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New story: THE WITCHES OF HARMONY

I am drawn to foreign locations. Some of you know that I’m an avid, lifelong student of foreign languages.

At the same time, travel involves many unknowns. There is a lot that can go wrong… especially if you encounter supernatural entities at your destination.

That’s the idea behind my Terrifying Travels series.

The most recent addition to the series is THE WITCHES OF HARMONY, which involves restless 17th-century spirits in the fictional Greater Boston town of Harmony, Massachusetts. Check it out on Amazon.

Amazon book description:

Some business trips are better left unbooked.

Bill Preston has spent years traveling the country for his job, working trade shows in convention centers from one coast to the other. So when he’s assigned to an industrial expo in Harmony, Massachusetts, he expects another routine week on the road.

Then a coworker warns him about Harmony.

He won’t say exactly what happened there. Only that he never wants to go back.

Bill soon discovers that Harmony is a picture-perfect New England town with a history no one wants to discuss. There are whispered stories about witches who escaped the Salem trials—only to meet a more terrible fate in Harmony.

There are warnings not to go outside after dark.

And there are things in Harmony that only certain people can see.

Bill considers himself a rational man. He doesn’t believe in witches, ghosts, or ancient curses.

But something in Harmony has noticed him.

And before this business trip is over, Bill may discover that some places never escape their past.

The Witches of Harmony is a supernatural horror tale of haunted history, business travel, and a New England town with a secret it has been keeping for more than three hundred years.

The University of Cincinnati and my fiction

I attended the University of Cincinnati between the summer of 1987 and the early summer of 1991, and it is there that I earned my degree in economics. I arrived at UC in a circuitous fashion, and against my better judgment.

I started at Northern Kentucky University in the fall of 1986. NKU was just across the river from where my parents lived. (I was a commuter student throughout my college years.)

NKU provided an extremely pleasant educational experience—at least in those days. NKU had small classes, attentive professors, and a comfortable suburban/semi-rural environment. Oh, and parking was a breeze, too—no small matter when you’re a commuter student.

And of course, I was too foolish to know a good situation when I had it.

I can partly blame the 1980s. Those were placid, commonsense times, especially when compared to the chaotic cesspool that is the American culture of today.

A common trope in teen movies of the 1980s is the bored suburban/small-town teen whose life is so calm and satisfactory that he spends the first part of the movie waiting around for something exciting to happen. You can observe this trope in Risky Business, The Last American Virgin, Footloose, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

As a student at Northern Kentucky University in the 1986-87 academic year, I knew that the University of Cincinnati was an edgier, more tumultuous environment.

To begin with, UC was more than three times as large as NKU. UC was located in the inner city. UC was more “diverse.” (This was not a term that we used in the 1980s, but we understood the concept.)

UC—in the words of one of my friends—was also “a pain in the ass.” The daily commute was twice as long. Parking was a nightmare. Classes were frequently large, and so overenrolled that you might not get in.

I found the inner-city environment to be wretched rather than stimulating. On my drive home in the afternoons, I occasionally passed streetwalkers and drug deals in progress. The area around UC—both then and now—is a high-crime area. The campus itself was safe enough, but students were sometimes assaulted and robbed in the off-campus perimeter.

I briefly contemplated a return to NKU. But by the time I realized that I had made a mistake in coming to UC, I was already stuck there.

This was because of the way that NKU and UC allotted credits. At that time, NKU was on a semester system and UC was on a quarter system. As a result, NKU credits had a high exchange rate when transferred to UC’s system; but when transferring in the opposite direction, you would invariably lose credits.

So I finished my degree at the University of Cincinnati. The experience was far from a total loss, and not only because I earned a four-year degree. At the age of nineteen, I really had spent all of my life in sheltered, suburban, and (let’s be blunt about this) all-white environments. My years at the University of Cincinnati taught me to thrive beyond those confines—a skill that would serve me well in future years, when I entered some much rougher environments.

My time at UC also gave me a sense of gratitude—for the many unearned blessings that had been given to me by a mere accident of birth. These realizations brought both maturity and humility.

Looking back on it all almost 40 years later, I regard my years at UC as beneficial ones. I was there between the ages of 19 and 22. These are the young-adult formative years. It should not be surprising, then, that the University of Cincinnati shows up in my fiction. Below are the major and cameo appearances of the University of Cincinnati in my novels and short stories:

No Sure Thing

Set in 1988, this young adult novel includes many scenes on or around the UC campus of the late 1980s. While I have taken some liberties regarding professors’ names, etc., No Sure Thing provides an authentic look at the UC of the late Reagan era.

The Woman in Crosley Tower

This dark fantasy/light horror parallel worlds novella is set on the University of Cincinnati campus in the summer of 1987. In this story, one of the university’s actual buildings is the heart of the supernatural setting.

Eleven Miles of Night

This horror novel is set in 2013 and is not primarily about the University of Cincinnati. Two UC students, however, are major characters. There are multiple scenes set on campus.

Hay Moon and Other Stories

At least one story in my first short story collection, “Gaia Cried Out,” takes place partly on the UC campus.

***

I am not nostalgic about the University of Cincinnati in the conventional sense. I do not attend alumni events. Nor do I attend UC’s football or basketball games.

The university is, however, often my go-to location when I need a campus setting, especially one set in the 1980s. Thirty-five years have passed since I was last a student at the University of Cincinnati, and I’m still writing about it. UC will probably appear again in future stories.

-ET

21st-century obesity rates vs the buckle-down culture of the 1980s

K.W. Bogen, an author/influencer, declares in a public Facebook Reel that the commonly cited male preference for thin/fit women is a conspiracy of corporations and white supremacy.

Because isn’t everything a conspiracy of corporations and white supremacy nowadays? No doubt the patriarchy had a hand in it all, as well.

Ms. Bogen then goes on to show us her figure (about which I will refrain from comment). She asserts that thinness is “really, really difficult to achieve” without “starving oneself” or taking drugs. (I assume she is referring to Ozempic, though I can’t be certain.)

First things first. Many men do prefer thin, fit women. A smaller percentage prefer women who are “pleasingly plump”. A very small percentage actively seek out heavyset women. (This last group of men is rare; but they do exist.)

But what men like is not the central issue here. On that point, at least, I think Ms. Bogen and I may be in agreement—though for entirely different reasons. Continue reading “21st-century obesity rates vs the buckle-down culture of the 1980s”

Nightclub height requirements for men, and the Law of Unintended Consequences

The other day my Facebook feed informed me that a nightclub in Brixton, London held a party earlier this year to which men under the height of 6 feet were barred from entry. The event was called “Land of the Giants.”

And they were serious about the height requirement. Men—and only men—were measured at the door.

The event sold out, but social media opinions were divided. Supporters argued that this was really no different from height filters on popular dating apps. Opponents assailed the height requirement as exclusionary.

I am 5’10” tall. I therefore would have been turned away at the door. Perhaps I should be upset about this. (That’s obviously what Facebook’s algorithm was hoping for.) But I don’t do much clubbing in Brixton, London. (I live in Ohio, after all.) And at my current age of 58, well… I guess I don’t regard this as a personally pressing matter.

The height requirement is tacky. But if a woman really must have a man capable of playing guard on a professional basketball team… “Who am I to judge?” as the late Pope Francis once said.

As sexual beings, we are entitled to like what we like, so long as we confine our liking to consenting adults. Women are entitled to fetishize height. Men are equally entitled to fetishize youth, thinness, and thigh gaps.

The question is not what we are entitled to do, but—perhaps—what we should do. Continue reading “Nightclub height requirements for men, and the Law of Unintended Consequences”

Frank Beard and memories of ZZ Top

I was among that first generation of adolescents to discover MTV in the early 1980s. If you were 14 years old in 1982, as I was, MTV was really great stuff.

The ZZ Top videos were among the best. The music itself was catchy. But ZZ Top’s MTV videos often portrayed short stories, often with fantasy elements.

Among the most memorable of these was “Legs” (1983). “Legs” is essentially a miniature fairy tale, set in 1980s America. The video also features cameo appearances by two Playboy Playmates—Jeana Tomasino and Kymberly Herrin. What could be more 80s than that?

But the members of the band, by then men in their early middle age, also provided a distinctive visual trademark to every ZZ Top production.

ZZ Top was a three-man band from Houston, Texas. They had no pretensions of being glam rockers. The guitarist and bassist, Billy Gibbons and Dusty Hill, both sported long beards that made them look like refugees from the Texas Hill Country of some prior decade.

Frank Beard, the drummer, was ironically the only member of the band who did not have a beard. Frank Beard passed away yesterday at the age of 77.

***

My research tells me that Beard was preceded in death by Dusty Hill in 2021. (Hill was 72.)

I’m not going to pretend that either death was a personal loss. But these two men, though strangers, contributed significantly to the pop culture tapestry of my formative years. That pop culture was, on the whole, more upbeat and vibrant than the one we are forced to endure today.

I’m glad that the marketplace rewarded both Beard and Hill for their musical prowess while they were still alive. ZZ Top peaked in popularity decades ago. But their music videos have aged well and are still available on YouTube.

Frank Beard, 77. R.I.P.

-ET

Rush, Rolling Stone, and the Anika Nilles clarification

Most of us never expected Rush to tour again. And then it happened. The band’s 2026 Fifty Something tour has met with wide acclaim.

This has resulted in Rush getting more attention than it got during its heyday. One such accolade is the appearance of the band’s two surviving founders—Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee—on the cover of Rolling Stone.

I understand that this represents something of a milestone, even for a band that has been famous for decades. I have never cared a hoot about Rolling Stone magazine; but I am a longtime fan of Rush.

According to the backstory I have read on the internet, Rush was previously persona non grata at Rolling Stone magazine, for either musical or (perhaps) political reasons.

Since this was apparently such a big deal among Rush fans, the Rolling Stone cover did make the rounds on social media. That meant comments, of course.

Among the most persistent comments I saw in such threads were remarks like, “Where is Anika?” or “Anika Nilles should have been on the cover, too.” Continue reading “Rush, Rolling Stone, and the Anika Nilles clarification”

Aging rockers and what they can teach us

I was a teenager in the 1980s, and I’m still a fan of the popular music of that era. This summer a number of the rock acts that I grew up with have gone on tour. That’s rather amazing when you think about it. Four decades have passed since I was listening to these same musicians as a suburban teen. I just turned 58, and most of these musicians are now well into their seventies.

This is a phenomenon worth examining not merely for nostalgia’s sake, but for what it can teach us about aging and longevity.

Let’s start with Rush. Rush was founded in 1968, the year I was born. The band had its commercial breakout a few years after that in the mid-1970s, when I was in primary school. I was a huge fan of Rush during their second heyday of the mid-1980s. (Rush remains my all-time favorite band.)

Following the death of Neil Peart in 2020, Rush hired the comparatively youthful (43) Anika Nilles to fill in as their drummer. But guitarist Alex Lifeson and bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee are 72 and 73, respectively.

I watched footage of Rush’s 2026 tour on YouTube and other social media platforms. I’ll begin with the now obligatory observation that yes, Anika Nilles is an amazing drummer, and as good a fill-in for Neil Peart as could reasonably have been expected. But Alex and Geddy seem to have lost little in recent decades. Rush’s music, we should not forget, is technically demanding to perform live. But these two septuagenarians are performing as well as they ever did.

There was, of course, one fly in the ointment. A few concert dates had to be postponed because Geddy Lee was suffering from acute laryngitis and bronchitis. Another thing about touring with a rock band: life on the road is physically demanding—no matter what music you’re playing.

As a counterexample, there is David Lee Roth, the former frontman of Van Halen. At age 71, Roth is a shadow of his former self. He canceled his tour this summer without completing it for unspecified reasons. The most probable reasons, however, were weak ticket sales and negative fan reactions.

David Lee Roth received a lot of criticism for his almost painful-to-watch performances. But David Lee Roth has reached an age when most men are traditionally sedentary grandfathers. We also have to remember that during his salad days he set the bar very high. Anyone who recalls Van Halen’s performances from the 1970s and 1980s will also recall his onstage gymnastics. It simply isn’t possible for a man in his seventies to measure up to that.

Somewhere in the middle are AC/DC and Def Leppard.

Def Leppard’s lead singer, Joe Elliott, is 67 years old. He is no longer the trim, energetic young man who captivated MTV audiences in the 1980s. His voice is still serviceable, but there’s no doubt that time has taken its toll.

All of the vintage members of AC/DC, on the other hand, are now in their seventies. The lead singer, Brian Johnson, was born in 1947. That makes him one year younger than my father—and I’m pushing 60. It is still fun to watch AC/DC perform live. But once again, time has left its mark.

I reiterate: playing live rock and roll on stage in a major commercial venue is both physically and mentally demanding. Most of the population could never do it, regardless of age.

What can we learn from the above examples? First of all, the definition of old has definitely changed. If you take care of yourself both physically and mentally, you can keep going for a long, long time.

But that doesn’t mean that any of us is about to become immortal—or that time no longer counts. No matter how well you take care of yourself, it’s impossible to be at 75 what you were at 35. That’s simply the constraints of time and human biology, which get us all in the end.

-ET

View THE WOMAN IN CROSLEY TOWER on Amazon

When every other email is a scam

This morning I received an email from a co-chair of Warner Bros. Entertainment. In the subject line of the email, she informed me that she wanted to option the movie rights to one of my books.

The immediate problem? The book won’t be released for another month. It is currently listed on Amazon as a preorder. I haven’t sent out review or ARC copies. Nor do I use so-called “beta readers.” So unless the co-chair of Warner Bros. Entertainment somehow gained access to my personal files, there is no way she could have read the book in question.

The email also came from a Gmail account. Gmail accounts have unfortunately become synonymous with this kind of scam email in recent years. I say “unfortunately” because in the past, Gmail was regarded as one of the more reputable email services.

Scam emails are nothing new on the internet, of course. As far back as the late 1990s, many of us would receive scam emails claiming to represent the Nigerian lottery. All we had to do was forward our banking information so that the lottery officials in Lagos could deposit the amount that we’d won. So easy!

But AI enables internet scammers to personalize their messages. Authors—most of whom have their contact information online—have become salient targets. A scammer can set up an AI agent that scrapes book descriptions from the internet. Then the same AI can craft and send emails that seem semi-legitimate.

I was (very) briefly fooled by one such scam earlier this year. I received a Gmail message from an author in one of the genres in which I write. He claimed to have read one of my books and greatly admired it. In this case the book had been out for a while and found some readership. That was the first element of believability.

The scammer also did not purport to be Stephen King, John Grisham, or another celebrity author well known to the general public. The impersonated author had received some media attention in the United Kingdom, but would generally be unknown to American audiences or people who are not avid readers.

The email, moreover, seemed genuine. The content of the message suggested that its originator had indeed read one of my books and was at least familiar with the basics of the theme and plot.

What did I do? I replied. I thanked the author for having read my book and taking the time to send me an email. I made a vague promise to check out one of his books. I assumed that would be the end of the matter.

But then I received a reply only hours later. The slightly famous author wanted to know details about my writing process. How did I come up with my brilliant ideas, and develop them so beautifully?

At this point, my built-in BS detector went off. On a hunch, I checked the author’s website. The author maintained a blog and his most recent post indicated that someone had been impersonating him and sending out fake emails in his name. So that was that.

When authors are targeted, such frauds are usually long plays. The aim is to gain trust, and then convince the dupe to spend a large sum of money on a specious PR agency or promotional scam—which will inevitably be based in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, or South Asia.

How many authors are fooled by such scams? Well, I replied to one such email once. Spend a week in any writing forum on Facebook, and you’ll spot a post by at least one individual who declares—breathlessly and not nearly dubiously enough—that John Grisham or Stephen King has emailed them to ask them what they’re working on. I suspect that most would-be victims smell a rat before sending money. But phishing scams in general still have a success rate of 2.7 to 5 percent, according to recent statistics.

Once again, it is important to keep in mind how AI has changed the nature of scamming. It is no longer necessary for tricksters to rely on lowest-common-denominator contrivances like overseas lottery claims. A clever scammer can now personalize a phishing scam for each one of us. And with AI, he can do that at scale.

This new landscape of online fraud has affected my behavior. I don’t give my personal email address out to anyone new anymore under any circumstances. When I absolutely must give out an email address as a consumer, I use one of several throwaway accounts that I have developed and set up solely for such purposes.

The email address on my author website likewise is a throwaway account that I use as a buffer. If I determine that an email sent to this account is legitimate, I will then reply via my regular author email address. (Note: I did not reach this stage of trust with the aforementioned scammer who claimed to be the British author.)

And I haven’t even mentioned the most pernicious email scam of all. There are millions of AI agents on the internet that are trying to break into our personal email accounts every minute of every day. Their aim is to use our email accounts to gain access to our banking information. Or—in lieu of that—to use our email accounts to send out more scam emails to more unwary souls.

Which brings us to email marketing. During the initial internet boom of twenty-five years ago, an entire cottage industry developed around email marketing. The B2B and B2C online marketing spaces are filled with claims that email marketing is still just as profitable as it was in 2001 or 2005.

The writing and publishing world is filled with vendors and consultants whose business models are based on email marketing. “Build your mailing list!” they declare, as they attempt to sell you a system for luring potential readers through a labyrinthine email funnel.

If you’re selling or marketing anything legitimately, an email list is probably still worth having and maintaining. But it’s also important to realize that the online environment has changed since 2001 or 2005. I know many adults who have eliminated email entirely, relying instead on their smartphones and text messages (game-changing innovations that did not exist in 2001 or 2005) for all online communications.

When every other email message is a scam, we’re all just a lot more wary of email.

-ET

On turning 58

I write this post upon turning 58. To be precise, my 58th birthday is August 9.

This birthday marks a peculiar milestone. I have now reached an age at which I can remember my grandfather.

I passed this milestone with my father decades ago. My parents are only twenty-two years my senior, so I can remember my father at the age of twenty-nine.

But my grandfather? My grandfather was a World War II veteran who experienced the Great Depression. He was truly from a different time.

And yet… my grandfather, born in October 1921, turned 58 in October 1979. I was in the sixth grade then; but I remember late 1979 quite well.

***

This is the point where many people would suggest that fifty or perhaps even sixty (since I’m very close to that milestone too) is the new thirty—or perhaps the new forty. I’ll spare you such bravado. 60 is not the new 30 or the new 40. 60 is 60. And 58 is 58.

That said, I’m relatively fortunate insofar as my health. I’m a lifelong runner and weightlifter, and I’m in reasonably good shape. I’m not going to say that I don’t feel my age at all. But I feel it, I suspect, less than the average man my age.

***

The real problem with reaching this age is not that one feels old, but that the world feels old. I miss times that were more to my liking (even if they were less technologically convenient). I miss many people who are no longer here.

We all eventually reach the stage where the past becomes more important than the future. I suppose I have reached that point. This doesn’t imply a death wish, a state of despair, or a complete indifference to the present or the future.

It does, however, mean that I’ve become a temporal foreigner. I can operate in this era—for the most part—but if I had my choice… I would be somewhere else. Or sometime else.

I suspect that this is part of the normal process of aging. An indifference to the future prepares one for the inevitable day when one will no longer be part of the present. At 58, my journey is more than halfway over. I don’t expect to live to age 116, after all.

I’d like to stretch it out just a little bit longer. But whether that “little bit longer” means three years or 30 years, I’m already grateful. I’ve been blessed with a very good life—better than most.

Wherever you find yourself on your journey, I wish you happy trails, even though it’s my birthday we’re talking about. That’s another thing about being this old. Birthdays are kind of old hat now, too.

-ET

Vietnam Vets and Generation X

Today Vietnam vets are older men in their seventies and eighties. But when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, Vietnam vets were young middle-aged men in their thirties and forties.

When I was very young, Vietnam vets were still in their twenties. I was born in 1968, so I have no direct memories of the Vietnam War. I do, however, remember its immediate aftermath. It was a common topic of conversation in the mid-1970s. In those days, the war—as well as the political and social turmoil of the 1960s—were very much in recent memory.

Movies about the American War and Vietnam began to appear in the 1970s. These include Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter. Although Taxi Driver is not technically a movie about the Vietnam War, its central character, Travis Bickle, is a disturbed Vietnam War veteran.

And this was the common “meme,” to use an internet-age word: the disturbed Vietnam War veteran. In film and literature, Vietnam vets were often portrayed as brooding, volatile individuals.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that the American Vietnam War experience began to be portrayed with a bit more nuance. The release of the Vietnam War film Platoon, a commercial and critical success, portrayed the Vietnam War as a complex situation in which American soldiers often had to choose the least bad option. As the 1980s concluded, portrayals of Vietnam vets became far less simplistic, more diverse, and more respectful.

I would never attempt to write a novel about the Vietnam experience itself. But I did include a Vietnam vet in my Gen X coming-of-age novel, No Sure Thing. The novel is primarily the story of Paul Nelson, a 19-year-old University of Cincinnati student. But Paul’s mentor, Ron McNab, is a 42-year-old Vietnam vet. (No Sure Thing is set in 1988.)

I would describe the character of Ron McNab as half-fictional. Throughout my formative years, I met many Vietnam vets who shared their experiences with me. Several of them became an inspiration for Ron.

-ET

View NO SURE THING on Amazon

Germany banning films… again

We all know the history surrounding Nazi Germany and its authoritarian controls on popular culture. The Third Reich aggressively banned art that the Nazi Party deemed substandard, degenerate, or subversive.

But that was 90 years ago, right? Today Germany is a modern, democratic nation that isn’t afraid of free expression. Right?

Not exactly. The old authoritarian impulses still hold sway in Berlin. Last month German movie regulators refused to assign a rating to director Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante. Since it is illegal to distribute films in Germany that have not been rated, this effectively banned Citizen Vigilante from the Bundesrepublik Deutschland.

Citizen Vigilante stars Armie Hammer as Michael Sanders, a vigilante who hunts down rapists and violent criminals, many of whom are migrants from Islamic countries.

The movie is an unsubtle statement on government policies that have tolerated—and perhaps even encouraged—mass migration from the Middle East to destinations in the European Union and (to a lesser extent) North America. (Uwe Boll is a German filmmaker.)

By all accounts, Citizen Vigilante is not a pleasant film, and perhaps you could argue that it is not even a particularly good one. But if present headlines are any indication, this is a debate that is not going away anytime soon. The backlash against mass migration is not limited to the Trump-voting sectors of America. The same backlash has been building in Europe for quite some time now. The immigration issue is the primary reason for the recent successes of Germany’s right-leaning Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).

In the internet age, you simply cannot stamp out ideas. After the movie was suppressed in Germany, Elon Musk made it available for 48 hours, free of charge, on his X platform.

I didn’t hear about the movie because of Elon Musk, however. I learned of Citizen Vigilante when I read a finger-wagging article decrying the film’s very existence. It probably would have escaped my notice otherwise. That’s the irony of cancel culture: the very act of denouncing something has the unintended consequence of amplifying it.

I haven’t seen Citizen Vigilante, though I’ve seen clips of some of its most controversial scenes. By all indications, the movie is boilerplate vigilante spectacle. That’s an old genre in entertainment. It goes all the way back to the Race Williams detective stories published in Black Mask in the 1920s, when large numbers of Americans were anxious about rising crime rates. In the 1970s, it was manifest in the Death Wish vigilante films starring the already fifty-something Charles Bronson.

The notion of citizens taking the law into their own hands is an uncomfortable topic for a film. But when such movies become popular, it is usually because of some genuine grassroots frustration with the status quo. Perhaps this is the issue that the German government should really be paying attention to, rather than trying to ban what is, by all accounts, a rather mediocre movie.

Although the Third Reich ended more than eighty years ago, German authorities are still uncomfortable with the concept of unregulated speech. They are also, apparently, unfamiliar with the concept of reverse psychology.

Never before have so many movies, videos, and whatnot competed for our attention. The best way to convince people to seek out an otherwise obscure movie is for a government to declare its director a pariah and his movie verboten. Citizen Vigilante received over 10.5 million views, from all over the world, during its 48-hour free run on X.

-ET

One more American soccer fan

Soccer was regarded as a somewhat newfangled sport when I was an adolescent and teenager in the first half of the 1980s. If you were a soccer fan, people might have suspected that you were going out of your way to be different or “special”.

I once asked my uncle if he ever watched soccer. “Well,” he said wryly, “soccer might be all right if you were a European.”

I fully grasped my uncle’s sentiment, even if I didn’t entirely agree with it. In that time and place, there were only three sports that counted: football, basketball, and baseball.

I ran track and cross country in high school. While no one regarded the running sports as aberrant, no one cared much about them, either. I don’t remember many spectators at our track meets—even when our team was doing well.

My high school got its first boys’ soccer team while I was a student there. The team did quite well, as I recall, winning a state championship in 1984. This was appreciated, of course; but the soccer team still played second fiddle to the football team in the fall athletic season. No one saw this as a great injustice or irony. It was just the way things were.

Soccer has become far more popular in the four decades since then. But it has become popular primarily as a sport that Americans play—not watch. And most of the Americans who play soccer are of student age.

Consider the numbers. The Super Bowl routinely pulls in 123 million to 128 million domestic viewers in the US. Even a World Cup final match struggles to pull in half that… in the US, that is. Globally, about 1.5 to 1.8 billion people follow the World Cup. American football, by contrast, has almost no bounce beyond US borders.

I have never been much into watching other people play sports. (Another thing about the US: our passion for spectator sports has risen in proportion to our obesity rates. But that’s another essay.) My personal disinterest, coupled with my indifference to soccer as an American, prejudiced me against watching the 2026 World Cup. I wasn’t against it; I just didn’t care.

And then I started watching—just to see what all the fuss was about, at first. Somewhat against my will, I got hooked. By the final match between Spain and Argentina, I was a moderately enthusiastic World Cup fan.

I discovered that there are some things about soccer that I particularly like. For one thing, it is one of the few remaining sports that a normal-sized person can play at a professional level. Pro basketball is now a game for people who are almost seven feet tall. I’m only 5’10”. I simply can’t relate to pro basketball. But the average World Cup soccer player is very close to my height.

Soccer is a fast-moving game. This is a quality that it shares with hockey. One cannot watch a soccer game with half one’s attention. One must either focus on the game, or focus on something else. The action is simply that engrossing.

I know that some Europeans can become rabid partisans of one team or another. Riots at European soccer venues have been a well-documented phenomenon for years.

I’ll probably never attend a match in person and I’d certainly never riot over the outcome of such a contest. But by the end of the 2026 World Cup, I was enthusiastically rooting for Spain. There were too many instances of poor sportsmanship on the Argentinian side, while the Spanish team struck me as a class act.

Soccer will probably never be as popular in the USA as pro football. The NFL is simply too entrenched in the American psyche. But pro soccer now has at least one new American fan. I’ll almost certainly watch the World Cup in 2030, and probably some additional tournaments in the interim.

-ET

Daniel Ortega: history repeats itself

Which Latin American strongman was most on the mind of the American president in 1986? Daniel Ortega, the dictator of Nicaragua.

Ortega, a Marxist protégé of the USSR, ruled Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. The Reagan administration provided aid to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, often through clandestine means. This led to the infamous Iran-Contra scandal of Reagan’s second term in office.

There was talk in some quarters about direct U.S. intervention in the Latin American nation in the 1980s, though I don’t think this was ever seriously on the table.

Ortega was eventually ousted from within and found himself out of power for seventeen years, from 1990 to 2007. Then he came back into power. Ortega’s second dictatorship has lasted for almost 20 years now.

The 80-year-old Ortega has just declared that Nicaragua will no longer hold elections at all. We’re back to the 1980s.

No, I’m not about to suggest that the US should attempt to force a regime change in Nicaragua. That was a bad idea in 1986, and it’s a bad idea now. From the U.S. perspective, the situation in Nicaragua is a nuisance, not an existential threat.

But we may consider the irony. So much has changed since the mid-1980s. (To consider the matter from a personal perspective, I turned 18 in 1986, the year I graduated from high school. I will soon turn 58.)

There are, however, some constants in this ever-changing world. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

-ET

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Debbie Gibson’s bikini and social media marketing trends

Debbie Gibson has been showing up in my personal Facebook feed of late, even though I haven’t subscribed to her, and even though I’ve never been a particular devotee of her music.

This is probably because of demographics. I’m a Gen Xer in my 50s. Debbie Gibson is a pop star from the 1980s. Therefore, Meta reasons that I should be a Debbie Gibson fan.

(And just to be clear about this: I never actively disliked Debbie Gibson or her music. But I was never really part of her target audience, either. She specialized in a brand of pop love songs that were written for 14-year-old girls enduring their first serious crushes. Debbie Gibson’s breakout year was 1988. In 1988 I was a 20-year-old male.)

This morning Debbie Gibson showed up in my Facebook feed wearing a bikini. Now once again it is necessary for me to provide a disclaimer. Gibson looks damn good in her swimwear, for a woman of any age. So there’s no “body shaming” going on here.

But the economist in me has to wonder… What compels a 55-year-old woman who has been famous for 40 years to post bikini photos of herself on social media? That might make sense for an up-and-coming, wannabe social media influencer. But Debbie Gibson, who has been famous since Ronald Reagan was in the White House?

I think it might have something to do with the way media marketing has changed since the halcyon 1980s.

Forty years ago, Debbie Gibson’s marketing cycle looked something like this:

Release an album.
Record a music video.
Appear on MTV.
Do magazine interviews.
Maybe appear on television.
Disappear until the next album.

In the old days, marketing assets were expensive to produce and deliver. Barriers to entry were high. Therefore, marketing tended to occur in high-end, highly curated campaigns.

The internet and social media all but eliminated those barriers to entry. Now everyone, from your local plumber to your next-door neighbor’s daughter, can achieve more marketing presence than would have been possible for Debbie Gibson in 1987. As a result, everyone who hawks their wares online needs to market themselves like your local plumber or your next-door neighbor’s daughter.

There is nothing conspiratorial or sinister about this. Technology and economics are doing their thing.

All of this seems second-nature to anyone under the age of 30. But to those of us who can remember the previous century well, the shift in the media landscape can often be discombobulating. I wonder if Debbie Gibson would agree.

-ET