I can’t remember the first time I heard the expression “what a year last week was,” but it seems truer by the hour—and this was a holiday-shortened workweek! In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes boldly predicted that by now, we’d all be working just 15 hours a week. But given the intensity of the insanity of the news lately, I’d settle for 15 hours a day in a dark room.
I’m Nick Gillespie, editor at large at Reason and occasional contributor to The Free Press, subbing in for Nellie Bowles, who may or may not be taking the day off to interview for a better-paying job aboard the Long Island Rail Road, which would allow her to work remotely with unlimited personal days while earning six figures in overtime alone. As some of you may know, I’m libertarian and, as I cautioned at The Free Press debate on immigration in 2024 with Ann Coulter, Sohrab Ahmari, and Cenk Uygur (more on him in a moment!), that usually means people think I’m mostly going to talk about drugs and economics. Which I am!—I just want to give fair warning. If that’s not your thing, don’t worry, Nellie will be back next week. And if you can’t wait that long, head over to the Free Press Forum at 2:30 p.m. ET today, where Nellie will answer all your questions in a subscriber AMA.
→ Remember, kids: Real winners don’t use drugs!: It’s officially summer, and all kinds of sports events—the Indy 500! Baseball! The NHL playoffs!—are breaking out all over the place like prickly heat rashes. The upcoming NBA Finals will pit either the San Antonio Spurs or the Oklahoma City Thunder against the New York Knicks, who haven’t won a championship since 1973, when the team included future senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ), nicknamed “Dollar Bill” partly because he was a “famously frugal” cheapskate despite having signed one of the fattest NBA contracts of the era. Regardless of who the Knicks face, they are a lock, since Chicago-born Pope Leo blessed their victory.
The week’s greatest (read: saddest) sports story comes from the Enhanced Games, a new Vegas-based competition showcasing athletes openly using steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs), and vowing to crush records in marquee events like the 100-meter dash and the 100-meter freestyle swim. Interestingly, a competitor who vowed he’d “juice to the gills” performed worse than he did when he couldn’t use drugs. Even more embarrassing: The 50-meter backstroke winner was a non-enhanced athlete, thus, writes James Dator for SB Nation, “tearing apart the entire premise for the games.” All told, one world record was beaten while three unenhanced athletes won their events. It’s a victory for man over pharma.
Here’s the upshot: PEDs are not magic potions that will automatically create a race of super-athletes. They are one technology among many—including space-age fabrics for uniforms, weight-training and other practice regimens, diet and nutrition, surgeries on tendons and ligaments, and over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs—that can help world-class athletes improve their performances (often by speeding up recovery times). We should have more honest and open conversations about them in sports and regular life, but all the PEDs in the world aren’t going to make just anyone the Lance Armstrong of accounting, let alone cycling.
The biggest loser at the Enhanced Games wasn’t an athlete, though. It was Donald Trump Jr., who was among the high-profile funders of the games, and whose parent company’s stock tanked after the middling results. That may not even be the worst recent loss for Don Jr., whose father played the ultimate trump card to get out of going to an undesired destination wedding. I, too, might be tempted to start a war to avoid going to a rehearsal dinner where Don Jr.’s college buddies toast him. While the president swore he really, really wanted to go to the Bahamas to celebrate his son’s merger with “socialite” Bettina Anderson—with a name like that, I should hope you’re a socialite—he just had too much work to catch up on. “I feel it is important for me to remain in Washington, D.C., at the White House during this important period of time,” he wrote on Truth Social.
