It may be 64 years after the New York Mets losing 120 baseball matches in their debut season led manager Casey Stengel to plead “Can’t anyone here play this game?” Yet The Wall Street Journal columnist William A. Galston notes that the same question could still apply to another “two monumentally inept teams.”

He doesn’t have in mind the Chicago White Sox, whose 121-loss season in 2024 led first-year Met Ed Kranepool to confess to the Journal that  “I feel sorry for them,” or the Colorado Rockies beating the equally longstanding Mets record for rock-bottom run differential last year.  Instead, Galston has in mind the Democrats and Republicans, “Capitol Hill’s Unlovable Losers” (May 27).

Less than two full years after the 2024 presidential election, Galston has merely to nod at the former party’s abject failure to learn from their loss, and the latter’s squandering of what little momentum remains from their win. UCLA School of Law professor Stephen Bainbridge adds: “at least we’re better off than the UK, which has about half-a-dozen incompetent teams.”

The iconic cinematic line from WarGames about it being “a strange game” if logic dictates that “the only winning move is not to play” applies not only to nuclear war, but the nuclear-option scorched-earth tactics that increasingly dominate electoral and cultural wars. While the suggested alternative of “a nice game of chess” offers at least a level playing field and an even chance to win — and even the most underdog of sports teams at least have some real if slim possibility of an upset — all-encompassing politicization fares even worse than such comparison implies.

After all, the psychological investment into two-sided competitive games isn’t quite as zero-sum as the scoring suggests. John Astin’s Dr. Gangreen in the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes animated episode “The Great Tomato Wars” finds “the agony of defeat” to be as appealing as “the thrill of victory” — as he also puts it: “I hate ties! I like winners and losers” — and one need not go that far to appreciate a well-played contest. Affairs of state divert resources from win-win voluntary deals to sports arenas whose business doesn’t need them to earn consumer dollars, and other battlegrounds where the vintage 2004 Alien vs. Predator tagline “whoever wins … we lose.” perpetually applies to a closer-to-home species of space invaders.

For a less unlovable political loser, Galston could have turned to Jimmy Breslin, the author of a book about the 1962 Mets named after Stengel’s remark. While Kranepool helped take his team from last place to triumph in the 1969 World Series, Breslin finished in penultimate place as Norman Mailer’s running mate for NYC mayor.

Observing that “the last thing that New York can afford at this time is a politician thinking in normal politicians’ terms,” Breslin offered not just a long-shot chance of change at the top (Mailer optimistically estimated a chance of winning the race around 5%) but the promise of moving much of daily life to local community decision-making by neighbors — and so out of the control of elected, and unelected, officials entirely.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In the months leading up to the USA’s 250th birthday party, some debris from its 200th is making headlines.

The New York Times‘s Jennifer Schuessler finds conspicuously “much less investment and enthusiasm overall” for this year’s semiquincentennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence than the 1976 bicentennial, itself diminished by jaded jeers charging that “‘Buy-centennial’ huckersterism had sold out the true radical spirit of ’76” (“How a Historian Saved the Schlock of ’76,” May 5).

Schuessler chronicles plenty of “hats, mugs, playing cards and pickleball paddles” currently being hawked under the aegis of Donald Trump, but compared to such bicentennial-branded excrescences of “unapologetic 1976-style schlock” as toilet paper, diapers and condoms, even the output of a coauthor of Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life can be described on the pages of the Gray Lady as “tasteful.”

Yale University’s library includes a permanent panorama of such effluent ephemera thanks to State University of New York academic Jesse Lemisch, who preserved what he predicted would become “a deeply embarrassing heritage for 2076.”  Schuessler explains how Lemisch drew a stark contrast between the actually existing capitalism of ’76 and “the ‘arrogant nationalism and elitism’ of the 1950s that historians, like the nation itself, were already leaving behind.”

Lemisch confronted “the historical profession’s complacent, complicit relationship with American power” as early as a 1967 analysis of the American Revolution, “a genuinely democratic uprising driven by the aspirations of the artisan and working classes, which were ultimately thwarted by wealthy elites.”  That viewpoint was “particularly recommended” in the newsletter The Libertarian, whose “Washington Editor,” Karl Hess, was on the path that led to his interview in the July 1976 issue of Playboy (which highlighted his observation that “The Declaration of Independence is so lucid we’re afraid of it today … because it tells us there comes a time when we must stop taking orders”).

Yet even back then, Lemisch suspected that efforts at “replacing elite history with a history of ‘average people'” had, in shifting emphasis from the halls of power to the market square, “merely traded in the heroes of politics for the heroes of business.” So it was not completely out of character for him to see the spirit of 1976 as one that “floated down from above, and responded to no popular longing to celebrate the Bicentennial,” despite Schuessler noting that voting with dollars for “Patriotic Dixie cups and cereal boxes might seem to epitomize the kind of populist ‘history from below’ that Lemisch championed” (less than a month after Mekado Murphy has written in the Times that relics of Rocky‘s bicentennial bout “are as essential to Philadelphia tourism as the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall”).

One replica of the Declaration from the Me Decade, a freebie for Fourth of July grocery shopper Michael Hart, might have made the perfect bit of decorative detritus for Lemisch — if Hart hadn’t instead typed up the text, immortalizing it as the first entry of his Project Gutenberg collection (he would oversee it growing into an online library tens of thousands strong).  In 1971, one of the few files starting to spread as widely on nascent computer networks was a popular Star Trek game by Mike Mayfield.

The utopian universe whose tricky traders rarely “wear red, white and blue, or look anything like Uncle Sam” (as surmised in the 1987 episode “The Last Outpost”) ironically also provided inspiration to the patriotic Objectivist Hart. Times obituary author William Grimes described Hart’s eBook giveaways as aiming to prefigure a Trek-like “age of universal abundance,” one which would upend “all established power structures” and  “challenge the entire social and economic system of the United States.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Half a century is plenty of time for an Apple to stay fresh, or to rot.

The New York Times‘s Kalley Huang (“For Employee No. 8, Many Changes in Apple’s 50-Year History,” April 2) traces the evolution of Apple Inc. from a “scrappy start-up that assembled computers by hand” — and whose organic name was a natural fit for an environment in which “Silicon Valley’s fruit orchards hadn’t yet been taken over by office parks” — to one which “has come to define how to be a global technology company.”

In a 2014 Bloomberg interview, Steve Wozniak recalled how he had “given away my designs for the Apple-1 for free,” leaving it to Steve Jobs to take projects the other Steve had “designed for fun” (while being “totally aware that a revolution was close to starting”) and “somehow turn them into some money for both of us.” The sum of their money would become so enormous that Chris Espinosa, who admits that having “had no college degree and … only worked at one company” since 1976 doesn’t sound like much of a résumé, owns what Huang estimates is well over $100 million worth of the corporation that makes a thousandfold of that in profit every year.

Craig Newmark’s op-ed “Craigslist Made Me Rich. Giving the Money Away is Easy” might have included Espinosa as evidence for how “making money isn’t proof to me that I know something any better than someone else” but of being “in the right place, at the right time” to apply common sense to a new field, if it hadn’t gone to print in the same day’s edition of The New York Times.  Newmark doesn’t propose any political program, keeping his distance even from any endorsement of “left-wing nonprofits” and instead promoting such voluntary philanthropic efforts as the Giving Pledge. Still, the public souring on the information industry, as captured by such titles as Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus and Tripp Mickle’s After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul, might seem the inevitable result of it enabling such outsized yet largely fortuitous accumulations in the first place.

The Giving Pledge cofounder Bill Gates owes much of his fortune to emulating Apple. The video game Halo was first showcased at MacWorld by Jobs before it became an exclusive killer app for Microsoft’s Xbox. Gates’s Windows operating system tapped the talent of Macintosh’s iconic icon designer Susan Kare. And yet the broader impact of Apple’s innovations is hardly confined to such sheerly financial windfalls.

This is not just because Apple efforts like the HyperCard which made creating and viewing multimedia straightforward, the Pippin which brought built-in Internet access to a video game console, and the Newton which pioneered the personal digital assistant were influential on later developments without managing to become profitable products for them or anyone else.

Indeed, much of the creativity that spread from Apple’s roots in Cupertino, California to cyberspace is closer in spirit to Wozniak than Jobs. It was entirely typical for Stephen D. Young and Debra Willrett’s Backgammon, programmed for the Apple Macintosh in the same non-Orwellian year 1984 during which the desktop model was introduced, to give out a postal address for users who “enjoy it and would like to see more ‘freeware'” to “please send whatever you think it’s worth” … and permission for them to disseminate the software itself.

Huang notes that Apple’s current survival requires not just satisfying customers but withstanding “tariff whiplash, antitrust scrutiny and geopolitical turmoil.”  Consumer sovereignty and cooperative networking can tame such seemingly relentless forces — and make the fruits of tech’s golden geese as common as dirt.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Guest Column: The age of the Gilded Apple” by Joel Schlosberg, The Elizabethton, Tennessee Star, April 7, 2026
2. “The Age of the Gilded Apple” by Josh Schlossberg [sic], CounterPunch, April 10, 2026