With all apologies to David Lynch, in “That Thing You Do!” the film isn’t the thing.

Tom Hanks’ directorial debut, which was released to critical praise but was a box office disappointment, doesn’t hinge on the charming, passable performances of its lead actors. It doesn’t get by on its script, which tells the story of an out-of-nowhere rock ‘n roll band and their earworm of a hit song. Written by Hanks, the screenplay is so thin that the star lists out the stock types of each character in the third act. It definitely doesn’t get by on studio glitz; even if the production team did a bang-up job of recreating the early 1960s, they can’t get around the fact that much of this movie is set in a dreary Erie, Pennsylvania. Whether “That Thing You Do!” works for audiences — and the cozy, quick story of a flash-in-the-pan band has resonated with a ton of people since its release in 1996 — depends entirely on if the title song lands. 

Credit for that has to go to Adam Schlesinger, the late pop-rocker and bassist for Fountains of Wayne who wrote the track with nothing more than the film’s title and a few hints at the story. He needed to recreate the sound of the thousands of teenagers who had their heads rearranged by The Beatles and immediately ran to their garages to pick up guitars — and he nailed the teenybopper perfectionism of early Lennon-McCartney joints. The song’s backbeat is crisp. The bassline struts. The emotions are big, dumb and messy, but no one told that to the harmonies. Even the brief imitation of Lennon’s “losing control” scream is laser-precise, meant to boost the song’s momentum and carry it through a cheery and lazy surf solo. Give it a listen; it sounds like it was written by committee and by four bored teens in equal measure. It’s lightning. 

“That Thing You Do!” had to be that good, because no fictional rock band has ever leaned harder on their hit. The film follows the whirlwind, two-month career of The Wonders, a group so replacement-level that we first meet them arguing over “The” band names that are already taken. Drummer Guy Patterson (Tom Everett Scott) is the star of the film but the bassist joining him in the rhythm section, played in the film by Ethan Embry, doesn’t even have a name. (He’s listed as T.B. Player in the credits.) With lead singer Jimmy Mattingly III (Johnathon Schaech) and guitarist Lenny Haise (Steve Zahn) out in front, they go from local sensation to Billboard chart-toppers in weeks and implode just as spectacularly. Across that timespan, the audience is treated to “That Thing You Do!” in part or in full eight times, once every 13 minutes. Whether that’s the result of a threadbare script or just Hanks knowing what he had is up to the viewer to decide. What’s certain is that “Thing” never gets old.

Unlike The Wonders, Schlesinger’s ability to write a world-beating earworm was no fluke. He pulled off that trick multiple times. Just give a listen to “Pretend to Be Nice” from 2001’s “Josie and the Pussycats.” He’s the pen behind 2005’s “Just the Girl” by the Click Five, which laid a mall-emo whine and reverb-heavy drums over The Wonders’ tried and true formula. If you’ve heard of Schlesinger at all — and aren’t a power-pop geek or a “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” superfan — it was likely through his band Fountains of Wayne and their 2003 hit “Stacy’s Mom.” Though that’s not his band’s best — that honor goes to “Radiation Vibe” or “All Kinds of Time” depending on the mood — it’s more proof that Schlesinger had a direct line to the idealized past in his brain. He could channel an undeniable pop hit out of that ether whenever he wanted.  

Talent like his is in short supply in 2026, especially after Schlesinger himself passed away in 2020. Watching “That Thing You Do!” climbing the charts throughout the movie is a peek into an alien musical world, one that was both more regional and more monocultural than the one we inhabit today. 

The song starts as a word-of-mouth sensation, filling a local restaurant as more and more teenagers hear about this new band and their soon-to-be hit from their friends. They press vinyl to sell at shows, and it gets into the hands of disc jockeys at ever-larger radio stations with an increasing number of watts behind their broadcasts. A labelman, played with equal parts tenderness and sleaze by Hanks, swoops in to take the boys on a tour of state fairs. When the song outgrows the blue-ribbon crowd, they’re flown to Los Angeles for one nationally televised performance before falling out in a bit of dressing room melodrama. 

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The Wonders’ origins and skyrocketing fame built by the ability to press a record locally and impress radio programmers who curated their playlists by hand, are practically a fantasy in the consolidated media landscape of today. The idea of one song taking hold among the entire nation’s teenagers is even more ridiculous now that streaming has fractured the musical monoculture. Global connection came with a kind of dispersion, diluting shared connections closer to home while allowing for worldwide discovery.

For proof, just look at the (Wonder-less) Billboard charts today. Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” just broke the record for most weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100. Meanwhile, the chorus of people who claim to have never heard the song grows louder every single day. The debate whether this is a mark of country music classism rages in the pages of the Rolling Stone, itself a bit of a relic from those more culturally unified days. 

“That Thing You Do!” hides its nugget of pop music consensus inside another bygone bit of shared culture: the afternoon cable movie. These easy lifts don’t ask you to think too much. They get in and out in under two hours, often starting as minor hits that become part of the cultural fabric through repetition; they’re on in the background and there when you need them. Films like “That Thing You Do!” are neither notable nor offensive to the typical viewer, and they never make you wonder “Who is this for?” If that question was ever asked, the answer is simple. It’s delivered in three-part harmony in the opening seconds of The Wonder’s lone pseudo-hit, gorgeous and unmissable. 

Who wants to listen to this Beatles pastiche, dreamed up to get Tom Hanks’ film studio off the ground? You.

The post At 30, “That Thing You Do!” is the perfect fake one-hit wonder appeared first on Salon.com.

I couldn’t help but notice some people on social media dunking on a post from @nicksaraev, a self-described entrepreneur helper, who boldly proclaimed on X a few days ago: “I am not joking when I say this. Spotify, Apple Music, and streaming in general is over. AI music is now very, very good. You just don’t know yet because all AI music circulating today is from ~2-3 generations ago. Suno v6 pro et al has solved infinite personalized music.” He followed it up with “Yes, this probably hurts your feelings. It’s still going to happen.”

While my feelings are unhurt, and I don’t really know what “infinite personalized music” means or how it could be “solved,” at the same time, I can easily guess what is implied here and I don’t actually want to know more. As one Bluesky user observed, the inherent idea here comes “when you have no concept of how people engage with music.”

Nonetheless, we don’t seem able to escape this trend. I have a friend who has, on a few occasions, sent me AI-generated raps with his name or a joke inserted as the lyrics. They can be technically proficient, maybe even a little funny, but there is always an underlying cadence of the uncanny valley that I still doubt Suno v6 pro et al. or whatever has totally overcome. Please don’t send me examples; I actually don’t care. It’s not that I’m offended by the idea of generated art; it’s just that it bores me. I’m having plenty of fun engaging with music made with human ears, hands and minds.

Way back in the Bush II and Obama years, I volunteered at my college radio station in the Music Procurement Department or whatever it was called. Our job was to sort through the massive mailer box of padded envelopes and bubble mailers that came in from record labels, big, small and in-between. It was like Christmas every Wednesday afternoon as we shredded packages and stacked CDs, occasional stickers and vinyl, splitting the spoils and loading them into our computers — by hand even! We made notes about what should get added to the radio catalog as fodder for our aspiring DJs — and what should get chucked out or given away for free at radio events.

If we didn’t already know the band, the way we chose which albums to review was often based on cover art, the promo materials we skimmed, or a sticker on the front that read RIYL: Recommended If You Like. Almost every artist would put something like “RIYL: Jay-Z, Radiohead, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Talking Heads.” Sure, totally random indie label from Seattle, all of your bands sound exactly like Nirvana. It could be a pretty boring, sometimes horrifying process — I’ll never forget the thrash metal song we received about Shannen Doherty that sounded like it was recorded in a blender. I still can’t get over the inane lyrics: “Shannen Doherty, Shannen Doherty / You’re in my head. Shannen Doherty, Shannen Doherty / I like bread.” I wish I were making this up.

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But the crate digging, which I also did in physical record stores, was always worth it when you found your new favorite band or heard the summer’s hit track long before any of your friends. I was introduced to so many artists, many of whom I still turn to today. Hot Chip, Sea Wolf, Fleet Foxes, to name a few. It taught me to always give music a chance, no matter how ugly the art or how crusty the jewel case. Usually, you can listen to the song up to when the vocals kick in before giving up or listening longer. By then, you usually know if you’re gonna hate it or not.

I still devour new music this way, clocking a daily average of four hours of tunes familiar and novel. It helps me write and focus and relax and otherwise temper my mood throughout the day. I’m always looking for new artists to try. And I hope I always consume — I hate that word, but there it is — music this way, instead of becoming a curmudgeon who only appreciates the tunes from their youth and thinks anything modern is trash. If you think that, you aren’t digging deep enough. 

The only thing I can think of that’s worse than getting stuck on Greatest Hits or Top 40 is pushing a button and generating “infinite personalized music” with no human influence. It bores the sh*t out of me. It’s not just the lack of discovery, though that is critical, maybe because it scratches those deep primal hunter/gatherer itches. It’s more about the lack of anything personal behind the music. No history, no struggle, no catharsis, no exploration, no humanity. I listen to music because it’s flawed, raw and human, not just noise to fill my day. I have no doubt AI music will keep improving, at least to a point, but I predict few people who actually love music are going to listen that way because it has lost its essence.

Yes, I have streamed plenty of AI music on YouTube, often unintentionally when the vaporwave or atmospheric DnB mix I’m vibing to autoplays some slop channel. I can almost always tell when it’s generated. There’s a flatness, like an echo of a song you heard a long time ago, something better. It puts me to sleep and I inevitably switch it off. Maybe it’s gotten better lately. But I still think I’d notice. At any rate, I’d never seek it out.

As a child I was once gifted a “custom” cassette tape with songs “written for me.” Every single track on the album was centered around “Troy,” with my name mentioned as often as possible. I listened to that thing over and over again, until I spilled a bottle of soap in my tape deck and ruined it. But anyway, none of the songs were actually produced with me in mind. It was made by a company called Kidselebration that in 1986 made “personalized” cassette tapes like these for a whole boatload of names. The songs never changed, someone just dubbed in a different name into the song for Kyle, Sarah, Robert, etc. I can’t imagine how much friggin’ work this must have been before Pro Tools, but it was probably just the ‘80s equivalent of a lot of cut-and-paste.

You can listen to the one for “Jessica” here if you really want to. Every time they say “Insert Name,” it sounds totally awkward and weird. But even as a kid, I suspected on some level that this tape wasn’t really for me specifically. Something always felt off. If infinite personalized AI music doesn’t give people the same vibe, maybe they’re not listening hard enough. And please, don’t send me your robot music. Send me anything else.

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I suppose a Richard Nixon revival was inevitable. After all, the 37th president was the modern model of the corrupt, abusive presidency that is currently being perfected by Donald Trump and his corrupt administration. In fact, much of the legal theory of the unitary executive under which the current administration operates sprang from the bowels of right-wing think tanks smarting from Nixon’s fall from grace. 

Many of the norms, rules and laws that governed the executive branch until Trump and his loyalists systematically threw them in the White House dumpster originated in the aftermath of Watergate, so reimagining Nixon as the first victim of the so-called deep state serves as a perfect rationale for what is happening today. For conservatives, the long-awaited historical payback has finally come.

In July, the Wall Street Journal reported that Nixon is suddenly all the rage among young conservatives who are “Nixonmaxxing” all over social media and sporting merch with sayings like “Nixon now, more than ever” and “Pretty girls for Nixon.” One young fan mused, “Is Nixon pulling off the greatest posthumous political comeback in history?” 

Maybe so. This new interest among the Gen Z crowd is actually a well-designed public relations campaign by The Nixon Foundation, which used social media in 2018 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his presidency. Short-form videos featuring Nixon saying “I am not a crook” over gangster rap, along with clips from “Mad Men” showing Jon Hamm-as-Don Draper saying, “Kennedy, I see a silver spoon, Nixon, I see myself,” went viral. 

But the fandom is more than just vibes. Podcasters like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson have both recently called Watergate a setup, never mind the evidence or admissions by Nixon’s accomplices like H.R. Haldeman in his diary. Even Vice President JD Vance is in on the act, comparing himself to Nixon in June during an event to promote his memoir at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum: “Young senator, vice president, writes some bestselling books, is hated by the media.” (He’s not wrong.) 

“I’ve always liked Richard Nixon,” Vance said, calling him a political genius. The vice president praised Nixon’s foreign policy acumen, giving him props for the opening of China and the Vietnam peace process, while conveniently leaving out the part about bombing Cambodia. Vance also denigrated the Watergate hearings and investigations that eventually brought Nixon down, saying, “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

Sadly, he’s probably right. Nixon didn’t have the right-wing media machinery that now excuses Trump’s criminality and spreads conspiracy theories — like the trope that the “deep state” is out to get the president. That alone has managed to keep the MAGA base and Republican officials on board with Trump, which is why he was acquitted in two impeachment trials during his first term. After all, Nixon didn’t resign until he was told that he had lost his base in the Senate and faced certain conviction and removal from office. That wasn’t the case in February 2021, of course, when the Senate refused to convict Trump for “Incitement of Insurrection.”

But there is also evidence that even Nixon had his limits. Yes, he grossly abused the office of the presidency, treating the executive branch like his private fiefdom. He ordered the FBI and the CIA to commit crimes. He bribed, blackmailed and paid off potential witnesses against him. But he didn’t burn the tapes, and he dutifully turned them over when the Supreme Court ordered him to do so. And although there was that infamous “19-minute gap” on one of the tapes that would have sealed his fate, many of the conversations revealed a profane, corrupt president. 

But even as Nixon’s overall approval rating sank to 24% during the week before his resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, Republicans — 62% of them — still supported him. These were undoubtedly some of the die-hards who eventually began pushing to roll back the reforms that were enacted in Nixon’s wake.

During a post-presidency with British television presenter David Frost, Nixon famously said, “When the president does it, it’s not illegal.” Those words sounded then — and sound now — like an authoritarian gaffe. But in reality, the idea was based on a very real concept popular among right-wing Republicans, who believed that the president should have unfettered power to enact policies to “protect” the nation. 

After that interview, Nixon penned a 2,500-word essay explaining he didn’t believe the president is above the law, but that the nation’s executive must be granted “some faith in his judgment” and given “room for maneuver.” 

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“His powers are not unlimited,” Nixon wrote. “But neither can be existing law — in a limited way, and at times of special need — and still meet these larger responsibilities.” Apparently, “special need” could be defined as whatever the president says it is, and therein lies the unlimited power. 

This notion forms much of the logic of the unitary executive theory that has been growing among thinkers on the right for decades, and with court cases beginning in the early 1980s, the presidency has been granted more and more such power. This, of course, culminated in Trump v. United States, the 2024 Supreme Court ruling that gave the president near total immunity from prosecution for anything done in office. (The president had already been granted immunity from civil liability by the Court in Nixon v. Fitzgerald in 1982.) Now, the idea that presidents are above the law is gaining steam with yet another “investigation of the investigation,” this time into the special prosecutors who scrutinized Nixon back in 1974.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump Justice Department is now officially looking into that case based upon the conspiracy theories promulgated by Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide turned historical revisionist and conspiracy theorist who presented “a two-hour presentation at Justice Department headquarters called ‘Watergate As Lawfare,’” making the argument that, you guessed it, the deep state took down Richard Nixon.

There’s a method to all this madness, and it’s best illustrated by the fact that Vance is the one leading the charge. Any ambitious Republican official thinking about the future has to find some way to excuse their complicity in Trump’s corrupt — and likely illegal — behavior. If they have any hope of being elected to national office, their only choice is to try to maintain these MAGA fictions and arcane conspiracy theories after Trump is gone by continuing to deny the reality of what he’s done. One way to do that is to convince people that it was never just about Trump; the deep state has been out to get Republicans ever since Nixon.

If they can’t convince people that their complicity was actually righteous resistance to a secret cabal of bureaucrats and dirty cops fighting to keep Republicans from enacting their righteous agenda, then potential GOP presidential candidates like Vance are likely going to have a hard time overcoming what is likely to be a massive revolt against Trumpism once he is out of office. 

We’re seeing the edge of it now — and it’s not just about the price of gas. The air is finally going out of MAGA, and every single Republican politician who took advantage of it will be held accountable by the voters for what they have done. The GOP’s only hope is to find a Republican somewhere who hasn’t been touched by Trump and MAGA. 

Good luck with that.

The post The dark reasons behind all the Richard Nixon worship appeared first on Salon.com.

The biggest scandal in the modern history of professional sports broke wide open across the Atlantic this past week. How much that reflects larger social, cultural and economic pathologies and whether it affects regular people’s lives in any meaningful way is a complicated question. At the very least, I would suggest that the Manchester City scandal, which has driven the already-overheated British media to new heights of hysteria, isn’t really about soccer or sports. 

Man City (often simply called “City”) is by far the most successful team in the English Premier League over the last 15 years and one of the four or five biggest soccer franchises in the world. Last week an independent legal panel delivered a long-anticipated verdict, finding the club guilty on 114 counts of systematic financial fraud, amounting to more than a billion dollars in fake revenues and sham commercial sponsorships. This scathing judgment only covers the years from 2009 to 2018, but no one thinks the actual or alleged fraud suddenly stopped after that.

Effectively, the verdict amounts to a finding that City cheated their way to the top of world football through a dizzying but blatant series of scams and shell games, allowing the team’s petro-state owners to illegally outspend competitors and pump hundreds of millions into inflated salaries for star players like Norwegian thirst-trap Erling Haaland (he of the formerly golden locks), Kevin De Bruyne and Sergio Agüero, and illustrious coaches, first and foremost among them the Catalan genius Pep Guardiola. 

(Visionhaus/Getty Images) British newspaper headlines after Manchester City found guilty of breaches of Premier League financial rules, Sept. 26, 2026.

Along with winning numerous championships and tournaments, Man City changed the nature of the world’s favorite sport and transformed the EPL from a medium-size U.K.-based enterprise plagued by hooliganism, erratic attendance and crumbling stadiums into a global merchandising and marketing empire whose broadcasts, “kits” and online fan clubs extend from Indonesia to Arkansas. 

If you belong to the large proportion of humanity inclined to a shrug-emoji reaction — billionaire oligarchs, overpaid athletes, incalculable sums of dirty money; who cares? — the first thing to say is that you’re absolutely right and that’s the only healthy response. But the salient fact that pushes the Man City narrative beyond a sports-business scandal and toward more cultural, political and even philosophical terrain is that virtually everyone who followed soccer and the EPL understood what was happening all along. That sort of willful blindness or collective cynicism is by no means limited to sports or celebrity culture — and it has become a widespread corrosive force in our society.

At any rate, everyone who was paying attention rapidly perceived the pattern after 2008, when Manchester City — a historically mediocre team with a modest fan base, sad-sack local rivals to Manchester United, who dominated the sport in the 1990s — was acquired by the Abu Dhabi United Group, a private equity firm closely aligned, shall we say, with the royal family of a Persian Gulf autocratic state. (Exactly how closely, and whether ADUG can be considered a separate entity from the Abu Dhabi government, is one of the issues at stake in the byzantine Man City case, now heading into an appeal process that could take years.)

It’s worth noting here that City Football Group, the ADUG subsidiary that has poured all that money into Man City, also owns or operates football/soccer clubs and related real estate projects around the world, including New York City FC in Major League Soccer, which at this moment is constructing an expensive new stadium in Queens, to be named — like everything else in the CFG universe — for Etihad Airways, Abu Dhabi’s state-owned carrier. 

Here lies the central conundrum of the Man City scandal, which is, like so much else about this story, a dirty secret that is no secret at all. Abu Dhabi’s petrodollars are deeply embedded in the economies of many Western nations, and any serious effort to punish or exile ADUG’s prize sporting property could have far-reaching ripple effects. That goes a long way toward explaining why U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who has struck such a forceful posture toward Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, has issued only vague blandishments about this explosive case on his own home turf, and clearly hopes the whole thing will simply go away.

In his excellent summary of the City scandal, Alex Shephard of the New Republic observes that the “massive accounting sham” behind the team’s spectacular rise under the Abu Dhabi ownership was concealed only in threadbare fashion, and was widely tolerated for a range of interlocking reasons: 

Manchester City committed fraud on a massive scale primarily as a soft power project for an authoritarian nation because it was allowed to do so. The Premier League chose to look away. The team was good and the money was flowing. Questions about its finances — let alone about its ownership — were swept under the rug. As Manchester City became the best team in the Premier League, the Premier League became the most powerful league in Europe and, by extension, the world.

It isn’t easy to translate this tangled affair into American terms, and in any case I’m here to argue that the real significance of the Man City story is not about big-money skulduggery in professional sports. But let’s imagine that the Los Angeles Dodgers or the New York Knicks were found to have broken the rules of their respective leagues to such an extraordinary degree that observers seriously suggested that their recent championships should be stricken from the record books and that the teams themselves should be banished from Major League Baseball and the NBA for years to come, if not forever. (Such outcomes are on the table in the City case; so is a slap on the wrist and a large payoff, or a negotiated compromise somewhere in between.)

Let’s further imagine that we had collectively decided that the Dodgers or Knicks were so entertaining to watch that we’d pretend not to notice that they were owned by Kim Jong-un’s first cousin or Vladimir Putin’s niece. (Which if anything is understating the case: ADUG’s proprietor, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, is the brother of Abu Dhabi’s absolute ruler and his regime’s vice president.) Then we’d pretend we were surprised to learn that their entire operation was shamelessly corrupt, when the only genuinely surprising part was that the leagues involved had decided to risk their own survival by exposing the financial misdeeds after all those years of looking the other way.

My point here is that while I’m surprised to find myself writing yet another article in 2026 about soccer — if you presume that betrays some personal interest, you would be correct — this one isn’t really about soccer at all. Whatever ultimate judgment befalls Manchester City after years of legal wrangling is beside the point, although there’s some grim amusement to be found in comments sections on The Athletic, as fans try to “well, actually” or DYOR a verdict that will certainly tarnish the team’s reputation in perpetuity.

This is partly a story, as Shephard says, about sportswashing and the immense soft-power reach of authoritarian regimes like the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, all of which are heavily invested in professional soccer and other global sporting ventures. (Paris Saint-Germain, the biggest team in France and current European champions, was once owned by its fans but is now a property of the Qatari state.) Beyond that, it’s a story about questions almost too large to describe clearly.

It’s a story about a world that pretends to value democracy but is increasingly defined by massive inequality, oligarchy and, for that matter, monarchy. It’s about a world where the billionaire ex-president of the United States had to run for re-election in order to stay out of prison — and it worked. A world where the two most respected organizations in American broadcast journalism, CNN and CBS News, could come under the control of one man, who transparently aims to turn them into propaganda outlets supporting one faction of one political party. 

It’s a story, in other words, about how much we will put up with. Or rather about how much we have convinced ourselves we must accept, given the unimaginable imbalance between the tech billionaires and fossil-fuel despots on one side and the other 99.9% of us on the other, whose only feasible role is to be their servants, their worker drones or their captive audience, or else to be deemed expendable. 

It would be ridiculous to cast the English Premier League as a hero in that larger narrative, as if its current stance had anything to do with standing up against autocratic sportswashing or defending democracy and the rule of law. Man City may even have a point, on the level of libertarian economic theory, that the EPL’s financial rules were unfairly structured to prevent upstart teams from competing with long-established franchises like Liverpool, Arsenal and Manchester United, and that owners should be allowed to spend as much as they want to put a competitive team on the field. (That is, in fact, exactly how Major League Baseball operates, although its moment of reckoning is right around the corner.)

But there may also be a crude lesson under this dunderheaded clash of the titans that pertains to democracy, and can be seen reflected in the verdict on the Trump regime that we all see coming in this year’s American midterm elections, or in the surge of popular opposition to data centers and to the unrestricted development of AI. To paraphrase the maxim falsely attributed to Lincoln, you can fool a whole bunch of the people for a hell of a long time, but you can’t fool all of them forever. 

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Ultimately, the Premier League must have concluded that the reputational and economic damage of prosecuting its most successful team for obvious financial crimes — which is likely to be considerable — was preferable to the damage of not doing so. EPL leadership stuck a finger in the wind of public opinion, so to speak, and decided their best chance of not killing the golden goose lay in manning up for the principles they had visibly abandoned, or at least pretending to.

You definitely shouldn’t care what becomes of the EPL or Manchester City; I’d be better off if I didn’t either. Erling Haaland and his teammates will be fine, as will the Abu Dhabi royals, although whatever remains of the club’s pre-2008 Mancunian fanbase is likely to suffer bitterly. But you might care about finding the outer limits of the corrosive social and cultural corruption and cynicism to which we have all been subjected — and in which we have all been complicit — and then finding the courage and resolution to resist.

Will I watch Manchester City’s first post-verdict match on Oct. 11, against their archrivals Liverpool? Um, yeah. It’s a news event! I’m doing my job, or that’s what I’ll tell myself. But I won’t pretend my hands are clean.

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