A Difficult Burden

How to tackle

Well, looks like Ritam pinned me with the Chappelle slot.

This year it looks like they’re going with Bill Burr—but for this cultural institution? I guess it’s me. I guess the burden falls to me. I guess Ritam looked at the calendar months ago, read the tea leaves, and maneuvered our schedule so that I’d end up here.

There’s a lot I could say. That’s for sure. There’s so much to talk about, you know? So many things. Big, weighty topics. Just so many of them.

Guess I could talk about “the rightward shift” of “Gen Z men.” “Podcast diets.” “The Revenge of the Bro” and “The Zynternet” and all that. Seems like something that’s up our alley here. Definitely could take that on.

Maybe I try to do something more expansive and humanistic—wrap my arms around the whole thing. Positive outlook, bigger picture. Silver linings. Long arc of history, etc.

Always have Indian stuff to lean on. A lot of meat left on the Vivek Ramaswamy/Usha Vance/“Kash Patel” bone. That’s for sure.

All these paths lay before me. A veritable cornucopia of paths, brother. The question we’re all asking:

Which one does Nabeel take?

The NBA season is here (huge run out the gate from the Warriors), and that means this ad is back on our screens. It is wild that this ad made it through multiple rounds of edits. So many people had to watch and approve this before it made it to the regular rotation that it’s now in. Every single one signed off. And all of them, somehow, missed this image:

At 0:10 seconds, this guy misses the dunk. Why would you have an entire Michelob Ultra ad and spend money on the Sinatra song and shoot the whole thing and make the whole idea that Michelob beer allows for this type of athleticism—not only physically but in spirit—only to have the guy miss the dunk?

There’s no possible explanation. Every other guy in the ensuing montage makes his dunk. The ball clearly and obviously goes through the hoop in the rest of them. So why would you include that first shot of the guy missing the dunk?

It’s unfathomable.

It is, truly, a tragedy.

It is a dereliction of duty, at best, and an outright concession to our most dangerous impulses, at worst.

This is a stark reminder that, maybe, our country is not what we thought it was. That our neighbors, whom we so cheerfully wave to every morning as we pick up our newspapers from the driveway, are secretly OK with this—nay, even in support of it. That the headwinds and undercurrents we could not foresee laid the groundwork for something like this to happen.

The difficult truth? There’s no way out but through. We must resist. We cannot wallow in defeat; we have to—if not for us, then for everyone else—fight back against this Michelob Ultra ad. I hope you’ll join me.

Ritam’s Footnote

The long arc of history… damn… history is lowkey a curvy baddie… history could lowkey get it asf 🤤🤤… history’s arcs and twists and turns are giving me brain……….