion this year. That’s a 2 percent increase, and it’s down quite a bit from the 6 percent growth we saw in 2022. But it’s way, way up from the $128 billion we saw a decade ago. You’re still going to have a lot of choice for a long time.
Agreement on arms control is getting harder, but it still really matters.
UNITED NATIONS, Geneva — There was a stretch in December’s late-stage negotiations that seemed pretty bleak. Russia was mad, mostly that no one would entertain its made-up claims of a US-funded bioweapons program in Ukraine. Iran was mad, apparently about sanctions. And everyone was haggling over language in the final review document for the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC), the nearly 50-year-old international treaty that prohibits states from developing or deploying biological weapons.
Diplomats, delegations, and experts feared this is where the review conference (or “RevCon,” as it’s known) might stall out. The review, which takes place every five years, is intended to make sure the BWC is still operating and being implemented effectively in the current era. Reaching consensus among more than 180 countries on what that means is always a huge task. This time, spillover from geopolitical tensions — capped by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — made these talks even messier.
But after three weeks of discussions that ended about a week before Christmas, the BWC RevCon ended up a modest success. The parties basically agreed to agree to keep talking, establishing a working group, which would meet for a little more than two weeks each year and deal with a long, long list of issues related to the BWC, including evaluating developments in science and technology and potential verification and compliance measures. And the unit that implements the convention would get another staff member. A team of three people tasked with helping to keep the world free of bioweapons became four.
“Modest,” then, is doing a lot of work. But in this geopolitical climate, you take what you can get.
“I’m sure if the international context had been different, we would have achieved much, much more,” Ambassador Leonardo Bencini, permanent representative of Italy to the Conference on Disarmament and the president-designate of the Ninth Review Conference on the Biological Weapons Convention, told Vox in December. “But, as I said, given the situation, we have to be pleased that we managed at least to break the deadlock.”
Bencini echoed the statement from United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, who called the BWC result “a glimmer of hope in an overall bleak international security environment.”
“We were very worried that if we did not get this, we don’t know what might happen to the future of these disarmament negotiations in the multilateral system,” Bencini added.
Because, right now, the arms control movement is facing something of a tough moment.
The state of global arms control is not great
Take the BWC: The norm against the deliberate use of biological weapons is largely still intact, but political wrangling — this year, and in many years past, including from the US — has stymied progress, leaving limited breakthroughs to stand as accomplishments. And that means the world is still pretty far away from really strengthening the convention, making it more relevant and responsive to the technological and scientific advances that are changing the nature of biothreats.
Other arms control conventions have faced similar challenges. This year, Russia blocked agreement on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, apparently over objections to a clause referencing the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine. In November, Russia also last-minute canceled technical talks with the United States on the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last nuclear arms control treaty between Washington and Moscow still standing.
Russia has certainly played a starring role as an increasingly isolated spoiler in these forums, which is happening against the backdrop of the Kremlin’s invasion and assault on Ukraine, itself a gross violation of international law. Moscow’s attack also increased the risk of a possible nuclear confrontation between Russia and the US and its NATO allies. Russian President Vladimir Putin has raised the specter of a nuclear attack.
The Ukraine war and its fallout may be among the biggest current threats to global stability. But Russia is not alone. China is expanding its nuclear arsenal and has rebuffed attempts to engage bilaterally on arms control with the US even as the competition between Washington and Beijing escalates. North Korea is likely closing in on more nuclear tests. Tensions simmer between nuclear powers India and Pakistan. The United States tore up the Iran deal during the Trump administration, one of a few arms control treaties Washington exited in recent years, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Agreement (INF) and the Open Skies Treaty, which allowed for unarmed reconassaince flights. The latter two exits chipped away at the arms control regime with Russia, even as the US had very valid claims of Russian noncompliance.
These arms control agreements, both bilateral and multilateral, are supposed to be the guardrails in times of global crisis, not unlike the one we’re in now.
“Arms control, historically, did a great deal to make threats and the understanding of threats a lot more predictable, and I think that led to a mutual balance and led to a relatively stable mass destruction weapons system worldwide for decades,” said John Gilbert, a retired US Air Force colonel and senior science fellow with the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation’s Scientists Working Group.
But technology is advancing, disinformation is spreading rapidly, and geopolitics are shifting, especially with the rise of authoritarians and anti-democratic forces, who may value disruption above more stable state-to-state relations. That fuels a precarious loop: Tensions make the talks and trust needed to reach deals that much harder, and that, in turn, makes these treaties no longer fit for purpose in the current moment.
All that may lead to a world where an arms race eclipses arms control. “We do not need to take that decision to react — that would be my hope for some governments, not to fall into the rearmament trap,” said Maren Vieluf, an arms control expert and researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg.
Experts strongly caution that we’re not there yet. The multilateral infrastructure is still operating, albeit with more and more limitations and snags.
“One question to ask yourself in each case is: What would we do if it wasn’t there — and would the situation be better or worse? And in most cases, I’d say the situation would be worse,” Richard Cupitt, senior fellow and director of Partnerships in Proliferation Prevention at the Stimson Center, told Vox in December.
How did we get here?
What fits into arms control is pretty broad. It includes restrictions on weapons of mass destruction, like nukes and chemical and biological weapons. It can cover certain conventional weapons and autonomous weapons, and other tools of war. There are major multilateral treaties like the BWC, or the Chemical Weapons Conventions. And there are really important bilateral treaties, like those between Russia and the United States, that put limits on arms and create transparency to avoid miscalculation or confrontation. Put simply, these all help establish international norms that, ideally, make the world safer.
And the world is safer because of these efforts. The number of people killed in wars between states has declined since the end of World War II. The United States deployed atomic bombs in World War II, but nuclear weapons have not been used since. Bans on conventional weapons like land mines and cluster munitions and blinding laser weapons have not eliminated their use in conflict but have nonetheless, and over time, helped build norms against their use.
A lot of what makes up our arms control regime, particularly around weapons of mass destruction, was shaped during the Cold War period, with two nuclear-armed superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, anchoring the global order. That is one of the obvious challenges the current arms control apparatus faces.
“The whole infrastructure of this idea of arms control, and these bilateral and multilateral agreements, were created at a particular time and in a particular world, for a very specific purpose,” said Laura Considine, an associate professor of international politics who specializes in global nuclear politics at the University of Leeds. “And so we’re left with this very, I think, rigid structuring of institutions that is premised on Cold War, bilateral relationships, and the superpowers, and that’s just fundamentally not where we are anymore.”
Technologies have changed since the 20th century, too, and while these treaties serve as foundations, they also need to account for developments and respond to new risks and threats.
Right now, geopolitical divides make actually coming to an agreement on any updates difficult. It is hard to pinpoint a precise turning point of when things started souring because these kinds of arms control agreements are inherently difficult to make, requiring relationship-building, public pressure, and political will, all of which ebbs and flows. But a real erosion of trust among countries like the US and Russia has become a roadblock to shoring up some of these institutions.
Though some of these arms control treaties may have helped avert catastrophe during the Cold War, they may have seemed less necessary after the fall of the Soviet Union; the George W. Bush administration, for example, pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a 1972 treaty with the then-Soviet Union, arguing it had outlived its purpose and prevented America from building up its defense post-9/11. A broader complacency might also have set in, in part because arms control worked, which perhaps led policymakers to underestimate the threat, say, of proliferation and advances in technological capabilities.
The last few years may have accelerated some of these trends. Trump, for example, withdrew the US from multiple arms control treaties, like the INF and Open Skies Treaty. But then the Biden administration did not seek to rejoin, citing legitimate Russian rule-breaking. Experts said authoritarian swings — in Russia under Putin, but also in China under Xi Jinping, and rightward shifts in established democracies — also make it harder to make deals. Leaders are less accountable to their publics (who, hey, probably don’t want to die in a nuclear war) but also may see value in gaining an edge over their global rivals.
Disinformation, and the quick spread of it, is a tool to undermine the credibility of regimes; Russia, for example, keeps claiming the US is financing a bioweapons program in Ukraine, including designing bioagents that could target specific ethnic groups. It’s baseless propaganda, but it still serves to undermine the credibility of the institutions — in this case, the BWC. One leader or country can’t unravel an arms control agreement, but their actions and approach can degrade it, as Russia is doing right now.
“We all understand the value of arms control. And I think Russia understands the value of it, but they don’t care,” said William Alberque, director of strategy, technology, and arms control at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “Peace and stability aren’t the things they want. They want risk in order to make us afraid, so that we’ll give stuff up.”
That kind of impasse also makes it harder to make future agreements, even if tensions thaw. As experts pointed out, lots of these arms control talks are technical — precise data on weapons and capabilities — but they also hinge on familiarity, trust, mutual respect. When people stop talking, it’s a lot harder to just restart negotiations because that trust erodes. Jessica Rogers, impact fellow at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), said this is the concern about the New START treaty, which is set to expire in 2026 and might not have a follow on. “Just not having that dialogue, it just creates a lot of pessimism among nuclear experts — or generally among arms control experts — because there’s no time really to negotiate a follow on to the expiring New START Treaty,” she said.
These treaties still matter, even if things look a bit bleak. And honestly, it’s not all bad.
Maybe the world where these treaties were forged doesn’t exist anymore, but they still matter — even if they’re imperfect, even if they are violated.
As experts said, the idea that you’re going to get a new legally binding treaty — even if that is what you ultimately want — just isn’t a reality in these current international and domestic climates.
“Treaties were written at a time when the world was different, and they need to exist; they need to exist as the foundations to ensure that there is something there,” said Anuradha Damale-Day, policy fellow and program manager at BASIC. “But I think there’s been more of a willingness because of everything that’s happened to find more innovative ways to problem-solve, that are more incremental, and that add together in their parts into something that is bigger.”
That incrementalism may seem quaint compared to the threat of nuclear apocalypse, but that may be the only option available right now. “It’s shifting right now to account for the reality that the situation has changed,” said Shannon Bugos, senior policy analyst at the Arms Control Association. “We know the traditional view of arms control is not necessarily what is best for the current moment.”
Instead, countries are focusing on things like strategic dialogues and crisis hotlines — at least we can call you if things get dicey. This kind of risk reduction is more fluid and informal, and not legally binding in the way of a treaty or convention. But it still serves to help change the norms and narratives and, most importantly, deescalate tensions.
There are other ways to establish arms-control systems, like political declarations. In November, 80 countries signed the first international declaration to protect civilians in populated areas, which commits states to restrict the use of explosive weapons in those areas, to reduce the harm posed to civilians, and to better assist victims of such attacks. Of course, attacks like this are still happening, but experts see it as a critical step to help make it less likely in the future.
“The fact that this is becoming more of a widespread understanding will hopefully save civilian lives down the road,” said Bonnie Docherty, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch and a lecturer at Harvard Law. “So, yes, it’s not an overnight panacea. We know that it’s not immediately going to change the lives of the people in Ukraine, unfortunately. But it’s where things start to shift.”
Unilateral declarations by states — basically, a country saying we think this is bad, so we’re going to stop — also can influence the arms control discussion. A recent example: The Biden administration in April 2022 committed not to conduct direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) missile testing, a fancy way of saying the US won’t blow up stuff in space, which can be pretty destructive and leave behind debris. This was a major arms control initiative, and since then, a handful of other countries have made similar commitments. Sure, they’re mostly the US’s allies and partners, but all these efforts have to start somewhere.
And adopting universally shared norms against certain weapons or tactics is a slow, slow process. Geopolitical conflict or national interests can unravel or undermine that progress. As of November 2022, more than 91 countries had signed on to a treaty to ban nuclear weapons (admittedly, none of them nuclear powers). Yet this was also the year the world fretted about what might happen if Putin used a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine; people rushed to buy iodine pills in Europe.
This is exactly the kind of climate arms control treaties are designed for, to stop threats from spiraling. Arms control agreements only work, though, when states trust that their enemy is going to abide by the rules. Without that, countries may see less value in reducing risks than in trying to rearm to prevent them.
The fear is that the world might creep toward the brink of a very real disaster to tip that balance back. “Do we have to go through a Cuban missile crisis moment for people to understand the value of arms control — or is this just the new era of risk until we do stumble into a crisis or disaster?” Alberque said.
This reporting was made possible by a grant from Founders Pledge.