Who’s the Madonna of 2026? Turns out: Madonna. America experiences ritual humiliation via soccer game. A spirited defense of getting married at MSG.

Emily Gould

The nightcap for this dance party of an album takes an honest look at the unforeseen pitfalls and points where success was not a certainty. ‘Fragile’ threads conversations about family and failure into one of the artist’s most personal songs to date. It’s an ode to Christopher Ciccone, Madonna’s younger brother, who had an at times very difficult relationship with his sister before they reconnected ahead of his death in 2024. She wrote it near the end of his battle with cancer. Mortality is an ever-present undercurrent in discourse about Madonna in her late 60s, in which people groan that it’s sad if she posts a risqué photo as if there’s an age when a person should stop feeling great in their body. ‘Fragile’ dismisses a fear of the grave in a voice-over from the singer stating that the end of life is just a ‘portal we’re going through.’”

The USMNT, as I have written for many years, is what Americans always consider themselves to be but never actually are: scrappy underdogs. On the world stage, they’re the perpetually undermanned, outgunned but improving team that is on its way up, a growth stock that’s worth getting in on the ground floor for. It’s a team, as we’ve seen throughout the tournament, that’s extremely likable and potentially ready to take its next step forward. But with one shocking reversal on Sunday — one that had a lot more people around the world talking about the integrity of global football and FIFA than just Belgium’s coach — that all turned around on them: They were the enemies, the bad guys … the empire. The U.S. team was not ready for that. Not many would be.

It was immediately obvious. (A friend joked that the first ten minutes of play felt achingly similar to the first ten minutes of watching Joe Biden on the debate stage two years ago. It was clear we were well and truly fucked.)”

To get a brief respite from the heat, I went to the second floor of Roberta’s at One Penn Plaza to see what I could of the venue itself. Looking at the pink curtains draping the sixth floor of MSG, where cocktail hour allegedly took place, I saw the lipstick-on-a-pig nature of the wedding firsthand — the pipe and drape hardly looked gorgeous or intimate from the outside. It was obvious that it required a tremendous production to transform the arena into the couple’s alleged castle-in-a-forest setting. But thanks to the nature of the venue itself, no one was concerned about the aftermath. If Swift had chosen other rumored venues like the Met, the Cloisters, or Governor’s Island, there would have been plenty of chatter about the need to protect these historic sites from whatever horrors a massive wedding like this would entail. Dua Lipa and Callum Turner’s recent Palermo nuptials have already sparked controversy for turning a historic site into a theme park, and that party had only 300 guests. Imagine the potential destruction of a Taylor Swift wedding at some remote Italian island or medieval chapel. MSG? No one made a peep.”

Everybody get up and dance!