Monoculture is a concept describing a society in which everyone — or at least a large plurality — shares common interests. America once had one in spades. People stopped on the street to watch the “Seinfeld” finale being broadcast in Times Square. Over half of the entire country watched the final episode of “M.A.S.H.”

And, of course, there were sports. America’s two most popular sporting leagues, Major League Baseball and the National Football League, once dominated their respective halves of the year. At one time, almost 60% of American households watched World Series games.

But now that’s changing. And while determinists may argue that it was an inevitability that some sports may wax or wane in popularity, they did not have to. They are being killed.

It is difficult — even borderline impossible — to watch some teams’ games.

In the late 1950s, football teams had a problem. The NFL instituted a blackout policy, banning games from being broadcast if they did not sell enough stadium tickets ahead of time. This was done to aid teams from smaller cities, which depended upon revenue from ticket sales and could have potentially failed without that income.

But the Supreme Court ruled that the NFL — in determining which teams’ games could be broadcast — was running afoul of the law. So the league turned to Congress and President John F. Kennedy, who in 1961 passed and signed the Sports Broadcasting Act.

The SBA gave antitrust exemptions to the four major American sporting leagues — the NFL, MLB, the National Hockey League, and the National Basketball Association — when it came to the pooling of telecasting rights of their games

With their exemptions secured, the leagues proceeded to enforce strict exclusivity policies, giving the rights to the games to certain stations in certain circumstances. This system worked for a while, but it began to break down in the age of cable television, when certain games were essentially placed behind paywalls, a practice that has intensified in the streaming era.

This development has been a boon to the major leagues, which have made billions in sales of exclusive games. Amazon paid about $1 billion per year for “Thursday Night Football,” and MLB makes at least $800 million from its exclusives.

For the fans, however, it has been a disaster.

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Now, “Thursday Night Football” belongs to Amazon Prime when outside a local region. The same situation occurs with key Christmas Day games, which can be found on Netflix. ESPN likewise has exclusive rights, some of which are broadcast on YouTube and others on Netflix. Certain nationally broadcast games are not available on local TV.

MLB’s blackout policies have produced even more confusion for viewers. It is difficult — even borderline impossible — to watch some teams’ games. Atlanta Braves fans, for example, were in recent years instructed on how to watch their team’s games on Gray-owned broadcast stations, but Gray only hosted 15 games out of MLB’s 162-game season. Watching all 162 could cost hundreds of dollars.

Some MLB fans are even worse off. The state of Iowa, for example, is “blacked out” from viewership of six different nearby teams, leaving fans unable to watch a given game unless they have access to a specific package.

Obviously, viewers hate this. Polling has found that over 70% of sports fans want games to be broadcast for free locally, and the National Association of Broadcasters has called for Congress to consider changing the Sports Broadcasting Act.

While changes to the Kennedy-era law are overdue, there is reason to believe that the law as written does not allow the leagues to act as they have. The text of the law covers professional sporting leagues that engage in “sponsored telecasting of the games.” Telecasting is a specific form of transmission and arguably does not include broadcasts over the internet.

Some may point out that laws written in an older time can apply to newer technologies, but that’s not at issue here. The First Amendment, for example, covers speech said over television or the phone — but that is because it is still speech. If the SBA had covered only broadcasting, the leagues would potentially have an out. But it doesn’t.

The Trump administration is already taking action on this front. The Federal Communications Commission asked for comments on the state of sports broadcasting earlier this year, and the Department of Justice has opened an antitrust probe into both the NFL and MLB.

These investigations could end up being long-running and likely will require both Congress and the courts to act. Americans should urge all three branches of government to take action and cut through the broadcasting web to save the last element of America’s monoculture.

A recent viral essay from the New Yorker details the virtual market lock Google and other AI companies have quietly, some might say underhandedly, gained on the coveted and highly vulnerable K-8 public school population.

While we’re watching oil prices, the border invasion, and trying to feed our families, Big Tech is already fully insinuated into the school system — via long-standing, highly corrupt but technically legal arrangements between corporate-industrial capital and the U.S. Department of Education.

John Taylor Gatto, the legendary New York schoolteacher, best-selling author, and titan in the struggle for human dignity, once warned, “Schools were designed … to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.”

Lifelong customers are tough to create, unless you indoctrinate them.

He was correct, of course. And so the penetration of AI and Big Tech into public schools shouldn’t be a surprise. Rather, it is inevitable — as AI and Big Tech share many of these original ideas related to the management of human beings via cybernetics and technocracy. It’s almost as if the captive audience of young children was put into place to wait for the final insinuation of ultimate control through dumbing-down technology.

Consider the experience recounted in the New Yorker by writer Jessica Winter, a mother herself: “Students at my eleven-year-old daughter’s public middle school began receiving new Google Chromebooks, and that is when I heard the tap-tap of the cloven hooves approaching our doorstep. The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: ‘Help me write.’ If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is ‘Help me visualize.’”

Lifelong customers are tough to create, unless you indoctrinate them at the most vulnerable and malleable stages of their lives. As our expectations have fallen concerning our social arrangements, companies like Google or Anthropic, in partnership with, say, Microsoft, are building a long play. They’re capturing the brand allegiance, building familiarity, and establishing “relationships” early — investments that will extend throughout life.

“No single company has a monopoly on A.I. in K-8 education,” Winter observes. But Google, thanks to its Chromebook, is well on the way.

“A report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group noted that, by the last quarter of 2020, year-on-year sales of the device were up by 287%,” reports Winter. “In a national survey conducted by the Times last November, about 80% of K-12 teachers said that their districts use Chromebooks, which has created a vast captive market for Gemini and helped make A.I. in schools a near-universal prospect.”

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One senses a strange respect for the business acumen of these market virtuosos. After all, it wasn’t long ago that their “progressive” bona fides and “good person” ethos were fully accredited by the country’s all-too-well-established elite institutions. Those old habits and expectations die hard. But today the emerging picture concerning AI-forward Big Tech and our children’s minds, to say nothing of our own dwindling capacities, still remains too “conspiratorial” for most of the mass media apparatus.

However gingerly, Winter tiptoes toward the truth. She flags a new MIT study that concludes “the integration of LLMs into learning environments may inadvertently contribute to cognitive atrophy.” But again: Winter notes the study’s timid authors “appended an FAQ to the paper with instructions on how to discuss its findings,” begging readers not to use “the words like ‘stupid,’ ‘dumb,’ ‘brain rot,’ ‘harm,’ ‘damage,’ ‘brain damage,’ ‘passivity,’ ‘trimming,’ and so on.”

Even if we didn’t have countless studies decrying the potential and proven deleterious effects of AI — on adults! — we should, and could if we wanted, simply sit back and apply Gatto’s observations and warnings to the manner in which tax schemes and kickbacks have deluged the classroom with digital technology that seems built more to impair than inspire.

It isn’t at all up for debate as to whether the U.S. education system was purposely built to serve the needs of industrial capital for docile and compliant workers. We could, I suppose, debate the ethics of that government-corporate merger. But it has long been in effect.

What may still be debatable is whether we, as a people — we American are still a coherent people, right? — wish to radically amplify the depth and scope of that docility. The perverse logic at work in the unified sectors of American education, finance, technology, and government is geared for deeply anti-human outcomes. And those fed into the gears at a young enough age will never know any better.

Recently, I wrote about my cancer diagnosis. In the aftermath of that ordeal, I finally scheduled something I had put off too long: a colonoscopy. It had been 11 years since my last one.

Part of that gap was due to neglect, I suppose. But much of it came from the reality of caregiving. Over the last six years alone, my wife and I have spent nearly 12 months in hospitals. The stretches at home often felt like military logistics.

And since we live about 60 miles from the nearest facility performing colonoscopies, scheduling one is not exactly like stopping by the barbershop.

Truthfully, I was nervous. Not panicked, but uneasy enough to want reassurance that this was one area of my body not planning an uprising. Once you hear the word “cancer,” your imagination suddenly takes on a full-time job.

When we learn to steward our bodies and hearts well, it often spills into our finances, our work, our relationships, and the way we carry responsibility itself.

So there I sat in the curtained pre-op area waiting for the doctor.

As I watched, the curtain beside me kept shifting while he searched for the opening. A hand appeared, disappeared, then the curtain moved again.

After decades of hospitals and surgeries with my wife, I’ve learned something important: If you lose your sense of humor in these places, the fluorescent lighting wins.

So when the doctor finally stepped through the curtain, I said to him in my best Roy D. Mercer impression:

“Look a here … if you’re havin’ a hard time finding the hole in the curtain, I’m a little concerned about you rootin’ around where you’re about to go.”

He burst out laughing and sheepishly assured me he knew exactly what he was doing. A few minutes later, they wheeled me toward the procedure room.

As we rolled through the doors, I gave the Mercer impression another go:

“Ahhright then … y’all gonna get to the bottom of this now. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.”

Then, just before they put me under, the doctor answered in his best Larry the Cable Guy voice:

“Let’s get ’er done!”

My last thought before going to sleep was: “How reassuring.”

Thankfully, the procedure went well. I’m good for several more years. I’ve seen moments like that one in hospital rooms, waiting areas, funeral homes, and around kitchen tables where exhausted families carried burdens they never imagined carrying.

Two weeks before the colonoscopy, I was playing the piano for the funeral of a beloved pastor here in Montana. The sanctuary was heavy with grief. Then, while adjusting my music, my sleeve caught the piano lid.

Apparently, the thing had been engineered by the same people who design bear traps. The lid slammed shut with a crack loud enough to wake the dead, which, considering the setting, felt especially unfortunate. The whole congregation jumped. Then, they laughed while I turned the color of a stop sign. And for just a few seconds, in the middle of grief, people breathed again. Not because suffering is funny, but because despair is heavy, and laughter gives weary people enough strength to pick the load back up.

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Somewhere along the way, we started confusing seriousness with rigidity. We became suspicious of humor in hard moments, as if laughter dishonors grief.

I don’t believe that. The older I get, the more I believe humor can be an act of stewardship rather than denial.

It’s not pretending things don’t hurt or making light of tragedy. Just refusing to surrender every corner of the heart to darkness.

Hospitals have a way of distilling what matters. Sitting in waiting rooms, hearing monitors beep through the night, or listening to the wheels of a gurney rattle down a hallway strips away much of the endless noise masquerading as importance in our culture.

You start remembering what matters.

A friend recently asked how I’m approaching decisions about my cancer treatment. My answer was simple: Stewardship will drive this decision. Thankfully, we caught my cancer early enough that I have options. That didn’t happen through panic. It happened through paying attention.

Caregivers are notorious for postponing their own health while tending to everyone else. I’ve certainly done my share of that over the years. But healthy caregivers make better caregivers. Screenings matter, rest is important, and laughter is essential from time to time.

Stewardship rarely stays confined to one corner of life. When we learn to steward our bodies and hearts well, it often spills into our finances, our work, our relationships, and the way we carry responsibility itself.

In a culture consumed with debt, rancor, fraud, and endless outrage, the problems can feel too large and tangled to fix.

But perhaps stewardship still begins the same way it always has: with individuals willing to accept responsibility for what’s right in front of them.

This include our health, families, work, and our other obligations.

Healthy cultures are built the same way healthy lives are: one act of stewardship at a time.

The University of the Philippines bucked a slow start to complete an 82-78 win over University of Santo Tomas in the opener of its title defense bid at the 2026 Filoil EcoOil Preseason Cup on Sunday.

Tension gripped the Senate this week as reports spread that authorities were preparing to arrest Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa over an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant tied to the Duterte administration’s anti-drug campaign.

A driver of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) who was arrested following a shooting incident at the Senate has tested positive for gunpowder residue, the Southern Police District (SPD) said on Sunday night.

Over P526 million worth of illicit foreign-brand cigarettes were seized after the Philippine Navy recently foiled two separate smuggling attempts in Western Mindanao.

Novaliches Bishop Teodoro Bacani on Sunday reminded senators they are there to serve the people of the Philippines and not a specific individual.

A bus conductor was injured after a passenger bus crashed into concrete barriers along a portion of the EDSA Busway near the MRT-3 Kamuning Station in Quezon City on Sunday.

Poland’s military guards its Belarus border against what officials call a Russian-backed hybrid warfare campaign using migrants to destabilize NATO.