Who’s the Madonna of 2026? Turns out: Madonna. America experiences ritual humiliation via soccer game. A spirited defense of getting married at MSG.
POP GIRLIES
Madonna’s Confessions II Might Make You Weep on the Dance Floor
Get into the groove, then get out the tissues.
Craig Jenkins agrees with me and all the strict old gays: Madonna’s new album is good. And it’s not just danceable; it’s also deep. Calling in all of us who have ever described ourselves as “not religious but definitely, like, spiritual”: remember how Ray of Light made you feel? This is like that.
The nightcap for this dance party of an album takes an honest look at the unforeseen pitfalls and points where success was not a certainty. “Fragile” threads conversations about family and failure into one of the artist’s most personal songs to date. It’s an ode to Christopher Ciccone, Madonna’s younger brother, who had an at times very difficult relationship with his sister before they reconnected ahead of his death in 2024. She wrote it near the end of his battle with cancer. Mortality is an ever-present undercurrent in discourse about Madonna in her late 60s, in which people groan that it’s sad if she posts a risqué photo as if there’s an age when a person should stop feeling great in their body. “Fragile” dismisses a fear of the grave in a voice-over from the singer stating that the end of life is just a “portal we’re going through.”
Sorry to be sentimental on main, but the idea that we live on through the lives we’ve touched really gets me.
SPORTS
How the U.S. Men’s Soccer Team Went From Underdogs to Villains
Add another item to the list of “metaphors for America’s decline.”
The story of the USMNT is, as Will Leitch tells it, profound and oddly poignant. They made it further in the World Cup championship than anyone had dreamed they could, but then Trump bent the rules to intervene on behalf of an ousted player and suddenly their opponents weren’t just playing to win — they were playing to defend the integrity of the whole sport, or maybe the whole world. Of course the U.S. lost.
The USMNT, as I have written for many years, is what Americans always consider themselves to be but never actually are: scrappy underdogs. On the world stage, they’re the perpetually undermanned, outgunned but improving team that is on its way up, a growth stock that’s worth getting in on the ground floor for. It’s a team, as we’ve seen throughout the tournament, that’s extremely likable and potentially ready to take its next step forward. But with one shocking reversal on Sunday — one that had a lot more people around the world talking about the integrity of global football and FIFA than just Belgium’s coach — that all turned around on them: They were the enemies, the bad guys … the empire. The U.S. team was not ready for that. Not many would be.
It was immediately obvious. (A friend joked that the first ten minutes of play felt achingly similar to the first ten minutes of watching Joe Biden on the debate stage two years ago. It was clear we were well and truly fucked.)
Uh-oh! Once again, America is clearly not the victim in the drama being described.
TAYVIS
Taylor Getting Married at MSG: Good, Actually!
The controversial venue was the only responsible and ethical choice.
Hear Zach Schiffman out: He spent his weekend sweltering outside Madison Square Garden creating content, and he knows whereof he speaks.
To get a brief respite from the heat, I went to the second floor of Roberta’s at One Penn Plaza to see what I could of the venue itself. Looking at the pink curtains draping the sixth floor of MSG, where cocktail hour allegedly took place, I saw the lipstick-on-a-pig nature of the wedding firsthand — the pipe and drape hardly looked gorgeous or intimate from the outside. It was obvious that it required a tremendous production to transform the arena into the couple’s alleged castle-in-a-forest setting. But thanks to the nature of the venue itself, no one was concerned about the aftermath. If Swift had chosen other rumored venues like the Met, the Cloisters, or Governor’s Island, there would have been plenty of chatter about the need to protect these historic sites from whatever horrors a massive wedding like this would entail. Dua Lipa and Callum Turner’s recent Palermo nuptials have already sparked controversy for turning a historic site into a theme park, and that party had only 300 guests. Imagine the potential destruction of a Taylor Swift wedding at some remote Italian island or medieval chapel. MSG? No one made a peep.
MSG is also easy to get to and relatively easy to escape from, which are not things you can say about Rhode Island.
Click Your Way Out
Take a peek inside Audrey Gelman’s garden-shed home office in Hudson.
For a small designer, creating a viral bedazzled Labubu was both great and terrible.
An evisceration of Dalkey Archive Press covers, which is so niche but also so hilarious.
Effective-altruism advisers are scheming about how to get that Anthropic money.
Graham Platner situation updates.
The Biebers’ new West Village apartment is bland but very practical in terms of security and such.
Everybody get up and dance!