Cartoon by Joe Dator. For more: http://nyr.kr/17JBKpO

In preparation for attending Tuesday’s World Cup qualifier between Mexico and the United States, I was ordered to be discreet. The game was being played in Mexico City, at Estadio Azteca, in front of more than a hundred thousand Mexican soccer fans, so I shouldn’t wear red, white, and blue. My haircut, I was told by a Mexican acquaintance, was too American, so she recommended a hat. Walking into the stadium we saw a bus of American supporters being guarded by a line of police. My pants were hanging low, because belts were not allowed inside. “That way you can’t hit someone with it, and your fists are busy hiking your trousers up,“ a British expat living in Mexico City speculated…

Reeves Wiedeman on how to survive a soccer game at Estadio Azteca: http://nyr.kr/14rtxGK

Soccer fans at Azteca Stadium in Mexico City during a match between the U.S. and Mexico on Tuesday. Photo by Hector Vivas/LatinContent/Getty Images.

In this week’s issue, Ryan Lizza examines the Republican Party’s problem attracting minority voters, specifically Hispanics, through the efforts and concerns of the G.O.P. in Texas, “the largest and most important state in the Republican firmament.” Lizza talks to Ted Cruz, the Hispanic senator-elect from Texas, about the future of his party in the state, and, ultimately, the nation. “If Republicans do not do better in the Hispanic community, in a few short years Republicans will no longer be the majority party in our state,” Cruz tells Lizza. And, “in not too many years, Texas could switch from being all Republican to all Democrat. If that happens, no Republican will ever again win the White House … If Texas is bright blue, you can’t get to two-seventy electoral votes. The Republican Party would cease to exist.” 

Continue reading.

“The surprise hit of the London Games? Apparently, it is public transportation.” Lauren Collins on Olympians underground: http://nyr.kr/Ml6l4w 

(Photograph via Instagram).

Katia Bachko, “Why I Wish the Russian Gymnasts Had Won”: http://nyr.kr/QqFtjq

I don’t root for the Russians out of any sense of ancestral loyalty. For me, it’s all in the ballet…

Photograph by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images.

Gil Blank photographs fireworks at municipal displays, where he “can record single bursts being detonated at a time.” He then isolates the explosion, replaces the night sky with a flat black background, and surrounds the image with a wide white border, “like a specimen on a slide.” Sometimes he combines bursts from different places and different nights into a single image. “The images are perfectly factual—the explosions did in fact happen—but not necessarily the way you see them,” he writes. “The compounding and suturing process of which is, in any event, much more akin to memory anyway. You weren’t there—you didn’t see these particular fireworks—but none of that matters, because the subject is still immediately identifiable in that generically yearning way as a plausible placeholder for those non-existent memories.” Blank’s work is currently included in a group exhibition Endless Bummer / Surf Elsewhere at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles.

In the spirit of Independence Day, click-through for a selection of contemporary images inspired by Fourth of July festivities: http://nyr.kr/c3pGBN

Evening the Odds; Is there a politics of inequality?

Traditionally, class figured less in politics in America than in most other Western countries, supposedly because the United States, though more economically unequal, and rougher in tone, was more socially equal, more diverse, more democratic, and better at giving ordinary people the opportunity to rise. That’s what Alexis de Tocqueville found in the eighteen-thirties, and the argument has had staying power. It has also been wearing thin. During the five decades from 1930 to 1980, economic inequality decreased significantly, without imperilling “American exceptionalism.” So it’s especially hard to put a good face on the way inequality has soared in the decades since. Even if you think that all a good society requires is—according to the debatable conservative mantra—equal opportunity for every citizen, you ought to be a little shaken right now. Opportunity is increasingly tied to education, and educational performance is tied to income and wealth. When it comes to social mobility between generations, the United States ranks near the bottom of developed nations.

- In this week’s issue, Nicholas Lemann writes about Timothy Noah, Charles Murray, and America’s inequality: http://nyr.kr/JdmNNt

Why Are So Many Americans Single?

Few things are less welcome today than protracted solitude—a life style that, for many people, has the taint of loserdom and brings to mind such characters as Ted Kaczynski and Shrek. Does aloneness deserve a less untoward image? Aside from monastic seclusion, which is just another way of being together, it is hard to come up with a solitary life that doesn’t invite pity, or an enviable loner who’s not cheating the rules. (Even Henry David Thoreau, for all his bluster about solitude, ambled regularly into Concord for his mother’s cooking and the local bars.) Meanwhile, the culture’s data pool is filled with evidence of virtuous togetherness. “The Brady Bunch.” The March on Washington. The Yankees, in 2009. Alone, we’re told, is where you end up when these enterprises go south.

And yet the reputation of modern solitude is puzzling, because the traits enabling a solitary life—financial stability, spiritual autonomy, the wherewithal to buy more dishwashing detergent when the box runs out—are those our culture prizes. Plus, recent demographic shifts suggest that aloneness, far from fading out in our connected age, is on its way in. In 1950, four million people in this country lived alone. These days, there are almost eight times as many, thirty-one million. Americans are getting married later than ever (the average age of first marriage for men is twenty-eight), and bailing on domestic life with alacrity (half of modern unions are expected to end in divorce). Today, more than fifty per cent of U.S. residents are single, nearly a third of all households have just one resident, and five million adults younger than thirty-five live alone. This may or may not prove a useful thing to know on certain Saturday nights.