Good morning and welcome to the weekend. It’s Saturday, March 21, 2026. No particular national observance on the calendar today, other than the first full day of spring, since spring supposedly arrived at 10:46 a.m. yesterday.
1804: France adopts the Napoleonic Code, stressing clearly written and accessible law.
1871: Journalist Henry Morton Stanley begins his famous expedition to Africa.
1935: Persia is officially renamed Iran.
1943: An assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler fails.
1947: U.S. President Harry Truman signs Executive Order 9835 requiring all federal employees to have “complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States.”
1963: Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay is closed.
1964: The Beatles’ single “She Loves You” goes to #1 in the U.S. and stays there for two weeks.
2006: Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sends out the first tweet: “just setting up my twttr.”
Birthdays today include: Composer Modest Mussorgsky, blues singer Son House, Canadian politician Ed Broadbent, songwriter Chip Taylor, (Victor) “Vivian” Stanshall, British singer and comic songwriter (Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band), actor Timothy Dalton, singer Eddie Money, Supertramp’s Roger Hodgson, and actor Gary Oldman.
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My last few columns have been deadly serious, so perhaps it’s time to lighten up a little. Let’s talk about playtime, even for adults. I recently ripped Mark Judge a new one in my piece, “Now Is Not the Time to Back Off, Conservatives,” on March 13. So when this came over my desk last night from him, you can imagine it caught my interest.
The deeper we get into the digital age, the more people seem to lose their sense of play. As a new book points out, play is essential to human happiness and flourishing, and the digital age—with its inevitable politicization of everything—explains much of why it seems to be missing today. The loss of play is also why our journalism is so bad. There once was a time when journalists, believe it or not, were recruited from the athlete class. They were not the chip-on-their-shoulders loners, looking to settle high school grudges. And this was one of the reasons they were able to find so many great stories. They had a sense of adventure and toughness, and they knew where to look.
Well, yeah, but then again, that was also a time when what Judge calls “the athlete class” were also scholars. That quibble aside:
In her book The Playful Way: Creativity, Connection, and Joy Through Everyday Moments of Play, Piera Gelardi argues for the spiritual, psychological, and physical benefits of play. “Research reveals that playful adults excel at problem-solving and stress management and consistently report higher life satisfaction,” Gelardi writes. “They’re keen observers who spot fresh perspectives where others see only obstacles. They develop healthier coping mechanisms and bounce back faster from setbacks, too. As Dr. Stuart Brown from the National Institute for Play puts it, ‘The opposite of play is not work. It’s depression.’”
Judge raises a good point here.
A lot, in fact, most of play, involves problem-solving. Take sports like golf, where problem-solving is involved in every shot. The left likes to chastise President Donald Trump (and President George W. Bush before him) for playing golf. But the truth is that the game is an exercise in problem-solving, involving and sharpening the ability to think on one’s feet. Bowling would be another such example. Curling. Boccie. Bean bag boxes. Darts. Model building. Chess. Checkers. Cards. Rock Climbing. I find problem-solving ability to be crucial to my efforts in ham radio. All these things and many more, most of which my short list here doesn’t begin to cover, are crucial not only to the learning process but in keeping one’s mind sharp. Judge writes:
The social historian Christopher Lasch once wrote:
The uselessness of games makes them offensive to social reformers, improvers of public morals, or functionalist critics of society, who saw in the futility of upper-class sports anachronistic survivals of militarism and prowess. Yet the ‘futility’ of play, and nothing else, explains its appeal—its artificiality, the arbitrary obstacles it sets up for no other purpose than to challenge the players to surmount them, the absence of any utilitarian or uplifting object. Games quickly lose their charm when forced into the service of education, character development, or social improvement.
True that.
In the schools, do we even do recess anymore, where they turn kids loose outside on what we used to call the playground? It was Randall Jarrell, I think, who once quipped, “One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.” But from our perspective, what is childhood but a time for learning how to problem solve?
Clearly, there are a number of people who decide how to teach these young minds who do not see the importance of playtime for kids. I mean, leaving aside time dedicated to the idea of play in the school day, have you seen the playgrounds on school grounds these days? If by chance they even have them, they’re more dedicated to keeping the little darlings from being injured than they are to anything else. Have we totally forgotten that pain is God’s teacher, and one of the aspects of play is learning, first-hand, what NOT to do? And guess what? It usually does not need advance planning by someone with a degree in childhood development.
Yet if left to its own devices, play can and does result in education, character development, and social improvement. These virtues are nurtured because play and sports are among the last vestiges of an America that can engage conservative virtues.
Play, and frankly, sports, are not only all this but also one of the last vestiges of meritocracy. Yes, the very thing that we’ve been trying to eliminate, among other things, is the participation trophy.
We need to tell the supposed experts to shut up, sit down, and rest for a while. Stop pushing the idea on both our kids and on ourselves that play is a waste of time, or just a means of blowing off “excess energy”, and instead recognize it as crucial to our well-being, both physically and mentally.
Quip of the Day: “He who laughs last didn’t get the joke.” –Charles de Gaulle
I’ll see you tomorrow. Take care of yourselves.
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