DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: September 21, 2025

‘The Hollowness Of The Easy Victory’–Robert Redford Took The Road Not Often Taken:

Redford’s insight into elite sport, as he remarked during a promotional tour in 1970, was that “frequently it fits you only for the wrong things, even breaks you utterly.” Winning, and its attendant praise, in Downhill Racer’s telling, lasts about a minute. Then it begins to corrupt, a truth rendered in the final scene, when Chappellet briefly catches the eye of the young Austrian racer who was beating him until the Austrian crashed. Chappellet’s jolt of self-awareness, that he just as easily could have lost if the Austrian hadn’t caught an edge, is immediately overwhelmed by a congratulating crowd. At the final frame, you can already feel the inevitable toll coming, the day when he will be defeated, just another limping veteran.

Redford tells this story time and time again in his films, even the most unsporting. The Candidate? It’s about a race—and the final three minutes are among Redford’s finest, as he plays the newly elected Senator Bill McKay’s aghast awakening from mindless competitiveness: “What do we do now?” Ordinary People, which he directed, is an excruciating essay about a sporty boating-and-golfing couple who imagine themselves securely among life’s winners but prove incapable of dealing with real crisis. A River Runs Through It—a film I’ve seen possibly 10 times, and never without being wholly absorbed by the loveliness of its frames and of Redford’s poetic narration—focuses on a handsome athlete-fisherman, played by Brad Pitt, whose ease duels with recklessness. Quiz Show is about nothing if not how the hagiography that attaches to a “winner” can twist the most benign-seeming men. “What was I supposed to do at that point, disillusion the whole goddamn country?” Charles Van Doren asks in an effort to excuse his cheating.

He told a 2014 forum at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, “One of the themes that I’ve tried to work in films is the subject of winning, that this is a country that’s all about winning.” He continued, “I was told a slogan as a kid when I was playing baseball: Listen, it doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. That’s what’s important, and that was drummed into my head and drummed into my head. Yet, what I experienced was just the opposite. What I experienced was winning was everything. So, I think that sunk so deep into my psyche that when I became able, years later, to be an artist or to make film, I wanted to tell the truth about my country that wasn’t being told.”

Advice For Using Water–Cool it!:

You may not be giving a second thought to setting your washing machine on the hot cycle, cranking your showers to a steamy temperature or scrubbing your dirty dishes under a stream of scalding water.

If you did, you’d find that you probably don’t need to use so much hot water — and that you could be saving energy and cutting your utility bills. Water heating is responsible for more than 10 percent of both annual residential energy use and consumer utility costs, the biggest share after air conditioning and heating, according to the Energy Department. An American household uses an average of 64 gallons of hot water a day — close to the amount needed to fill an average bathtub — by doing laundry, showering, washing the dishes and running kitchen and bathroom faucets.