March 10, 2025 issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Nick Paumgarten’s brilliant “Dreams and Nightmares.” It’s an account of his experience in New Orleans, attending Super Bowl LIX and some of the parties and promotions leading up to it. “Eagles plus the Big Easy: I had to be there,” he says. The piece is part personal history and part reporting. Paumgarten reflects on his love of football (“I love the sport itself, the complexity of it, the variety of bodies and roles, the grace amid the peril, the sacrifice, the story lines, the religious devotion to the fate of the team and a city that’s not even my own”), his love of the Philadelphia Eagles (“The sight of the Kelly-green jerseys, against the sickly inchworm green of Veterans Stadium’s diabolical artificial turf, got its talons in me”), and his conflicted view of the Super Bowl. At times, he seems to relish the event (“It’s hard to think of anything that comes close, unless you count Christmas”). At other times, he seems to detest it (“The vulgarity and rot were palpable then, as they seem to have been, come to think of it, even when Hunter S. Thompson was in Houston for Super Bowl VIII, in 1974”). 

Paumgarten visits Media Row at the convention center (“I saw a man in a green Saquon Barkley jersey, green Eagles overalls, and green-and-silver face paint—bald but for a tight green Mohawk”). He meets up with a wealthy friend and they go to a night club called Empire (“Bouncers ushered us past the line and through the throngs inside to a table near the front”). He attends and Eagles-fan party in the Garden District (“cheesesteaks from Yinzer’s, soft pretzels, and Tastykakes”). His description of game day is detailed and vivid:

Tributaries of fans—from Bourbon and Baronne, Tchoupitoulas and Magazine—poured into Poydras Street and flowed toward the Dome. The doomsday prophets and kooks along the way brought to mind the streetside hubbub in John Kennedy Toole’s “Confederacy of Dunces.” You had your born-agains bearing signs: “God Hates Your Idols” (possible), “Free Will Is a Satanic Lie” (true enough), “God Hates Drunks” (no, He does not), “God Hates Fags” (no), “God Hates You” (me?). A vender evaded the constabulary with his pushcart of “Donald Fucking Trump” and “Bitch I’m an Eagle” T-shirts. A group of gentlemen dressed in white, in white cowboy hats, with patches of presumably fake blood over their privates, led a protest against male circumcision, with a sign that read “Nobody Wants Less Penis.” It seemed right-wing-coded, but I couldn’t be sure. The Black Israelites, meanwhile, were out on Canal Street. Scalpers offered tickets: for a man bearing a notebook, the price was “face value.” (The average price of a ticket, on the secondary market, was sixty-five hundred dollars. The cheapest ticket was twenty-six hundred.) But there were some bargains around: you could get your face painted with your team’s colors for twenty bucks, and a Coors Light for eight.

The piece brims with wonderful, original, quasi-surreal sentences. This one, for example:

George Kittle, the San Francisco 49ers tight end, wearing a Little Caesars T-shirt adorned with pizza-slice icons, showed up with his mother at the Sports Illustrated booth—a sad little Wayne-and-Garth-calibre nook, reflective perhaps of the diminishment of both a medium and a “brand”—with boxes of Crazy Puffs.

And this:

At the Bounty House of Wingman, the hype guys lined up for free boxes of chicken wings to go with a roll of paper towels, while on a nearby patch of artificial turf civilians and pros took turns attempting to throw green Nerf footballs through downfield targets. 

“Dreams and Nightmares” is a tour de force of personal journalism. I enjoyed it immensely.