SNNAFU
A Roundup of Good News
Bad things tend to dominate commentary on the news, causing us to miss the continued reality of human progress. So I have promised to pause occasionally and put together a brief roundup of good news.
A lot of that good news is about science and technology—there is some mixed news from the “year of elections,” but that’s another roundup—but I can’t pass up mentioning one other big story: the US cricket team’s surprise win over Pakistan. I don’t know much about cricket, but I’ve read the British newspapers enough to know that Pakistan is one of the world’s top teams, so I have an idea how big this is.
CNN tries to explain it to Americans by comparing it to the Miracle on Ice, the surprise American win over the Russians at the 1980 Olympics.
Call it the Miracle on Grass.
A national cricket team that most Americans didn’t even know they had beat one of the sport’s global powers Pakistan, for whom the game is a national obsession….
Cricket briefly flickered into US consciousness as the result popped up on news sites in a rare moment for a sport that lives in obscurity in the United States outside the South Asian and Caribbean communities.
“Beating Pakistan in the World Cup is going to open many doors for us,” said USA Cricket captain Monank Patel in Texas, where the game took place in a converted minor league baseball park.
Corey Anderson, who represented New Zealand internationally and now plays for the US team, told CNN he got hundreds of text messages after the win. “It’s probably shocked the cricketing world,” said the 33-year-old who has an American wife and kids.
This report includes a brief explainer of how the game of cricket works—and, well, it almost made sense. I’ll keep working at it.
I just wrote a draft on this for Discourse making the argument that if America can win at cricket, a game vanishingly few of us even understand, then we can win at anything. And the key to this, as the excerpt above indicates, is being willing to import talent—such as the Indian, Caribbean, and other Anglosphere immigrants who make up the US cricket team.
I’ll post that piece when it goes up.
Situation Normal: We Think It’s All Fouled Up
One of our biases toward disaster and apocalypse is that we tend to pay a lot of attention to problems when they are problems—but the moment something ceases to be a crisis, the moment it returns to normal, it drops out of the news and is forgotten. We remember it only as a problem and not as a solution.
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