Protestors burn transit stations in Madagascar capital; is American frustration so different?

Protests over lack of water and electricity turned violent late last week in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, and the government responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and a curfew.

(UPDATE, Oct. 14, 2025: Madagascar President Rajoelina has fled the country, and the military has assumed control of government, purporting alliance with protestors.)

I know about the crisis because of friends with family there. I have not seen the story on American TV, which I mention with anxiety over endangered media heterogeneity. You can read more about the protests at, e.g., Reuters (UK), TRT Afrika (Turkey), RFI (France), WION (India), Al Jazeera (Qatar), and if you dig for it, the AP (US).

I was in Antananarivo, known locally as "Tana," in July. The people there could not have been more gracious and welcoming.

At the same time, socioeconomic tension was plain. That's not unusual in African cities, but in Tana, by plain, I mean that there were troubling and unavoidably visible signs of increasingly worrisome economic inequality. 

Antananarivo, Madagascar, July 2025
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

A Tale of Two Cities

Tana from the Radisson gym.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

I used the nicely equipped gym on the eighth floor of the Radisson Blu Hotel in Tana. The room has floor-to-ceiling windows that afford a view of the city from the treadmills. But if one looks straight down from the windows, immediately adjacent to the hotel, there is a residential warren of ramshackle homes. Children play on clay paths between crumbling walls and an open sewer. The neighborhood is right behind a concentration of auto shops, noxious with exhaust and dribbling out the toxic effluents of their work.

Shanty town and auto district adjacent to Radisson. A cable-car line is visible on the horizon.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

In contrast, the Radisson itself is part of a small swanky village that boasts a grocery store, theater, cafes, and gift shops. The village is enclosed by high walls with only one road in from the auto-shop strip. At night, a massive steel door rolls shut to seal off the Radisson village. 

The scene is reminiscent of the fictional town of Woodbury in The Walking Dead, fortified against an incongruent dystopia. Though to reiterate, here, in real life, the souls outside the wall are good people trying to make ends meet. As the sun sets, all but a few local people evacuate the commercial village before the door closes, and then they flow back in with the light of dawn.

Kids play beside a drainage canal behind the Radisson.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Even the walled Radisson village, anyway, is not immune from Tana's socioeconomic troubles, because the utility infrastructure is the same, inside and out. The tap water is not recommended for drinking, and power outages are frequent, if usually short.

Malagasy people generally don't have freezers and shop daily for produce. The cost of appliances would be manageable for many. But the problem would remain the power grid, which is not sufficiently reliable, even in the city, to make home refrigeration cost effective. When the power goes out, most of Tana life hums on without interruption. But the outages paralyze places such as the Radisson village, where devices from refrigerators to televisions to elevators are essential to business.

In bizarre juxtaposition with the motley cityscape, wires are strung across Tana's skies, visible from anywhere. The wires reach from tower to tower and occasionally dip groundward into modern multistory buildings of metal and brick. This is Tana's brand new cable-car system.

I was not surprised to read that protestors last week set fire to "several" of the cable-car stations.

Madagascar and the Monorail 

A cable-car line fills the sky behind the Tana train station.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

 

The motivation for building the cable-car system was ostensibly sound. Tana is plagued by jammed traffic, which is impeding economic development. One of the reasons people crowd into the tight and unsanitary living quarters of the inner city is that they could not otherwise reach their jobs if they moved to better accommodation on the outskirts.

The cable-car lines promise to soar over the cars and trucks, moving people into and out of the city with quiet efficiency. The lines also are built to reach less developed surrounding areas, rather than tracking the congested main highway, thus inducing new suburbs to bloom and alleviating the crisis of housing, besides transportation.

One doesn't have to look hard at the plan, though, to doubt its cost-benefit analysis. To start with, the road congestion is a function of infrastructure failure as much as volume. Though there are some recently constructed traffic circles, most roads are unmarked by lanes, and most city intersections are chaotic tangles with no right of way indicated by signs or signal lights.

One wonders that infrastructure money might have been spent better to bring the existing potholed road system up to standard before stringing cables over head between shiny stations.

Cable cars hang motionless over Tana in July.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Then there are the cable cars themselves. The first time a friend and I had a look at them, I couldn't help but say aloud, "That wreaks of kickback." My friend agreed. We both thought immediately of "Marge vs. The Monorail."

The 198 gondola cars can hold only 12 passengers each and move only so fast. The system is designed to move daily 75,000 people and replace 2,000 cars on the road. That's not nothing, but also not a big chunk of potential commuters relative to the city's population of 3 million. And if one figures that growing suburbs will attract more people to Tana from impoverished parts of the country, the problem of induced demand is compounded.

Though cable cars are touted as a potential boon for urban development, they work best as a discrete-route solution for particular hurdles, such as topography, and as a complement, not a substitute, for proven mass transit systems such as busses and rail cars, both lacking in Tana. A "bus system" exists only insofar as terribly overcrowded minibuses barrel along customary routes. Limited inter-city locomotives rumble over dilapidated tracks.

Is There a Hyena in the Debt Trap? 

It's unclear from government reporting just how much the cable-car system cost Madagascar, but it's a lot. The price tag was supposed to be €152 million. The French government loaned the country €28 from the French treasury and arranged for the rest by private loan from Société Générale. Malagasy voters were not happy about the indebtedness. Moreover, Madagascar committed to fund any cost overruns. Some reports say that the French loans wound up covering only one of the two system lines.

The government's revenue basis to fund cost overruns and pay back the loans also is shaky. Malagasy people have balked at the cost of tickets on the cable-car system, which range from about €0.65 to €1.1. That might be low by western standards, but it's a lot locally. Daily round trips add up to at least €32 per month in a country where the monthly living wage is only €126, and €85 marks the low end of actual-wage estimates.

President Andry Rajoelina, 2019
(ILO via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The government has not been forthcoming with data about the project, and no wonder. Malagasy-French businessman Andry Rajoelina has been president since 2019 and held out a technological solution to Tana's legendary traffic woes as a showpiece project. 

Rajoelina's vision has been slow to come to fruition. Plans were sidetracked initially by the pandemic. The French money came only in 2021, and construction began in 2022, with delivery promised in two years. In 2024, the Rajoelina administration inaugurated the cable-car system amid much fanfare and worldwide press. But the system wasn't actually finished then, and operational opening was postponed to 2025. 

On my last day in Tana in July 2025, the cable cars moved, surprising everyone on the ground. The system was not yet open, but was being tested. Buckets of water were loaded into cars to simulate the weight of passengers. The system finally opened in August.

The worst public relations challenge the cable-car system has posed to the Rajoelina administration to date is not its ultimate efficacy, but simply the foreboding physical presence of the empty gondolas hanging motionless over the city. When people are stuck in traffic, or when the power goes out, or when they leave their homes in search of drinkable water, they look up at the network of towers and heavy wires and wonder whether any of that debt and spending will make their lives better.

Don't Look Up 

I'm sometimes guilty myself of a siloed focus on American affairs. And thinking about what's happening in Madagascar makes me wonder whether—when?—the day will come that Americans turn our frustrations into conflagration.

America feels every day less a "developed" country in terms of critical needs such as transportation, healthcare, housing, and jobs. And people struggle more every day to make ends meet, while politicians bellyache over the government supposedly doing too much.

An anecdotal survey: 

Transportation. To travel for work, I have to make the arduous, two-plus-hour trek to the airport via foot, bus, train, and bus again, across slow, unconnected, and overpriced transit systems that my region is lucky to have at all. When I land in Europe, I'll travel about the same distance with one ticket on a rapid, unified transit system in under an hour.

Amtrak is hard at work on "NextGen Acela." But it will only serve the northeast corridor and will top out at 160 mph. Europe hit that mark in the 1970s with trains today running in the 190s. China and Japan have high-speed trains on dedicated lines running at 220 mph. Anyway, "old gen" Acela was a corporate subsidy, as it practically priced out non-business travelers, even before Amtrak introduced predatory dynamic pricing. 

Healthcare. My wife and I saw Trevor Noah deliver his latest stand-up in Connecticut a couple of weeks ago, and he did a long bit on the nonsensical costs and bureaucracies that tyrannize patients in the U.S. healthcare system. Noah was treated for a wrist injury he sustained just before boarding a plane home to New York from his native South Africa. He could have been treated faster and for less out of pocket had he just flown back to a hospital in Cape Town, he only half-joked. 

A Connecticut stage awaits Trevor Noah on September 18.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Most memorable about Noah's monolog to me, besides his trademark storytelling brilliance, was the chorus of audible vocalizations of assent and empathy from the audience, including us, as Noah described the absurdities of hospital billing, from the mysteries of bloated pricing—weren't we promised "No Surprises"?—and picayune itemization of the mundane to the unashamed prioritization of profit over care.

Housing and jobs. My daughter bought a home in Los Angeles this year and has done yeoman, Instagram-hit renovation work herself. But she's looking for a new job to make the mortgage bearable. From her scores of applications, she recently rated an interview in her entertainment-industry wheelhouse. Yet she was one of 54 people interviewed for one low-level position. A form email later communicated regret that she was among the hundreds of unsuccessful applicants. Every American job-seeker knows such woes amid the full-time job of looking for a job, despite the touting of low unemployment by the administrations of both parties.

A measure of wealth inequality, the U.S. gini coefficient was 41.8 in 2025, on a scale from 0, perfect equality, to perfect inequality 100, according to World Population Review (WPR). That's bad for a well developed economy, comparing unfavorably with, for example, western European countries, which score in the low 30s, and Canada, at 29.9. Worse, inequality in the United States is rising over the long term, while it's falling elsewhere.

Our number is, however, on par with Madagascar. Malagasy data are difficult to come by, but WPR estimates a 2025 gini coefficient of 42.5, also on the rise over the long term.

The gini coefficient is a ratio, so it doesn't speak to comparable sums. People in a poorly developed economy might be quicker to disrupt the status quo when their very survival is on the line than people in a highly developed economy who become unable to afford cable TV. 

At the same time, Americans have a temperamental sensitivity to injustice and, even after 250 years, little patience for tyranny.

History is littered with great societies befelled by their own greedy elites.

Let's laugh at them, not with them: Klobuchar cites serious stats, but occasions levity in Jackson hearing

On day 2 of the Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) borrowed a joke from The Daily Show's Trevor Noah.

Klobuchar remarked on the significance of a woman taking a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court to attain a 5-4 gender balance for the first time.  Of 115 confirmed justices in American history, Klobuchar counted, 110 have been men.  Klobuchar said that she had "reminded" Trevor Noah on The Daily Show of similar statistics relative to service in the U.S. Senate: "Of the nearly 2,000 people who have served, only 58 have been women.  And he responded that if a night club had numbers that bad, they'd shut it down."  Here's the 38-second clip:

It was Noah who actually quoted the Senate statistic from a book, Nevertheless, We Persisted (2018), an anthology for which Klobuchar wrote a foreword and which she touted at the time. Noah followed up, "I've been to gay clubs that have better ratios of men to women."  Klobuchar took the occasion in 2018 to speak against the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, pending at the time.  She put the appearance on Facebook.

Klobuchar appeared on The Daily Show also in 2017 and in 2019, the latter while running for President.  But none of those appearances marks the funniest intersection of Klobuchar and Noah in popular culture.  That honor goes to a 2019 tweet by Noah in which he lampooned Klobuchar for overusing a joke on the campaign trail.

Amy Klobuchar has a joke she'd like you to hear pic.twitter.com/5mh5IQepva

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) September 6, 2019

Senators' interrogations of Jackson on Tuesday and Wednesday this week were at times cringeworthy, to use my wife's word.  In particular, the questioning by Senators Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) were difficult to endure; even National Review Senior Fellow Andrew C. McCarthy, who opposes Jackson's appointment on other grounds, described Hawley's attack as "meritless."  The affair rubs in for me David Brooks's recent lament in The Atlantic on the divide between today's rabid right and the meritorious social value of genuine conservatism.

Both Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah are off this week, so between the stresses of a contentious Senate hearing and the ongoing war in Ukraine, I am sorely missing my daily doses of escapist levity. Fortunately, The Daily Show's Desi Lydic deposited a dose of satire on the web for us; don't miss it.

Breyer's tastiest torts, Disney's perspective problem play Paramount late night with Colbert, Noah

Late Show monolog mock-up

On Wednesday, Paramount's late-night television kindly obliged my classroom teaching with two legal references, one fit for my Wednesday torts class, and another for my Thursday comparative law class.

First, a gift for Torts II students, from Stephen Colbert: In a monolog on the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, Colbert on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert played on the word "torts" to joke about Justice Breyer's stated intention to refine his cooking skills in retirement.  "From Torts to Tarts," Colbert said (cue 2:31), suggesting a name and mock cover for a forthcoming Supreme Cookbook.

The U.S. Supreme Court of course does not often deal directly with torts, or civil wrongs, which are mostly matters of state law in the United States.  It's often a source of misunderstanding for foreign lawyers and new American law students who must learn that SCOTUS is not "the highest court in the land" (even besides that one) when it comes to torts.

 

That said, a good deal of tort law finds its way to the federal high court on all kinds of paths.  Federal courts routinely apply state law in multi-district litigation, including mass tort claims, and in matters involving both federal and state claims.  State tort claims can become mixed with federal questions in problems of constitutional defenses and preemption.  Federal "common law" persists in places of original federal jurisdiction, as in maritime matters.  And the trial of civil wrongs recognized in federal law, such as civil rights, can borrow the "machinery" of state tort law, both procedural, as in application of a statute of limitations, and substantive, as in apprehension of proximate causation.

For Law360, Emily Field and Y. Peter Kang yesterday detailed six must-know Breyer opinions in product and personal injury liability.  These are their six cases (with links to Oyez), which they flesh out in the article (subscription required). 

• Due process / civil procedure / personal jurisdiction: J. McIntyre Machinery, Ltd. v. Nicastro (U.S. 2011), denying state personal jurisdiction for less than minimum contact by British machine manufacturer that marketed its product in United States (Breyer, J., concurring, joined by Alito, J., in plurality opinion of Kennedy, J., in 6-3 decision)
• Due process / punitive damages / product liability: Philip Morris USA v. Williams (U.S. 2007), holding that federal constitutional due process precludes a state punitive damages award predicated on injury inflicted on non-parties, i.e., even like injury on persons like the plaintiff, but not before the court (Breyer, J., for the 5-4 majority, joined by Roberts, C.J., and Alito, Kennedy, and Souter, JJ.).
• Preemption / product liability / warning defect: Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Albrecht (U.S. 2019), holding that FDA regulatory decision might or might not preempt state warning defect claim, and question is one of law for the court (Breyer, J., for the majority, in part unanimous, in part 6-3, joined by Ginsburg, Gorsuch, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Thomas, JJ.).
  
• Preemption / product liability / design defect: Williamson v. Mazda Motor of Am., Inc. (U.S. 2011), holding that flexible federal regulatory standard did not preempt state claim against automaker (Breyer, J., unanimous decision).
• Evidence / experts: Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael (U.S. 1999), extending test for admissibility of scientific evidence to other technical expertise (Breyer, J., unanimous decision).
• Arbitration / class action: Green Tree Financial Corp. v. Bazzle (U.S. 2003), leaving to arbitrator to decide whether to permit class action when arbitration agreement was silent on the question (Breyer, J., for a plurality, 5-4 decision, joined by Ginsburg, Scalia, and Souter, JJ., and Stevens, J., concurring).

The article is Emily Field & Y. Peter Kang, 6 Breyer Product, Personal Injury Opinions Attys
Should Know, Law360 (Jan. 27, 2022) (subscription required). 

Second, a gift for Comparative Law students, from Trevor Noah: On The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Noah reported on actor Peter Dinklage's criticism of Disney's planned live-action reboot of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937).  There have been other versions; the story is derived from fairy tales that were included in the first Grimms' in 1812.  Dinklage, who has dwarfism, wondered at the inconsistent wokeness of casting Latina actress Rachel Zegler as the lead, while continuing to work with a story about "seven dwarves living in a cave."

While acknowledging Dinklage's objection as legitimate, Noah admitted, "I've never watched Snow White and found the dwarves offensive.  All right?  But I do understand what he's talking about.  I genuinely do.  Because if that movie was called 'Snow White and the Seven Blacks,' I mean, that would be weird."

Noah's take nicely illustrates one dimension of the perspective problem in social research, and it's especially salient in comparative law.  Like Noah, I never thought about the seven dwarves as an insulting characterization of people with dwarfism.  But after hearing Dinklage's perspective from within the dwarfism community, I can perform a "mental rotation" (to use the psych term) and empathize.

The problem when researching law and society in an unfamiliar context, whether it's a shared physical condition, a religion, or a political state, is that my perspective is shaped by my own limited experience in ways that I might not even be conscious of.  The perspective problem can never be entirely eliminated in social research, but it can be mitigated.  It's helpful to think consciously about one's perspective to gain some cognizance of the limitations of one's research.

As to the Seven Dwarves of fairy-tale fame, Disney announced that it is "taking a different approach with these seven characters and ha[s] been consulting with members of the dwarfism community."  I look forward to what creative minds will yield.

Incidentally, in the same Daily Show, Noah did an excellent piece on insider trading in Congress.  Just last week I noted a publication on the subject by Spencer K. Schneider, a former teaching assistant of mine.  I added a video embed from Comedy Central to the bottom of that post.

Glued hair precipitates lawsuit talk, problem of liability exposure when products are misused

Trevor Noah and Dulcé Sloan had some fun on The Daily Show this week with TikToker Tessica Brown, who is considering suit against Gorilla Glue after using it on her hair sent her to the hospital.

I have some Gorilla Glue right on my desk.  I love the stuff, except how it hardens in the bottle before I can use it all, an apparently intractable malady of super glues.  I got out my reading glasses, and the tiny print on mine says:

WARNING: BONDS SKIN INSTANTLY.  EYE AND SKIN IRRITANT.  MAY PRODUCE ALLERGIC REACTION BY SKIN CONTACT.  Do not swallow.  Do not get in eyes.  Do not get on skin or clothing.  Do not breathe in fumes.  KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN.  Wear safety glasses and chemical resistant gloves.  Contains ethyl cyanoacrylate.  FIRST AID TREATMENT: If swallowed, call a Poison Control Center or doctor immediately.  Eyelid bonding: see a doctor.  Skin binding: soak skin in water and call a Poison Control Center.  Do not force apart. For medical emergencies only, call 800-....

 Image by RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-SA 4.0
with no claim to underlying content

No mention of hair, so I guess the warning label will have to be longer now.  The hair incident prompted a Twitter response from Gorilla Glue, lamenting the misuse and wishing Brown well.

Whether and when to acknowledge an unapproved use of a product always has been an intriguing problem in the practice of product liability defense.  Foreseeability is a key part of the product liability test in many states, so a maker with actual knowledge of an off-label use is sometimes wrangled into having to warn against the absurd.  That leads to some funny results, as evidenced by the label collection that my friend Prof. Andrew McClurg has maintained since before the internet was a thing, now a feature on his legal humor website.

In the analog days, a sharply worded letter might have been an adequate response to the customer who wrote in with helpful intention to suggest how effective oven cleaner might be for mole removal.  Woe be to the product maker whose goods turned up in a book such as Uncommon Uses for Common Household Products, which taught people how to MacGyver products to exceed their design intentions.  (And there's a small but fascinating sub-genre of publisher-defense cases at the intersection of product liability and First Amendment law.)  At that point, it was time to update the warning label, if not issue an affirmative press release, because it would no longer be plausible to argue lack of foreseeability to a jury.  The anticipatory defense would have to shift focus to other theories, such as unavoidable dangerousness and consumer responsibility.

The democratization of mass communication through the internet and social media has accelerated the timeline.  So now we see quick responses to individual incidents, such as Gorilla Glue's on Twitter.

The instant case is not firmly in the genre of unintended uses, because Brown intended at least to use the glue for its adhesive property.  Still, I'll go out on a reasonably secure limb and say that any lawsuit arising from the instant incident, at least upon the facts as reported so far, would be frivolous.  More likely, the TikToker in question has accomplished her mission by being the talk of the electronic town.

UPDATE, Feb. 13, 2021: Princess Weekes at The Mary Sue cautions us not to be manipulated by defense tort reformers into too readily siding against Brown, like in the Hot Coffee case.  I don't think I've been so co-opted, but such an admonition is always well advised.

Ciao and shalom, it's Columbus Day

It was painful and offensive to me to see the Columbus statue in Baltimore ripped down and thrown into the harbor on the Fourth of July.

I appreciated Trevor Noah's Daily Show commentary on Columbus Day, aired last week, because he recognized the meaning of the holiday to the Italian-American community.

Noah excerpted a Vox video (story), from 2018, which gave a good concise summary of how the Columbus holiday came to be.

The video describes "the legend of Columbus," and it is a legend.  Italian-American immigrants, such as my grandparents, came to embrace a legendary Columbus who bore little resemblance to the real historical figure.  Which is not to say that the legend lacked real meaning for real people.  There was a time when Italian-Americans were a "non-white" minority in America, Noah acknowledged.  The community reached out to adopt, and partly to create, a galvanizing icon.  

I studied Columbus quite a bit as an undergrad majoring in Spanish-language literature during the quincentenary of "the Discovery."  As best as we can know Columbus, which is not much, given a paucity of surviving and conflicting accounts, the truth must be that he was complicated.  People are.  He had a multiplicity of motives, some more morally laudable than others.  And probably he wasn't the sweetest sort of guy.  Crossing the Atlantic Ocean with a potentially mutinous crew of adventurers in 1492 was a rugged business, if not recklessly suicidal.  But Columbus did not invent Euro-centrism, Caucasian supremacy, or slavery.  The cultural arrogances and inhumane institutions of the 15th century were certain to encircle the globe aboard every ship that departed the continent.

Columbus statue (Brent Moore CC BY 2.0)

So my family, arriving in America in the 20th century, embraced a legend.  It wasn't a terrible choice of legend.  The first Italians to populate Baltimore sailed from Genoa, which is where Columbus probably was from.  My grandparents, who also came to America by boat, from Tuscany, revered Columbus well before the dedication of his Little Italy statue in 1984.  Through their Italian-American organizations, they contributed to the creation of the statue, which was made of marble and crafted by an Italian sculptor.  President Reagan and the mayor of Baltimore dedicated the statue in Baltimore's Little Italy, where my family first lived after immigrating.  When I was a kid, I was taken to Little Italy when my family volunteered and participated in religious rites and Italian-American festivals.  Later, and for many years, my uncle played the character of Columbus in Baltimore's Columbus Day parade, which started and ended at the Columbus statue.  I remember him decked out in cartoonish royal robes, standing atop a float mock-up of the Santa Maria, waving to smiling people, of all colors, who lined the streets.  

He stopped when it became dangerous to be Columbus.  Dangerous to celebrate our history in America, however reimagined and romanticized.

I'm not opposed to taking down statues of Columbus.  I've advocated for "fallen monument" parks, as abound in former Soviet states, Hungary's being the most well known.  They're immeasurably valuable to teach history.  They proffer powerful evidence that, try as we might to be good and to do right, morality has proven a stubbornly mutable ambition in the human experience.  

But taking down Columbus in Little Italy should have been a decision made by a cross-section of community stakeholders, not by a mob.  An effort had been under way in the Italian-American community already to raise money to move Columbus elsewhere.  The mayor of Baltimore promised prosecution of the vandals on July 9, but I've found no report of any arrest or charge to date.  The Italian-Americans who contribute still, vitally, to Baltimore's identity deserve better.  They deserve respect, right alongside every other community that has built Baltimore as a vibrant and diverse city.

As Noah observed, American history is now populated by many Italian-Americans who don't need aggrandizing legends to demonstrate greatness.  It's not too late to create the commission that should have been and to start talking about how to honor immigrant history and the City of Baltimore at the intersection of Eastern Avenue and President Street.  I don't know who, or what, might, or should, stand in "Columbus" square.  I do believe that if we work at it, we can find, or make, an icon that my grandparents would have appreciated, and at the same time raise a testament to a new story.

Ted Lasso heads to UK, will coach AFC Richmond

From The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (Oct. 6, 2020)

A new Apple TV+ show has Saturday Night Live alum Jason Sudekis playing southern-drawl-wielding American football coach "Ted Lasso," as he is recruited to coach an English Premier League (PL) soccer squad.

Lasso's fictitious team in the Ted Lasso comedy series is "AFC Richmond," but Sudekis wore an authentic Manchester City FC (my team) hoodie for his interview with Trevor Noah on last night's Daily Show.

Financially regrettably, this show compels my wife and me to re-subscribe to Apple TV+.  We shelved the channel, pending new content, after we finished the highly gratifying For All Mankind (blog), and after I finished the sufficiently compelling if after all tritely pedantic Morning Show (both shows 2019, second seasons forthcoming).

Ted Lasso is a co-creation of Scrubs (2001-2010) creator Bill Lawrence, which scores dispositively in my playbook, though I don't think Lawrence has since re-created that Scrubs magic.  Ted Lasso is a spin-off, or spin-up, of NBC Sports promotional shorts imagining Lasso's appointment as head coach of Tottenhan Hotspur.

 

Incidentally, I'm a consistent critic of NBC's intellectual-property monopoly over PL broadcast rights in the United States.  NBC carves up the PL season so that one would have to subscribe to an impossible, and impossibly expensive, range of commonly owned services to follow a favorite team.  Americans would never tolerate such exploitation of American football broadcast rights.  NBC and the PL are greedily short-sighted, because inculcating loyalty to a single side is essential to sell British soccer to the American viewer in the long term.  It remains to be seen how UK regulators would react were NBC, since merging with Sky, to dare to try such such shenanigans there, where team loyalty is a multi-generational sacrament.  Other sports-loving countries won't have it.

Sports comedy is supremely watchable when it's well executed.  I thoroughly enjoyed Hank Azaria's Brockmire (2017-2020), though I have not watched baseball in many years.  And who can forget comedy-drama Sports Night (1998-2000)?  The West Wing (1999-2006) is too often credited for Aaron Sorkin's introduction of fast cuts and fast-paced dialog into small-screen canon, but it was on Sports Night that he pioneered the art.

The Sudekis interview appeared on The Daily Show just a day after Trevor Noah opened with some Premier League humor (cue to 1:13), noting Aston Villa's defeat of both Manchester United and Liverpool, the latter 7-2.  Noah is a Liverpool supporter.

Here is the trailer for Ted Lasso.

Remembering 'very unique,' 'extremely historic,' pre- post-literate politics

Comedic media have recently lampooned with delight the President's sing-song description of litigation over the "national emergency" at the border.  (My favorites are Trevor Noah's "Guitar Hero" take and Stephen Colbert's "Torah reading."  Jake Tapper told Colbert aptly that Trump's description might actually prove correct.)  Then Bernie Sanders entered the race and admonished media that if his ideas were once fringe, they are no more.  Access to higher education always has been a key part of his platform.

This confluence of events made me nostalgic for the quixotic character of the savant President Bartlett of The West Wing (1999-2006).  To be clear, this is not a political statement: I'm not condemning Trump, nor endorsing Bernie, nor, least of all, saying anything about the politics of Martin Sheen, Rob Lowe, and Allison Janney.  I just wanted for a moment to set politics aside and revel in the appeal of a President who appreciates good writing and the power of language.  So I looked up this video introduction to West Wing season 2, episode 9, "Galileo V," aired November 29, 2000—ten months before September 11.  O simpler times and innocent idealism.

Hat tip to Kayla Venckauskas, UMass Law '19—editor-in-chief of the UMass Law Review, 2018 Rappaport Fellow, ALDF scholarship winner, and survivor extraordinaire of my 1L Torts class—for reminding me of this gem.  (If any of my media law colleagues still want to jump into this year's Law and Media Symposium on March 28, get in touch ASAP, and I'll do my best to hook you up.)