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Colorado has the mountains … but not the Olympics

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 17:38:57 +0000

Colorado has the mountains … but not the Olympics Rachel Sauer Wed, 02/04/2026 - 10:38

Jared Bahir Browsh

Fifty years ago, Denver was supposed to host the Winter Olympics, but fiscal and environmental concerns halted plans and highlighted difficult truths about hosting

With its infrastructure, mountains and the presence of the Colorado Springs Olympic and Paralympic Training Center, Colorado seems like the ideal Olympics host—and many wonder why the state has never hosted a Games.

Fifty years ago, Denver was scheduled to host the XII Olympic Winter Games during the state’s 1976 centennial celebration and the United States’ bicentennial. Denver’s bid was accepted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1970, but in November 1972—after a statewide referendum rejected funding for the games—the IOC was left scrambling to find another host city. Although Salt Lake City, Utah, and Lake Placid, New York, offered to host, the IOC, frustrated by the rebuff by Colorado voters, elected to move the games back to Europe in Innsbruck, Austria, just eight years after the city hosted in 1964.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the С�� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

The Denver episode taught both the IOC and event organizers as a whole to secure funding, infrastructure and the support of stakeholders before granting any city or country the rights to host major events—although Olympic host cities continue to navigate imperfect planning, as the 2026 host, Milana-Cortina, Italy, races to complete the hockey arena in time for the Games.

From underdog to host

Denver was seen as a dark horse when the bid process began, competing against Sion, Switzerland; Tampere, Finland; and Vancouver, Canada, for the rights to host the Olympics. Denver won the first round of votes but came in second to Sion in the second round (Vancouver and Tampere were eliminated in the first and second rounds, respectively). Most of the IOC voters for the Finnish town ultimately shifted to support Denver’s bid, which was granted in May 1970.

After significant cost overruns and losses during the previous two Games in Grenoble, France, in 1968 and Sapporo, Japan, in 1972, Denver was promoted as the economical Olympics. The Grenoble Games posed a loss of more than $250 million, so when Denver submitted a budget of $14 million, the IOC voters may have seen Denver ushering in a new strategy for a more affordable Winter Games.

However, as the planning moved forward, it was clear the $14 million budget fell far short of what would be needed. By 1972, some estimates surpassed $100 million with a number of unanswered questions regarding the venues and facilities. The University of Denver was floated as a potential location for the Olympic Village, but university officials were never informed of this plan, which would have occurred during the school year.

The original plans also called for the alpine events to be held at Loveland Basin and Mount Sniktau, which did not receive reliable snowfall and were airbrushed with “snow” to cover bald spots in the promotional materials. Many of the plans for events like cross-country skiing had routes that ran through residential neighborhoods in Jefferson County, and plans for the biathlon—a mix of cross-country skiing and rifle shooting—included ranges near Evergreen High School.

Planning goes off course as the election nears

Because the IOC preferred bids that allowed for the vast majority of events to occur close to the host city, the original Denver Olympics plans promoted Loveland Basin and Mount Sniktau as being only 45 minutes away from the city—which may have been possible if I-70 was shut down. Officials then decided to move the ski events to Aspen and Steamboat Springs, both more than 100 miles from the originally proposed Olympic Village. They floated plans to have multiple villages and even discussed having a helicopter usher athletes between sites.

Along with having cross-country skiing events in Evergreen, planners wanted to have the ski jump there as well, which would have required demolishing a hill, rerouting a residential road and pouring concrete over Bear Creek. Maybe Evergreen residents would have enjoyed watching events out their windows—and through their yards—even if it meant dodging bullets and finding new roads to get to work or school, but it is doubtful.

Then-state legislator—and future governor—Dick Lamm, political organizer Sam Brown and environmentalist Eileen Brown (unrelated to Sam) formed Citizens for Colorado’s Future (CCF), which campaigned against the Games. The group collected signatures and ran an information campaign in the lead-up to the 1972 election that included a ballot initiative for the $5 million promised by the state hoping to convince voters to not approve the funding.

A bumper sticker produced before Colorado residents voted on a 1972 referendum to fund the 1976 Olympic Games, which voters rejected. (Photo: History Colorado)

The CCF looked to secure a meeting with the IOC, and when group leaders were rebuffed, they traveled to the Sapporo Olympics, where the IOC executive committee was meeting. CCF members ultimately crashed the meeting, to the consternation of the committee, and presented their findings regarding the true cost and environmental impact to the IOC. This caused Avery Brundage, who was attending his last Winter Games as IOC president, to threaten to pull the Games from the Denver Organizing Committee, which quickly put together a presentation to reassure the IOC.

The cost overruns at the 1972 Sapporo Winter Games and the summer games in Munich further reinforced the cost concerns in Denver. Munich also faced one of the worst terrorist events in sports history, which cast a cloud over the Olympics just months before the 1972 election. Groups like Protect Our Mountain Environment (POME) also held well-publicized protests in places that would be impacted by the Games, including Evergreen.

On Nov. 7, 1972, these myriad problems led Colorado voters to reject the $5 million Olympics contribution from the state, with 60% of voters choosing to say no to the state spending the money on the Games. The following week, Denver officially withdrew from the Games and then-Governor John Love, who championed the bid, resigned the following year to serve as “Energy Czar” under President Richard Nixon. In 1974, Lamm was elected governor, eventually serving three terms and running on a campaign focused on environmentalism and limited development.

Ultimately, Colorado voters were proven right. The 1976 Innsbruck Games cost an estimated $58 million, even with the use of existing facilities from 1964. The Montreal Summer Games the same year were one of the worst financial disasters in Olympic history, with the city, its province, Quebec, and Canada shouldering a debt of more than $1 billion, which was not paid off until 2006.

The early ‘70s bid was not the last time that Denver tried for the Olympics. Federico Peña, mayor of Denver from 1983-1991, pushed to bid for the Olympics even as the city faced financial difficulties. Denver also bid to be the United States Olympic Committee pick for the 2002 Winter Games, with plans that had the University of Colorado Boulder campus serving as the Olympic Village. Denver was beat out by Salt Lake City for the 2002 Games, which faced a bribery controversy over its winning bid.

Ultimately, the politics of Colorado, which include ballot initiatives and the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR), create a difficult path for Denver to host an Olympic Games. The concerns of 1976, including rising costs and environmental concerns, have only gotten stronger as some have questioned the long-term impact of hosting. Also, with the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles and the 2034 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, it may be decades until another Olympics makes it back to the United States—and odds are Colorado voters would not approve of the exponentially higher cost of the Olympics in the future.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the С�� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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Boxelder bugs and other insects are invading houses

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 17:31:39 +0000

Boxelder bugs and other insects are invading houses Rachel Sauer Wed, 02/04/2026 - 10:31

Jeff Mitton

The good news is none of them bite, sting or carry diseases that can be passed to humans

My house is being invaded. It happens to some extent in fall of most years, but this is the most intense invasion we have experienced, and on the first day of February we are still heaving cadavers and active insects into the backyard. One day I caught eight invaders. Most years, we have just one species trying to get in, but this year it is three.

Let me introduce the combatants: First is the small milkweed bug, Lygdaeus kalmi; next is the boxelder bug, Boisea trivitatti; and third is the western conifer seed bug, Leptogossus occidentalis. These three insects have much in common. For example, all of them are looking for a safe, warm place to spend the winter so they can reproduce in spring; more about this later. None of the three has cryptic coloration, they all have aposematic (or warning coloration) and each has a chemical defense. They all suck sap from green plants.

None of them bites or stings or carries diseases that can be passed to us.

The aposematic colorations advertise to predators that they are wielding chemical defenses. The colors and patterns of the three species make them easily identified, and the foul and poisonous fluids make any encounter poisonous and memorable.

Small milkweed bugs, like monarch butterflies, sequester cardiac glycosides that they take from the sap of the pods and seeds. Boxelder bugs have abdominal glands that release a foul smelling, disgusting-tasting liquid when they feel threatened. The western conifer seed bug has glands between its legs that release a repulsive, pungent smell taken from the seeds of Douglas fir, western white pine and lodgepole pine. Their bright colors, backed up by an awful taste with sickening effects, adequately protects these three bugs from predators.

Home-invading insects including (left to right) small milkweed bug, boxelder bug and western conifer seed bug. (Photos: Jeff Mitton)

I find it interesting that monarch butterflies, large milkweed bugs, milkweed leaf beetles and milkweed tiger moths, all feeding on milkweed, have adopted the orange and black aposematic coloration. They undoubtedly gain protection from the legions of herbivores, similarly colored, all carrying similar cardiac glycosides synthesized by milkweeds.

All three of these insects eat by sucking fluids sap or fluids inside green leaves and developing seeds. Their common names from their most common source of sap: small milkweed bug, boxelder bug and western conifer seed bug. Boxelder bugs favor the sap that they get from developing boxelder seeds, although they grow adequately by feeding from silver maples in Boulder.

By far the most common of these bugs that I encounter inside the house are the boxelder bugs. At first, it was puzzling that such a high proportion of them, approaching 50%, are lifeless chitinous sheaths lying on the floor. This observation reminded me of the reason that ladybugs, Hippodamia convergens, fly to the tops of mountains, such as Green Mountain and Bear Peak, as winter approaches. Ladybugs head to high elevation peaks for winter so that they can go into an undisturbed dormancy until spring. If they try to overwinter at lower elevations, they stir and fly about on warm sunny days in the winter. They fly about and search for food when none is available. They might die of starvation while searching for food, or they may exhaust lipid stores that they need to lay eggs in spring. Natural selection favors those that leave the most offspring, so ladybug genes that favor prolonged hibernation are most common. The insects trying to get inside houses should talk to ladybugs!

I asked a neighbor about boxelder bugs, and he responded that “all their lifeless bodies are scattered around the house.” Bugs that get inside have a comfortable environment, but they need more water and food to remain active inside, where familiar sources of water and food are not available. Natural selection needs more time to teach boxelder bugs the lesson that ladybugs have learned.

Jeff Mitton is a professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder. His column, "Natural Selections," is also printed in the Boulder Daily Camera.

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The good news is none of them bite, sting or carry diseases that can be passed to humans.

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Top image: boxelder bugs attempting to get into Jeff Mitton's house (Photo: Jeff Mitton)

Faster, higher, stronger (at any cost)

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:49:55 +0000

Faster, higher, stronger (at any cost) Rachel Sauer Fri, 01/30/2026 - 14:49

Jared Bahir Browsh

Cheating scandals throughout the Olympics’ 130-year history highlight how the pursuit of victory can often conflict with Olympic values

"Faster, Higher, Stronger." The Olympic motto, chosen by the father of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin, expresses the aspirations of the Games in competition and in morality. However, as the many cheating scandals throughout the 130-year history of the Games have shown, the pursuit of victory can often conflict with the effort to maintain the perceived values of the Olympic Movement.

On Jan. 15, after an 11-month investigation, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation announced an 18-month suspensions for two coaches and an equipment manager from Norway’s ski jump team after they were caught on video manipulating the suits of jumpers following inspection at the Nordic World Ski Championships. Although the two skiers whose suits were manipulated—reigning Olympic champion Marius Lindvik and 2018 silver medalist Johann André Forfang—will still compete, it has cast a cloud over the event just weeks before the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies in Italy on Feb. 6.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the С�� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Cheating is as old as sport, and much like at the ancient games, athletes and their coaches have been willing to bend—or break—the rules to gain an advantage for the sake of Olympic glory. The biggest scandals are often followed by rule changes and more intense oversight by the International Olympic Committee and sport officials.

Hitchhiking and strychnine at the 1904 marathon

The 1904 Games in St. Louis is rightfully considered one of the worst Olympics in history. Though Chicago unanimously won the bid to become the first U.S. host of the Olympics, politicking by the Amateur Athletic Union, the postponement of the World’s Fair to 1904 and opposition to an Olympic Stadium in Chicago led to the Games being transferred to St. Louis.

At the time, St. Louis was about a third the size of Chicago and offered fewer transportation options, leading to decreased participation compared to the 1900 Games in Paris. Also, the associated World’s Fair focused heavily on white supremacy and imperialism, which was reflected in the disorganized Games.

One of the most famous examples of the poorly executed Games was the marathon, which was filled with cheating, scientific misinformation and the same racism that was associated with the World’s Fair. The length and difficulty of the marathon has tempted cheating since the first games, but the marathon in St. Louis was especially controversial.

The 1904 event, which began in the middle of the afternoon as temperatures soared past 90, saw only 14 of the 32 two runners finish the race, including Len Taunyane (ninth) and Jan Mashiani (12th), two members of South Africa’s Tswana tribe who were included in the race to prove white superiority, coming to St. Louis as a part of the Boer War Exhibition. They were the only Black South Africans to represent their country until 1992.

James E. Sullivan, who organized much of the 1904 Olympics, also wanted to prove that dehydration improved performance and had only one water station on the entire route. American runner Frederick Lorz began to cramp and dropped out of the race, soliciting a ride from a local driver. When the car broke down, Lorz finished the route and walked into the stadium, celebrating as the winner before a spectator revealed he had hitched a ride. Another American runner, Thomas Hicks, crossed the finish line more than 20 minutes later, boosted by strychnine sulfate and brandy after his own brush with dehydration. The chaotic race almost led to the elimination of the marathon from the Olympic program.

The straight dope

Thomas Hicks (center) crossed the finish line of the 1904 Olympic marathon with the help of strychnine sulfate and brandy, after a brush with dehydration. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

As the 1904 marathon debacle shows, some athletes will risk their health if a substance, including poison or liquor, can give them an edge. Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson may be the most famous individual example of performance-enhancing drug use at the Olympics—disqualified after testing positive for steroids at the 1988 Seoul Games following a world record-setting performance in the 100-meter dash. Carl Lewis, who placed second, was awarded the gold medal after Johnson was disqualified. Johnson had also tested positive for stimulants at the U.S. Olympic Trials, but was still allowed to compete.

The United States was again embroiled in a doping scandal in 2007 when sprinter Marion Jones admitted to steroid use as a part of the larger BALCO banned substance scandal and was stripped of her medals from the 2000 Sydney Games. Cyclist Lance Armstrong was stripped of his bronze from the 2000 Games as well.

However, the largest doping scandal spans more than 74 years, after the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) joined the Olympic Movement in 1952. The Soviet Union's promotion of communism put the nation at odds with capitalist nations—specifically with fellow superpower the United States—making the Olympics a proxy battle in the Cold War. The USSR was at odds with many Western countries as the Soviet Union’s athletes were given nominal jobs within the Soviet government, allowing them to train and compete full time through their athletic primes. This often led to competitions between older Soviet and much younger amateur athletes.

It was later revealed many of these athletes were also involved in state-sponsored doping programs, with Soviet labs working to stay a step ahead of testing, especially after testing for steroids began in 1976. In spite of this, East Germany, which had its own doping program, placed second in gold medals at the 1976 games in Montreal, motivating the Soviets to accelerate their own doping program for the 1980 Moscow Games and the 1984 Los Angeles Games, although they boycotted the latter.

The same doctor who signed off on the Soviet doping program for the 1984 Games, Dr. Sergei Portugalov, was instrumental in renewing the state-sponsored doping program through at least 2008, when seven runners from Russia were banned from competing at the 2008 Beijing Games. In 2017, Portugalov was permanently banned from working with athletes by the Court of Arbitration for Sport while Russia was banned from the Olympics for doping from 2019-2023. Russian athletes were allowed to compete under the Olympic Flag—as they did in 2024 and will in 2026, the result of a separate ban related to the invasion of Ukraine.

For many years, Soviet athletes (here entering the opening ceremony of the 1964 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo) fought proxy Cold War battles with western nations in the Olympics. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Conspiring for glory

As enforcement has intensified, efforts to cheat have become more complex, with multinational conspiracies behind more recent controversies. The most famous of these efforts occurred during the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, which was already clouded in controversy after it was revealed in 1998 that the Salt Lake Organizing Committee had bribed Olympic officials to obtain the bid. Although other bid processes have faced claims of bribery, this was considered the largest corruption scandal in IOC history, prompting an overhaul of the bid process.

During the pairs figure skating competition, Canadians Jamie Salé and David Pelletier performed a near-flawless routine but were awarded silver due to a 5-4 split among judges that favored Russian competitors Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze. Judge Marie Reine Le Gougne alleged soon after the event that she was pressured by the head of the French skating federation, Didier Gailhaguet, to give the Russian pair favorable marks in exchange for Russian support for French ice dancers Marina Anissina and Gwendal Peizerat, who were scheduled to compete later in the Games and ultimately won gold.

Judged sports like gymnastics and figure skating have long faced criticism over their judges, especially during the Cold War, when there were frequent claims of bias for either Eastern and Western bloc nations. Le Gougne eventually recanted her story, but the damage was already done and Salé and Pelletier were eventually named gold medalists alongside Berezhnaya and Sikharulidze, who kept their gold. The incident led the International Skating Union to implement a new system to score performances in an effort to limit impropriety in judging.

Typically, when Olympians cheat, they cheat to win, but the 2012 London Games saw several badminton teams take a different approach. After securing a place in the knockout stage in women’s badminton doubles, two South Korean pairs, along with a pair from China and one from Indonesia, attempted to lose on purpose in their last group stage match to obtain a preferred matchup in the next round. All four teams were disqualified for uncompetitive behavior and future tournaments included another draw for runners-up from each group. Some countered that even though they tried to lose matches on purpose, their intent was to win the tournament.

As the common saying goes, “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying,” which is often quoted after a cheating scandal. However, as the incidents involving the Russian Olympic Committee and others have shown, many of these incidents go beyond mere rule breaking and risk the health and well-being of the athletes involved. The IOC tries to remain free of controversy, but as we have seen across the 130 years of the modern Olympics, the organization is not immune to politics, socioeconomics or human nature. Athletes and even entire federations are so tempted by Olympic glory that they are willing to bend sporting ethics for the sake of winning.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the С�� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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Top photo: Vegar S. Hansen/Wikimedia Commons

Inferring the evolutionary tree of antelope ground squirrels

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:25:19 +0000

Inferring the evolutionary tree of antelope ground squirrels Rachel Sauer Fri, 01/16/2026 - 08:25

Jeff Mitton

Desert dwellers offer evidence that genes carried by an individual store information that literally reaches back millions of years

Sitting in my campsite at Goblin Valley State Park, I saw an antelope ground squirrel standing erect on its back feet, which I found amusing. I soon found that this was a common posture evoked by vigilance. Antelope ground squirrels are in the genus Ammospermophilus, which has five species, all in North America. I was watching white-tailed antelope ground squirrels, A. leucurus, the only antelope ground squirrel in Colorado and Utah.

Antelope ground squirrels (AGS) occur primarily in deserts, including Great Basin, San Joaquin, Mojave, Peninsular, Sonoran and Chihuahuan. They also occur in dryland environments like sagebrush communities and some grasslands. Most species of ground squirrels hibernate, but living in relatively warm and dry environments allows AGS to be active year round.

AGS have several adaptations that allow them to live in the deserts of the western United States and Mexico. Later that day, in the heat of the afternoon, AGS were walking with their white tails coiled above their backs to shed their own portable shade. They would also linger in the shade of a piñon pine, dumping heat by stretching out their legs and pressing their bellies onto the soil. This posture is used frequently in their burrows, between bouts of foraging on the surface. Their body temperatures can rise to 108 to 110 degrees F without damage, much higher than most mammals.

AGS are adapted to deserts or drylands and A. leucurus occupies the greatest distribution, including Oregon, Idaho, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and the Baja California Peninsula. Background reading turned up a paper in a scientific journal that nicely demonstrated, with AGS, how biologists can utilize DNA sequences to infer an evolutionary tree of the genus, and to not only estimate the date that the genus first arose but also infer when and where each species arose.

Antelope ground squirrels occur primarily in deserts and also in dryland environments like sagebrush communities and some grasslands. (Photo: Jeff Mitton)

From 10 million years ago to the end of the Miocene, 5.33 million years ago, a single lineage sustained the ancestors of AGS, but approximately 4 million years ago, as deserts were spreading and developing in the Southwest, the lineage split into three clades. That is, from a solitary trunk the tree of AGS sprouted three branches. A. interpres evolved east of the Sea of Cortez, A. leucurus south ranged from the southern tip of Baja to the middle of the peninsula and A. leucurus north ranged from the middle of Baja to Oregon and Idaho.

Fewer than 1 million years ago, another three species evolved. Pioneers from the leucurus south clade colonized two small islands east of Baja in the Sea of Cortez and evolved into A. insularis. The leucurus north form spread into the San Joaquin Desert in California and evolved into A. nelsoni, and subsequently the AGS in Arizona and northern Mexico evolved into A. harrisii. A. leucurus still ranges from the southern tip of Baja to Oregon and Idaho, but within A. leucurus nine subspecies are recognized today.

Dates on the AGS phylogenetic tree were estimated with mutation rates in three genes and with fossil data. A. insularis, A. harrisii and A nelsonii evolved recently, with an average of 0.32 million years ago. On a different continent, modern humans evolved around 0.20 to 0.30 million years ago—approximately the same time.

At first, the differentiation of A. leucurus into northern and southern forms or clades seems curious, but similar vicariances or taxonomic boundaries have been noted in systematic and biogeographic studies of other mammals, birds, fish and insects. The barrier has been attributed to the Vizcaíno Seaway, which is now the Vizcaíno Desert. While systematists agree that there was a barrier to gene flow near the middle of the Baja Peninsula, estimates from different studies yield different estimates, which vary from 1 to 3 million years ago. One description of the modern desert mentions multiple marine terraces, but another states flatly that there is no convincing evidence of an open, freely flowing seaway. Perhaps the marine terraces were formed by recurrent, ephemeral lagoons or marshes that were sufficient to disrupt gene flow.

Studies like this one emphasize the point that the genes carried by an individual store information that literally reaches back millions of years. Historical biogeographers working with genetic data in animals or plants or microbes can peer through the roiling mists of time to infer relationships among species, to detect speciations and extinctions and to map the migrations of species driven by glacial cycles. Similar techniques to those used in this study of AGS were used to map the migration routes that brought humans from southern Africa to every continent, archipelago and island in the world. Furthermore, our genome carries the evidence that humans hybridized with Neanderthals in Europe and the Middle East and Denisovans in Siberia.

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Listening to the preacher: Martin Luther King Jr. on collective morality

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:21:16 +0000

Listening to the preacher: Martin Luther King Jr. on collective morality Rachel Sauer Thu, 01/15/2026 - 11:21

Anshul Rai Sharma

Among the many reasons that Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy matters is because it refuses cynicism and moral fatigue

Jan. 19 marks Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a day to commemorate King’s life and an opportunity to revisit his political practice. In this current moment when crises intersect—as economic inequality widens, housing and healthcare insecurity grows and geopolitical uncertainties strengthen—many of us experience a quieter crisis of moral fatigue. The scale of what is wrong can numb our attention.

One of the many reasons King’s legacy matters is because it refuses cynicism. Fifty-eight years after his death, we are faced with the same question as he: How do we turn “this fatigue of despair into buoyancy of hope,” to use the preacher’s own phrase? In an era saturated with calls to save the world through individual moral ambition, King's approach may offer better and more productive alternatives by inviting a shared reflection on moral fatigue across societies, from the United States to India.

Anshul Rai Sharma is a PhD student in the С�� Boulder Department of Geography.

As a national leader, King was always alert to that which people share beneath their divisions. In his speeches, he always articulated a common humanity: "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." This network of mutuality made him see social divisions as unnatural and morally indefensible.

As a young man, his train journey from Atlanta to Connecticut allowed him to witness how Black people sat separate from whites up to the Mason-Dixon line. But north of it, that barrier disappeared, revealing the arbitrariness of racial divisions and setting him on a lifelong path toward reconciliation. If, as W.E.B. Du Bois famously observed, the problem of the century was the problem of the color line, King's response was to wage a struggle against this separation through nonviolence.

In doing so, King was informed by an amalgam of influences, from Gandhi’s philosophy and practice of nonviolence to Walter Rauschenbusch’s social gospel. King wrestled with each philosophical idea and method as he exercised his own conscience. Added to this was his experience in organizing—from Montgomery’s bus boycott to the Poor People’s Campaign in Chicago, each, in its way, shaping and expanding King’s conception of humanity. The result was a moral geography without borders—one that may offer a way out of fatigue.

King’s life and practice

Throughout his life, King presented groups with moral demands attuned to their social position. From African Americans, he demanded nonviolent discipline in protest, a rigorous collective practice capable of transforming suffering into political force. From northern white liberals, he asked for more than verbal agreement with racial equality. As he put it, “It is one thing to agree with the goal of integration legally; it is another to commit oneself positively and actively to the ideal of integration.” From Southern white moderates, he demanded courage to overcome fear, to break with social consensus and to persuade others.

I read this strategy, unique to King, as a widening of moral responsibility. To separate morality from social life was, in his view, to empty it of force.

Similarly, individual ethical commitments that remained confined to belief, civility or legal agreement were insufficient because they left unjust structures intact. Instead of placing morality above or apart from social relations, King embedded it within them.

The result was a slow and gradual forging of solidarities, which transcended religious and class divisions. The Montgomery bus boycott, for instance, brought together Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians and Episcopalians. Though some clergy at times resisted King’s call to address social realities—instead suggesting that such matters be left to courts—King reminded them that “[a]ny religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.” In doing so, King redefined the church’s role as a moral actor accountable to the material conditions of people’s lives.

During his 1959 visit to India, Martin Luther King Jr. was introduced at a public gathering as a fellow “untouchable." He was featured on a stamp in India in 1969. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

His moral appeal transcended class divisions as physicians, teachers and lawyers stood alongside domestic workers and laborers in marches, united by King's vision of common life. Thus, social uplift became a shared undertaking in which no group stood outside responsibility. By grounding ethics in social struggle, King laid the foundation for a politics aimed at social reform.

‘I am an untouchable’

Social reform, in any credible sense, must begin from the lived realities of those most affected by injustice and confront the structures that sustain inequality. Not only did King’s philosophy align with Gandhi’s non-violence, it was also informed by a deep encounter with caste as a form of structural oppression.

During his 1959 visit to India, King was introduced at a public gathering as a fellow “untouchable,” a term then used to describe Dalits, those placed at the bottom of caste hierarchy and historically subjected to extreme social exclusion. Initially taken aback by the comparison, King reflected on its meaning: “Yes,” he said, “I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” He recognized the shared condition of social degradation produced by social systems. Such systems were deemed moral evils that demanded organized dismantling. Speaking of race and caste, he continued, “We have a moral mandate to get rid of this evil system.”

In this respect, King’s project of racial integration and equality resonates intimately with that of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the early-20th-century Dalit intellectual and political leader and principal architect of modern India’s constitution. Born into an “untouchable” caste, Ambedkar argued that political freedom without social reform was hollow and that democracy in independent India could not survive unless caste was dismantled at its roots.

While King is most often read alongside Gandhi, more enduring intellectual and strategic affinities lie with Ambedkar. Both leaders share historic trajectories, where King, the son of a Black preacher, rose to become a national leader of the U.S. Civil Rights movement; and Ambedkar, born into a Dalit family, became India’s foremost leader of the oppressed castes. These parallel lives help us see how both thinkers understood social oppression as systemic and placed social reform at the center of a nation’s political life. In 2017, Martin Luther King III, during a visit to India, emphasized the shared legacy of King and Ambedkar.

Moral ambition in contemporary times

Martin Luther King Jr. was intimately aware of how working people and the poor possess moral agency even when systems limit their options, and he campaigned to make people see this for themselves. This recognition is the beginning of self-respect, notes С�� Boulder scholar Anshul Rai Sharma. (Photo: U.S. Information Agency Press and Publications Service)

It is against this background that contemporary articulations of morality appear inadequate. Recent calls for ethical renewal often focus on individual responsibility while leaving social relations largely unexamined. Consider Dutch author Rutger Bregman's 2025 book Moral Ambition, which asks people to dedicate their time to improving the world—yet his framework reveals assumptions that, while indicative of our times, need to be reviewed.

Bregman argues that scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs, engineers and lawyers must become "morally ambitious" and that this is the pathway to solving the world’s most pressing issues. But his framework dismisses ordinary people, describing them as "herd animals" who "do what we're taught to do, accept what we're handed, believe what we're told is true."

Where King recognized the masses as capable of spiritual awakening, Bergman’s articulation of morality strips them of agency, seeing ordinary people as passive followers "sticking to the script that goes with our kind of life."

In thinking about this notion of moral ambition, it is important to remember that modern life still divides labor between activities that are or may seem as menial and routine and those that are seen as creative and ideal. A major portion of working people, especially caste minorities in the Global South and racial minorities in the United States, fall into the former category. To label such populations as "herds" or suggest they lack moral ambition refuses genuine engagement with the actual forces that shape people's lives, forces deeply felt and understood by both Ambedkar and King.

A portion of King’s enduring appeal lies in this recognition. Ordinary people face real economic and social constraints that shape their choices. These may include the struggle to make rent, raise children, navigate discrimination and survive without reliable state support. King was intimately aware of how working people and the poor possess moral agency even when systems limit their options, and he campaigned to make people see this for themselves. This recognition is the beginning of self-respect.

In his sermons and speeches, he spoke to the part of our being which is a gift, our ability to live dignified lives despite and against inequalities and oppressive structures. Through King’s words, people could see the constraints but also the real meaning of their lives, encouraging them to organize and to act. From Washington to Mumbai, from university halls to churches, this was the transformation that the preacher from Atlanta sought.

This is King's enduring gift, a moral framework that refuses to separate the personal from the social, that sees ordinary people as agents and that understands justice as something we create together rather than await from authorities or technocratic experts. As we face our own moment of moral fatigue, perhaps the question we should ask ourselves is not how to become more “morally ambitious” but how to bring home and amplify the latent moral energies that do not promise rapid or universal solutions, but that remain the quiet foundation of how communities endure, resist and remake the world.

Anshul Rai Sharma is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on caste, urban dispossession and housing in the city of Bengaluru, India.

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Among the many reasons that Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy matters is because it refuses cynicism and moral fatigue.

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Top photo: The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 28, 1963. (Photo: Agence France-Presse/Wikimedia Commons)

Merry Jewish Christmas

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 21:59:10 +0000

Merry Jewish Christmas Rachel Sauer Wed, 12/10/2025 - 14:59

Samira Mehta

How Chinese food and the movies became a time-honored tradition for American Jews

There is a meme that circulates every holiday season, an image of a sign in a restaurant window. “The Chinese Restaurant Association of the United States would like to extend our thanks to the Jewish people,” it says. “We do not completely understand your dietary customs … but we are proud and grateful that your GOD insists you eat our food on Christmas.”

Is the sign real? Perhaps not; the fact-checking site Snopes found no evidence of the association even existing. But the joke’s popularity points to a tradition cherished by many American Jews – Chinese food on Christmas.

But why would Jews, who do not celebrate Christmas, have Christmas traditions?

Samira Mehta is director of the С�� Boulder Program in Jewish Studies and an associate professor of women and gender studies.

Like many minority groups, Jews have always created ways of adapting to the societies in which they live, but whose culture they do not totally share. And one thing that means is a collection of Christmas traditions, varying by time and place. Many of them came up in interviews for my book “Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States.”

Old World festivities

Long before Jews came to the United States, some of them celebrated Christmas – participating in many of the cultural traditions, even as they avoided the religious part of the holiday.

According to Jordan Chad, author of “Christmas in Yiddish Tradition,” Jewish folklore about the holiday appears as early as the late 1300s. Plenty of Jewish communities in Europe spent Christmas Eve dancing and drinking, feasting and gambling – as many of their Christian neighbors did, when those neighbors were not in church.

Other scholars have argued that these traditions grew out of attempts to avoid studying Jewish religious texts on a Christian holiday. But Chad demonstrates that, over centuries, those customs came to celebrate the revelry of the season – though not the birth of Jesus.

Even in the 20th century, scholars such as Yaniv Feller have found, many middle- and upper-class German Jews embraced a secular Christmas, complete with a tree, a traditional dinner and presents. After all, some of those Christmas traditions stem less from religion than folk traditions and industrialization.

Given that long history, Jewish Christmas traditions are not necessarily a sign of Americanization.

That said, in the United States, Christmas is so culturally powerful – a day that almost everyone has off, and that the majority of Americans spend with their kith and kin – that many non-Christian immigrants celebrate it in a secular way, with family visits, Santa and a tree. They do not necessarily do the religious parts of the holiday, but they may well deck the halls. Certainly, my own Hindu relatives do.

And many Jews celebrate Christmas in some way because they are part of interfaith families – whether their own immediate family or extended relatives with whom they spend the day. Today, estimates place the American Jewish interfaith marriage rate as high as 50%.

Kosher-style Chinese

For plenty of contemporary Jews, however, it is profoundly important not to celebrate a secular version of Christmas. Starting in the 1970s, in fact, when American Jews were particularly worried about rising rates of interfaith marriage, many of the rabbis willing to perform ceremonies for Jewish-Christian couples made them promise to not have a Christmas tree. This happened despite the fact that, at the time, many American Jews did have Christmas trees in their homes.

Even if Jews do not want to deck the halls, though, many still have the day off. Meanwhile, their non-Jewish friends, families and co-workers are busy and much of the world is closed. And so many Jews have developed their own ways of marking the day.

Some Jewish families decorate a ‘Hanukkah bush’ as a seasonal alternative to a Christmas tree. (Photo: Jonah Green/Wikimedia Commons)

The Chinese food tradition is particularly famous. In fact, during Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s 2010 confirmation hearings, when Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham asked her where she had been on Christmas Day, she responded, “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”

The first written mention of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas Day comes from 1935, when, according to The New York Times, a man named Eng Shee Chuck brought chow mein and toys to a New Jersey Jewish orphanage.

His generosity was probably not why Jews started going to Chinese restaurants on Christmas; it is more likely that they were already doing so. The two communities lived cheek by jowl in many American cities, where immigrants of different sorts ended up in the same neighborhoods. And Chinese food contains little dairy, meaning it rarely violated Jewish dietary laws against mixing milk and meat.

Most Chinese cuisines do use pork and shrimp, which is forbidden by kosher laws. But many Jewish customers were happy to make an exception, especially if the forbidden food was tucked in a dumpling or otherwise out of sight – at least outside their own homes.

As new research by New York University graduate student Shiyong Lu demonstrates, Chinese restaurants were also eager to cater to American Jews: They wanted to develop white, American clientele, and here were some right in their neighborhoods.

As restaurant owners learned that Jews often eschewed pork, some began to offer traditional dishes with chicken instead – allowing more observant Jews to eat “kosher style,” without eating explicitly forbidden food. Today, there is wide variation in Jewish dietary practices, making Chinese food even more accessible for most Jews.

By the end of the 20th century, “Chinese food and a movie” had become the trope of Jewish Christmas. Because most Chinese immigrants were not Christian, their restaurants are often open on Dec. 25. And indeed, they are often filled with Jews.

Movies, volunteering and more

The same tends to be true for movie theaters. In 2012, I saw “Les Misérables” on Christmas Day in a theater that seemed to be a who’s who of the Atlanta Jewish community. In fact, the movies and the Chinese food are often paired, whether out on the town or at home, streaming with take out.

Jewish museums are often open and are another popular destination in cities that have them. And some Jews use Christmas Day for travel. At least in eras past, plane tickets were notably cheaper than the days around the holiday.

Another Jewish Christmas tradition is simply to go to work, so as to let Christian colleagues have the day off. Many Jewish doctors and nurses are on call, or staff the emergency room or the intensive care unit, so that their colleagues can be home.

Still other Jews perform charitable deeds on Christmas: They staff soup kitchens and food banks, bring holiday cheer to nursing homes and hospital patients, or deliver gifts to children in shelters.

Living in a culture that largely closes down each Dec. 25, many Jews have found ways of making meaning in the day – be that sharing family time over beef and broccoli, followed by a holiday blockbuster, or working to make sure that more of their colleagues can have a family day. And those, too, are Christmas traditions.

Samira Mehta is director of the Program in Jewish Studies and an associate professor of women and gender studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How Chinese food and the movies became a time-honored tradition for American Jews.

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Streaming killed the video star

Kylie Clarke — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:12:02 +0000

Streaming killed the video star Kylie Clarke Tue, 12/02/2025 - 17:12

Jared Bahir Browsh

Once a cultural phenomenon, MTV ends five music channels in the UK; viewership in the U.S. continues its downward slide

When MTV announced earlier this year that it would be shutting down music channels at the end of 2025, the reaction was nearly unanimous: MTV still plays music?

The digital networks—MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live— will shut down in the United Kingdom, Ireland and several other countries in Europe. In the United States, MTV’s secondary networks—MTV2, MTV Live, MTV Classic and MTVU—will continue operating for now despite declining viewership and being carried through cable.

The changes are evidence of both the global reach MTV had at its peak and the significant changes that have occurred in television, especially over the last decade as the rise of streaming and cord cutting has led to a dramatic decline in cable and linear viewing.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the С�� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Music programming has been a part of television since the 1930s, when radio broadcasters transitioned to the visual medium and many of the early experimental broadcasts in the United States and Europe featured live musical performances. As television matured following World War II, music continued to be an integral part of its growth with variety programs like The Ed Sullivan Show, which debuted as Toast of the Town in 1948, and American Bandstand, which debuted as a local program in Philadelphia in 1952 featuring top musical acts.

These shows not only brought musical acts into people’s homes but were one of the few opportunities for African Americans to be seen on the quickly growing medium. The Ethel Waters Show, a variety special that aired on NBC in New York City in 1939, was the first television show to be hosted by an African American. Later, as television spread, Nat “King” Cole hosted his own show, which aired nationally beginning in 1956, but struggled to gain a permanent sponsor in its 13 months on air, causing Cole to comment “Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark.” In spite of this type of prejudice, Ed Sullivan and American Bandstand regularly featured Black artists in the 1940s and 1950s before Brown v. Board of Education overturned segregation in schools.

Musicals before videos

Short musical movies are as old as sound films, with series like Silly Symphonies debuting in 1929 and featuring animation produced around classical music. Warner Bros. followed Disney’s lead with Looney Tunes in 1930 and Merrie Melodies in 1931, featuring music from the Warner Bros. catalog. In 1929, RCA produced the short film Black and Tanwith Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, set in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1930s, Paramount produced a series of short films featuring Cab Calloway and His Orchestra, offering visuals as a companion to his music.

In 1964, Top of the Pops debuted on the BBC, airing interviews, live performances and music news based on weekly record charts. The program also featured pre-taped music videos, then known as promotional films, when artists could not perform in the studio live. The Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night was also released in 1964, accompanied by the album of the same name and functioning as a promotional vehicle for the band and its music. Inspired by the Beatles’ film, “The Monkees” TV show debuted on NBC in 1966 with a made-for-TV band and their music at the center of the series. In animation, Saturday morning producers took a cue from the popularity of The Monkees with young viewers and made series like “The Archie Show” and “Josie and the Pussycats” following the same model. The fictional band The Archies even scored a No. 1 hit with “Sugar, Sugar.”

In the United States, Ed Sullivan ended his run on television in 1971 and the following year NBC’s “The Midnight Special” and ABC’s “In Concert" debuted, featuring filmed live performances and the occasional music video.

Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody is often recognized as a turning point in music videos. Released on “Top of the Pops” in 1975, the video’s production value and popularity led to a new age of music video production and to music videos becoming a vital tool to promote singles.

Throughout the 1970s, dedicated music video programs, including Australia’s “Countdown” and “Sounds,” aired more frequently. In the United States, cable television was quickly expanding and USA Network/Showtime’s Video Concert Hall, which debuted in 1978, featured music videos. In 1980, Pop Clips aired as a weekly show on Nickelodeon, produced by former Monkees member and music video pioneer Michael Nesmith.

Nickelodeon, the first children’s cable network, had been launched the previous year, in April 1979, by Warner Cable Communications; American Express purchased 50% of Warner Cable Corp. in September of that year. Soon after, Warner-Amex began to develop a network to attract the underserved teenage audience. Seeing music as a way to connect with the demographic, the company was originally going to purchase and expand Pop Clips, but instead developed its own Music Television network.

MTV launched on Aug. 1, 1981, and fittingly, The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first video played on the new network. The new network’s impact on the music industry was nearly immediate, as bands with little radio play like The Human League and Men at Work saw a significant uptick in record sales. It also kicked off the Second British Invasion, as the music video format was featured for years on British television. As U.S. acts scrambled to leverage the format, music videos imported from Britain by bands like The Police filled the MTV schedule.

In spite of the demonstrable cultural impact of MTV, the network still faced challenges from the limited proliferation of cable and the unwillingness of cable companies to carry the station due to concerns over the long-term viability of the network. After negotiations with cable operators resulted in little progress, MTV decided to go directly to the consumer. The “I want my MTV” campaign featured famous musical stars like Mick Jagger and David Bowie to promote the network and persuade television viewers to call their cable providers and pressure them to pick up MTV.

Controversial MTV

MTV’s rise in the early 1980s was not without controversy. Black artists were rarely seen on the channel, a fact Bowie raised in a 1983 interview on the network. Programmers for MTV said that the channel’s rock focus and fears of alienating fans in middle America prevented Black artists from being placed in heavy rotation. When Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” was rejected by MTV, the president of his label, CBS Records, threatened to pull all of the label’s artists from the network. MTV relented and the video debuted on March 10, 1983. Boosted by the music videos for “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” and especially the title track “Thriller,” the album went on to become the highest selling record of all time. The popularity of Jackson’s videos helped him to become the “King of Pop.” The music video for the title track of Jackson’s next album, “Bad” premiered in primetime on CBS, and the premiere for the video for “Remember the Time” was simulcast on multiple networks including ABC, NBC and MTV.

The following year was a turning point for the network. On the business side, Warner spun off Nickelodeon and MTV into their own company, MTV Networks, later buying Amex’s stake in the company and then turning around and selling all of MTV Networks to Viacom, completing the deal in 1986. Several new programs and special events also debuted on the network in 1984, including the MTV Music Video Awards, the Top 20 Countdown and the WWE event The Brawl to End It All, the first live wrestling event on cable. Cyndi Lauper featured wrestler Captain Lou Albano in her 1983 video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” leading to a WWE storyline featuring the pop star and cross-marketing that benefitted both MTV and the WWE.

MTV’s influence spread quickly throughout the 1980s, influencing other media while earning criticism for its effect on the music industry. Shows like Miami Vice introduced the aesthetics and music of MTV into scripted television. On the other hand, MTV was also criticized for leading the music industry to focus more on the visual appeal of artists than their music.

The Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 helped remove regulations that were slowing cable’s growth, leading to further expansion of MTV and other cable networks into new markets. Throughout the 1980s, the network continued to expand its original programming, moving away from the radio-style format hosted by its video jockeys, or VJs. This included more genre-specific shows like Headbangers Ball, which featured heavy metal, and the alternative rock-focused 120 Minutes, along with Dial MTV, which allowed viewers to call in and vote for their favorite videos.

Even with the expansion of music played on MTV, there were still genres the network overlooked. With MTV playing very little country music, in 1983 both Country Music Television and The Nashville Network launched. The same year, Black Entertainment Television also grew from a programming block on the USA Network into an independent network, airing music videos from Black artists. In 1985, MTV’s sister network VH1 premiered, focused on an older audience with adult contemporary music. All of these networks are now owned by Paramount.

MTV also expanded beyond the United States when MTV Europe launched in 1987. One of the new network’s early shows, Yo!, featured hip-hop artists and became one of its most popular programs, Yo! MTV Raps, which debuted in the United States in 1988 and helped expand hip-hop’s visibility. The genre had been limited on the network to a few artists like Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys, both of which heavily sampled rock music. Also in 1987, This Week in Rock launched MTV News, which originally focused on music and pop culture news but expanded into politics during the 1992 election, focusing on issues impacting its younger audience.

MTV continued to expand their programming in the late 1980s and early 1990s, airing the game show Remote Control and giving young comedians Ben Stiller and Jon Stewart their own shows. In 1992, MTV Sports debuted focusing on extreme sports, helping to bring skateboarding, BMX, and other alternative sports to the mainstream leading to the X Games in 1995. The same year modern reality TV was launched with The Real World. This also marked the beginning of the shift away from music videos as more reality shows and docuseries, like Road Rules and True Life, filled more of the schedule throughout the 1990s.

The last gasp for the music in Music Television was Total Request Live (TRL), which debuted in 1998. Driven by the popularity of boy bands, “pop princesses,” hip-hop, and pop rock, the show aired in the afternoon as teenagers were getting home from school. The program revitalized the role of the VJ and launched the careers of Carson Daly, Hilarie Burton, La La Anthony, and Vanessa Lachey. By the time TRL ended its original 10 year run, most of the music videos on the network were airing in late night.

As MTV moved into other programming, the internet became the primary platform for music videos. The non-linear format offered by early MTV with a playlist of very different videos played back to back forecasted our relationship with YouTube, TikTok, and other social media sites. MTV motivated the evolution of the music industry and the explosion of music videos that continue today, even as Paramount moves away from the M in MTV.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the С�� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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Once a cultural phenomenon, MTV ends five music channels in the UK; viewership in the U.S. continues its downward slide.

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Top image: MTV

On Thanksgiving, pass the gravy and a tight spiral

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 19:10:19 +0000

On Thanksgiving, pass the gravy and a tight spiral Rachel Sauer Mon, 11/17/2025 - 12:10

Jared Bahir Browsh

The tradition of football on the fourth Thursday in November is almost as old as the holiday itself, bringing families together in an important cultural touchpoint

As families unite for the Thanksgiving holiday, it is likely the gathering will include watching football before and after the traditional dinner. Thanksgiving football is almost as old as the holiday itself, with more than a century and a half of history on the holiday

Most historians recognize the Nov. 6, 1869, matchup between Princeton University (then The College of New Jersey) and Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, as the first official American football game. “Foot-ball” was played much differently then, looking more like a hybrid of soccer and rugby. Rutgers won by a score of 6-4 with about 100 spectators looking on.

Just 11 days later, an advertisement appeared in The Evening Telegraph, a Philadelphia newspaper, announcing a “foot-ball match" between Young America Cricket Club and the Germantown Cricket Club to be played in the Germantown section of the city on Thanksgiving. There are no reports of the game, but considering it took place just 70 miles southwest of New Brunswick, it was likely played under the same rules as the college game.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the С�� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Abraham Lincoln, influenced by a series of essays written by editor and activist Sarah Josepha Hale, had established Thanksgiving in 1863, proclaiming the last Thursday of November a holiday. Subsequent presidents continued this traditional proclamation until 1939, when Franklin D. Roosevelt named the second-to-last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving to provide an extra week for holiday shopping. This created a political rift with Republicans, who declared that day “Franksgiving” and encouraged Americans to celebrate the holiday the following week.

Congress solidified the date of Thanksgiving in 1941, with Roosevelt signing the bill on Dec. 26, 1942, officially making the fourth Thursday of November the Thanksgiving holiday. By this time, football on Thanksgiving had become a tradition, with some high schools establishing rivalries as early as 1875 and annual intercollegiate games beginning in 1876.

Princeton and Yale played a yearly game on Thanksgiving between 1876 and 1881 before the Intercollegiate Football Association declared its championship would take place on the holiday beginning in 1882. The University of Michigan played annually on Thanksgiving between 1885 and 1905, including a series of games against the University of Chicago that helped firmly establish football’s presence on the holiday. Many New England high schools play their rivalry game, or Turkey Bowl, on the holiday, allowing alumni to come back to root on their alma mater, a tradition that celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2025.

The third edition of the “Border War” between the University of Kansas and University of Missouri in 1893 took place on Thanksgiving in Kansas City, Missouri, a tradition that continued through 1910, when the conference began requiring all games to be played on college campuses. Like many rivalry games, it is now played in late November, typically the weekend after Thanksgiving.

As old as pro football

Thanksgiving games are also as old as professional football itself—the first recognized professional team, the Allegheny Athletic Association in Western Pennsylvania, regularly played on Thanksgiving. Regional professional leagues in Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania scheduled marquee late-season matchups and championships on Thanksgiving. The Ohio League and other professional and semi-professional football organizations did stop holding Thanksgiving games for a short time, given that many of their players were high school coaches whose teams played that day.

From its inception in 1920 as the American Professional Football Association, the NFL began playing games on Thanksgiving. The Detroit Panthers played their first Thanksgiving game in 1925, a tradition carried by several Detroit franchises including the Detroit Lions. In the Lions’ first season in 1934, owner George A. Richards saw a Thanksgiving Day game as a way to market the new team. Richards also owned NBC radio affiliate WJR, and he negotiated that the matchup against the Chicago Bears be broadcast nationally.

The NFL’s hold on Thanksgiving was disrupted in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The Franksgiving controversy led to a political-party split over when states would recognize the holiday, making it difficult for football teams to schedule games across state lines. The one exception in the NFL was the case of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles; being in the same state, they were able to play the game when Pennsylvania chose to recognize Franksgiving.

Yale and Princeton, here playing at Yale Field on Nov. 20, 1897, had an annual match-up on Thanksgiving between 1876-1881 before the Intercollegiate Football Association declared its championship would take place on the holiday beginning in 1882. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

World War II disrupted all sports, with the NFL hit especially hard by the loss of personnel, causing some teams to suspend operations. In one notable case, it led the Eagles and Steelers to combine teams to play as the Steagles for a season in 1943.

When NFL Thanksgiving games resumed in 1945, only the Lions continued the tradition. The All-America Football Conference (AAFC) played on Thanksgiving when the league launched in 1946. Both the AAFC’s Cleveland Browns and the San Francisco 49ers played on Thanksgiving in 1947 before joining the NFL after the AAFC folded in 1949.

The Lions and their rival Green Bay Packers, which play each other on Thanksgiving this year, battled on the holiday every year between 1951 and 1963. During this time, the two franchises’ fortunes seemingly switched, with Vince Lombardi taking over the Packers and leading the team to six NFL championships in the 1960s, of which they won five, including the first two Super Bowls. The Lions were the only NFL team to play on Thanksgiving during this period, except in 1952, when the Dallas Texans, in their only season, were scheduled to play the Chicago Bears. The Texans-Bears game had to be moved to Akron, Ohio, due to a scheduling conflict in Dallas. The Bears, underestimating the expansion team, sent their second unit to Akron and were upset by the Texans in the team’s only win of their sole season.

Not on Friday or Saturday

The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 allowed the NFL to negotiate media rights on behalf of the entire league, with the league agreeing to not broadcast on Fridays and Saturdays—a concession made to protect traditional scheduling of high school on Friday and college football on Saturday. Thursdays were an exception, so it did not affect the broadcasting of football games on Thanksgiving, although it would be another four decades until Thursday night games became a weekly fixture for the NFL.

Dallas returned to Thanksgiving in 1966, when Cowboys’ President Tex Schramm saw a holiday game as a way to publicize the team that was founded in 1960. Schramm also felt there would be an advantage for the team, given that the visiting team would have one less day of practice due to travel. The Cowboys joined the Lions as a permanent fixture on Thanksgiving, hosting a game on the holiday every year since 1966, except for 1975 and 1977. In those two years, the St. Louis Cardinals hosted over the much more popular Cowboys, who had become consistent Super Bowl contenders. The Cowboys’ success in the period and their appearance in the nationally televised Thanksgiving game led to their becoming “America’s Team.”

St. Louis also had a long-running tradition of the “Turkey Bowl Game” between high school powerhouses Kirkwood Pioneers and Webster Groves Statesmen. The matchup, which started in 1928, is an example of Thanksgiving’s presence in high school football. Separately, Norwich Free Academy and New London High School in Connecticut have been playing the “Ye Olde Ball Game” since 1875.

The Detroit Lions and the Atlanta Falcons play on Thanksgiving Day in 2005. (Photo: Dave Hogg/Wikimedia Commons)

Historically, many high school sports associations ended their seasons around Thanksgiving, allowing for championship games and rivalry matchups to be held on the holiday. State tournaments and shifts in sports seasons have disrupted this tradition in some places, but Thanksgiving continues to be a major day for high school football, especially in New England and the northeastern United States where these traditions began.

Football fans typically have very few obligations on Thanksgiving, given its status as a holiday. The holiday’s intersection with the end of the high school and college football seasons has meant playing on Thanksgiving quickly became a tradition for football. This has only intensified with the advent of television, as families use sports to come together or even escape tensions, which is why the NFL’s Thanksgiving games are among the league’s highest-rated regular-season contests. This popularity led to a third primetime game being added to the schedule to complement the early afternoon Lions game and midafternoon Cowboys game.

The third primetime game was partially motivated by the limited opportunity for American Football League teams to play in the game. When the AFL launched in 1960, it scheduled Thanksgiving Day games; however, when the league merged with the NFL in 1970, the Lions and Cowboys, two NFC teams, continued to be the sole hosts of Thanksgiving Day games. This meant that fewer AFC teams played on Thanksgiving and could only be the away team.

Playing in primetime

The first primetime Thanksgiving matchup, played in 2006, featured the Denver Broncos and Kansas City Chiefs and marked the premiere of Thursday Night Football. NBC obtained the rights to the primetime Thanksgiving game in 2012, which continued in spite of Amazon gaining exclusive rights to Thursday Night Football in 2022. The following year, the first Black Friday game aired on Amazon, further leveraging the holiday and shopping season. The game is played in the afternoon to avoid conflicts with the Sports Broadcasting Act, which bans the NFL from Friday night broadcasts during the high school season.

While a national audience watched, there have been several memorable games and traditions during the holiday game. The first overtime game on Thanksgiving was in 1980, with the Bears returning the opening kickoff for a touchdown—the shortest overtime in NFL history. The Bounty Bowl in 1989 intensified the rivalry between the Eagles and Cowboys after Philadelphia was accused of offering a reward for injuring the Cowboys kicker. In 2012, the infamous Butt Fumble occurred on Thanksgiving, when New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez ran into the backside of his own teammate. The fumble was picked up by the New England Patriots and returned for a touchdown.

Teams often wear their alternative jerseys on Thanksgiving to mark the holiday game, including throwback jerseys and the NFL’s monochromatic “Color Rush” uniforms. Halftime has also become a spectacle during Thanksgiving games, and since 1997 the Salvation Army has kicked off its Red Kettle Campaign during halftime of the Dallas game. A halftime concert has also been added to the games over time, with Shaboozey, Lainey Wilson and Lindsey Stirling performing at the three 2024 games.

Considering football on Thanksgiving is almost as old as the federal declaration of the holiday itself, it is no surprise it has become synonymous with the holiday. With fewer shared cultural experiences in this oversaturated media environment, the NFL remains one of the few forms of popular culture that crosses age, gender and political affiliation, helping to ease possible tensions and, along with food, bring families together during the holidays.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the С�� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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The tradition of football on the fourth Thursday in November is almost as old as the holiday itself, bringing families together in an important cultural touchpoint

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Remembering Jane Goodall’s vision for the future

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 23:34:55 +0000

Remembering Jane Goodall’s vision for the future Rachel Sauer Mon, 11/03/2025 - 16:34

Laura DeLuca

The renowned scientist and environmental advocate instilled hope and fostered conservation relationships that prioritized local knowledge and involvement; she also had strong connections to С�� Boulder

Long before I conducted anthropological fieldwork in East Africa, taught secondary school mathematics in Kenya and directed a global seminar in Tanzania, I admired Jane Goodall. As a hardy teen growing up in the Baltimore suburbs, I worshipped Goodall because of her love for chimpanzees, her intelligence, her compassion and her sense of adventure.

I hesitate to admit that, as a compact, muscular teen, I also coveted Goodall’s long, lanky legs, smooth blond ponytail and British matched-set-khaki-with-binoculars look. Like so many other American animal and nature lovers, I wanted to be like her.

I arrived in East Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya nearly 30 years after Goodall left England to study chimpanzees near Gombe, Tanzania. I am 30 years her junior and arrived in East Africa at the same age she did—mid-20s. In my case, I was assigned to teach at Bishop O’Koth Secondary School outside of Kisumu, Kenya.

Laura DeLuca is an anthropologist, director of the С�� Boulder Global Seminar Tanzania and guest director for the Global Seminar: Sustainability & Social Entrepreneurship in Bali, Indonesia. She also is a faculty member in the Stories and Societies Residential Academic Program.

One thing I really admired about Goodall was that she was humble and moved beyond the “white savior” model of conservation—even while benefitting from it. While Goodall was a product of her time and was inspired by books starring Tarzan and Dr. Doolittle—whose core stories now seem to have colonial underpinning—she recognized the importance of community-based conservation efforts that met the needs of Tanzanian residents. That was in contrast to some other non-native researchers, who were often hostile to locals because they believed they were a threat to conservation efforts.

I was teaching about the fortress conservation model in my ANTH 1155 course in Sewall on Oct. 2, the day after Goodall passed away. My students discussed Jim Igoe’s book Conservation and Globalization, about Tanzania and Maasai evictions, so it was in the forefront of my mind.

I held a moment of silence to honor Goodall, following which one of my students, Micah Frye, reminded me that Goodall visited Whittier Elementary School in Boulder in 2013. During her visit, Goodall spoke about her “Roots & Shoots” program, which focuses on youth education in environmental and humanitarian issues.

I teach about fortress conservation in ANTH 1155 because it has a big impact in Africa. It is a conservation model focused on creating protected areas, like Gombe National Park, from which human activity is excluded to safeguard biodiversity from perceived local threats. This approach, often rooted in colonial practices, frequently leads to the forced eviction of indigenous communities and local peoples, undermining their rights and cultural practices.

Goodall moved beyond the fortress model, even as she saw the importance of the national park status that her second husband helped secure for Gombe. To move beyond a fortress model, she founded the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) to inspire people not only to protect great apes and their habitats, but also to create a more harmonious world for all living things, including humans. The Institute’s work includes ongoing scientific research on chimpanzees and community-centered conservation programs to protect species and habitats and help communities realize the benefits from ecotourism. It also includes the Roots & Shoots program to empower youth to create positive change for animals, people, and the environment.

In fact, Goodall wrote the preface to The Solutionary Way, an inspiring book I am using in my Innovating Sustainability SSIR 1010 in Sewall’s Stories and Societies Residential Academic course. In early October, after Goodall’s passing, students wrote a reflection assignment on Goodall regarding lessons that inspired them.

I also appreciate Goodall’s work to hire Tanzanian researchers and scientists in a field that was historically dominated by ex-patriate Europeans, British and Americans. In addition to current Tanzanian leaders Freddy Kimaro, Deus Mjungu, Esther Sabuni, Mwanang’ombe and Erasto Njavike, Goodall hired my dear grad school friend Shadrack Mkolle Kamenya. During our time as graduate students at С�� Boulder in the mid-1990s, we spent hours studying together in Hale Anthropology Building (which Kamenya found creepy at night since the Nubian mummies were stored on the bottom floor).

Kamenya told me stories of his youth, including how as a child playing alongside the lake shore, he used to see Goodall taking a small motorboat on Lake Tanganyika to get to her research. He and his friends nicknamed her the “mzungu was Kasekela” or the “white lady of Kasekela.” (Kasekela is a forest in Gombe.)

Kamenya was the first Tanzanian director of research at the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI). He worked with the JGI for nearly 30 years in research, conservation and education before retiring in 2025 and lives in Kigoma, Tanzania. From August 1997 to 2005, he managed chimpanzee research at the Gombe Stream Research Centre (GSRC) in Gombe National Park.

Kamenya and I have been communicating more since he has retired, and I sent him a WhatsApp message after Goodall died on Oct. 1, asking about their interactions. He recalled how she cared and spoke for nature, which came from her heart, and how her wisdom and knowledge enabled her to talk with all kinds of people: young and old, politicians and leaders, poor and distressed.

In his section of the book Jane Goodall at 90: Celebrating an Astonishing Lifetime of Science, Advocacy, Humanitarianism, Hope and Peace, Kamenya wrote, “What a privilege to be around somebody who makes use of the time she gets on the planet to do the best she can for the environment, other people and biodiversity and very little for herself.”

Shadrack Kamenya (PhDAnth'97) was the first Tanzanian director of research at the Jane Goodall Institute, working for nearly 30 years in research, conservation and education before retiring in 2025. (Photo: Laura DeLuca)

Goodall’s Colorado connections

The IMAX film “Discovering Chimpanzees: The Remarkable World of Jane Goodall” was part of an exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in 2003. I literally gasped in the middle of the dark theater when I saw pictures of Kamenya in the film, which I attended with my friend Karen Cockburn of Africa Travel.

That was just one of many Colorado connections to Goodall that I’ve experienced. She had many friends in Boulder, especially close colleague and collaborator Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at С�� Boulder. Bekoff is not only a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society and a past Guggenheim Fellow; he was also an ambassador for Roots & Shoots.

Herbert Covert, a С�� Boulder professor emeritus of anthropology, also was connected to Goodall through Kamenya: He served as Kamenya’s dissertation adviser and noted that she “aided Kamenya when it was most needed.” To elaborate, funding outside of С�� Boulder that had been promised to support Kamenya’s PhD training did not come through for reasons that were not related to Shadrack’s academic progress. Covert and Kamenya pursued several other funding avenues with limited success until Goodall learned about Kamenya. Not only did Goodall help arrange for Kamenya’s dissertation research in the Gombe, but she also provided most of the necessary financial support needed to allow him to finish his degree.

Goodall also influenced Covert’s research of the behavioral ecology and conservation of endangered colobine monkeys and gibbons of Vietnam. He recalls her as a “sweet person.” Covert reports that he modeled his engagement with Vietnamese colleagues after what he had learned from Goodall; specifically, he requested that they set the research agenda. Thus, Covert and colleagues shared activities that met the needs of local communities with trust and respect.

Partly because of her close connections with Bekoff, Goodall visited Boulder frequently. I remember seeing her on Oct. 1, 2015, at the sold-out С�� Events Center, where she gave the 50th George Gamow Memorial Lecture.

At the beginning of her presentation, Goodall charmingly demonstrated her famous chimpanzee call—a vocalization known as a “pant-hoot”—captivating the Boulder audience and bringing her message to life. She learned to mimic this call during her time observing chimpanzees in Gombe and used it as a distinctive greeting. In the talk, Goodall told the students in attendance, “You’re lucky. You live in Boulder, where there really is concern for the environment (and) where wonderful things are happening. We want that to spread around the world.”

Jane Goodall gave the 50th Gamow Lecture at С�� Boulder Oct. 1, 2015.

On the same day as her talk at С�� Boulder, Goodall, who was 81 at the time, planted trees at Horizons K-8 Charter School. On the same trip, she took time to speak with inmates at the Boulder County Jail who were part of one of Goodall’s Roots & Shoots program, run with great passion for more than 15 years by Bekoff. The Roots & Shoots program was so effective that Goodall expanded it to other jails.

In 2018, Goodall taught a free online course through С�� Boulder for K-12 teachers—a partnership between С�� Boulder and Roots & Shoots.

Participants in the six-week class had access to more than 13 hours of service-oriented training and activities with Goodall and Roots & Shoots staff. The course, offered through Coursera, along with other Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS), taught participants how to identify and implement a local service-learning campaign using the Roots & Shoots program model. The service-learning curriculum equipped participants with education resources to discover the differences between service-learning and community service and apply the Roots & Shoots model to help youth have a voice in identifying and addressing needs in their community.

“There are many reasons to be hopeful for the future of our planet, but perhaps most inspiring is the energy, commitment and hard work of young people who we can empower as they grow to be better, more compassionate decision makers within their society,” Goodall said at the time. “I am so glad that through this Roots & Shoots online course collaboration with С�� Boulder, we’re able to share a message of hope and a call to action with a wider audience than ever before.”

Laura DeLuca is the director of the Global Seminar Tanzania and guest director for the Global Seminar: Sustainability & Social Entrepreneurship in Bali, Indonesia, an anthropologist and a faculty member in the Stories and Societies Residential Academic Program.

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Top image: Jane Goodall in Gombe National Park (Photo: Simon Fraser University/Flickr)

How Super Mario helped Nintendo level up

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 16:06:55 +0000

How Super Mario helped Nintendo level up Rachel Sauer Fri, 10/24/2025 - 10:06

Jared Bahir Browsh

Forty years after the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System, the name remains synonymous with worldwide gaming and technological innovation

When Nintendo released the Switch 2 on June 5, it marked the twelfth distinct console the video game company has sold in the United States. Its first, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), celebrates its 40th anniversary this month; it launched in New York City on Oct. 18, 1985, before launching in other cities, including Los Angeles, in 1986.

Although they are known primarily as a video game company, Nintendo’s roots date back to 1889, when it was founded in Japan as a trading card company. The company did well enough to stay in business through World War II, but its true turning point was in 1959, when it obtained the license to include characters from the Walt Disney Company on its cards, opening the children’s market to Nintendo. The company ventured into toys in 1968 and introduced the Beam Gun two years later, which was an optoelectrical game in which players shot physical targets with light. Electronics giant Magnovox then hired Nintendo to create a light gun for its video game system, the Odyssey, which came out in 1971.

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the С�� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

Like many toy companies making plastic toys, Nintendo struggled during the Oil Crisis of 1973-74, which led to increases in material costs. In response, Nintendo turned its attention to video games, strengthening its partnership with Magnavox to distribute the Odyssey in Japan and also contracting with the company to manufacture microprocessors for its own video game console, the Color TV Game, which launched in 1978. Nintendo was looking to profit from the growing video game market.

Video game consoles at that time were limited and only offered a small number of games, many of which were variations of games like Pong. The cartridge system had been invented in 1974 and licensed to Fairchild Camera and Instrument for its Channel F system in 1976. Jerry Lawson, one of the very few Black game developers, helped improve the design of the cartridges, or “Videocarts,” for release of the Channel F. Unfortunately, the $170 price tag ($950 in 2025) for the system and the $20 ($110 in 2025) for each cartridge, along with limited marketing, led the system to quickly be surpassed by the Atari 2600, released in 1977, which had a similar price point but more action games and arcade ports and a higher marketing budget.

Even as the home console market grew with advancing technology, the arcade market exploded, since arcade cabinets could contain more circuitry and computing power than their home counterparts. Arcades entered their golden age in the late 1970s, with several space-themed games like Asteroids and Space Invaders leading both children and adults to spend quarter after quarter to beat these games. Arguably, the most popular game to emerge in this era was Namco’s Pac-Man, which debuted in 1980. The gameplay was not just addictive, but it was one of the earliest arcade games to feature a marketable character. Inspired by a pizza missing a slice, the little yellow protagonist became a pop culture phenomenon and inspired merchandise, an animated series and even a Top 10 song.

From Jumpman to Mario

Nintendo’s home console, and the company as a whole, struggled financially in the late 1970s. However, two significant events occurred in 1979 that helped the company reverse its fortunes in the electronics market. First, Nintendo opened its American subsidiary in New York City in 1979 and began developing arcade games. Then, the following year, Nintendo released the Game & Watch, one of the first handheld video game systems using technology similar to that in handheld calculators. The success of the Game & Watch, and the introduction of Nintendo’s early arcade cabinets Sheriff (1979) and Radar Scope (1980) in Japan, pushed the company to invest more resources into electronic games.

After Radar Scope’s lower-than-expected U.S. sales, though, Nintendo needed a game to place in the unsold cabinets. In 1981, it released the first platform game in which the main character could jump as they made their way up the level. The game and characters were designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and replaced the hardware in unused Radar Scope cabinets.

Jumpman, as the character was called at the time, climbed ladders and jumped over barrels thrown by a giant gorilla to save the damsel in distress, Pauline. What came to be known as Donkey Kong was also groundbreaking because it featured cutscenes, or non-interactive narrative scenes, that helped to advance the game story.

Donkey Kong was groundbreaking because it featured cutscenes, or non-interactive narrative scenes, that helped to advance the game story and also introduced the world to Jumpman, who became the world-famous Mario. (Photo: Nintendo)

Donkey Kong not only went on to become one of the bestselling arcade games of all time, but when Jumpman was renamed Mario—after the warehouse landlord of Nintendo’s Washington state headquarters—Nintendo suddenly had found its mascot. The Donkey Kong spinoff Mario Bros. was released in arcades in July 1983, introducing the world to Mario’s brother Luigi and other now-ubiquitous characters like turtles that were later renamed Koopas.

Less than two weeks after Mario Bros. was released in arcades, Nintendo’s Family Computer (Famicom) was released in Japan. Home consoles maintained their popularity in Japan even as the video game market crashed in the United States in 1983—largely due to the lack of quality control over the games made for consoles like Atari, causing a flood of badly produced games into the market.

One downward tipping point was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a video game based on the blockbuster movie that came out in the summer of 1982. Atari reportedly paid between $20-$25 million for the rights to “E.T.” and accelerated the production schedule from six months to less than six weeks to ensure it was available for the Christmas season. Atari manufactured 4 million “E.T.” cartridges, but 3.5 million were reportedly either unsold or returned by customers. The surplus was infamously buried in New Mexico.

Oversaturation of low-quality games, along with the introduction of home computers and stagnation in video game technology, led to a drop in the video game market from more than $3.2 billion ($10.5 billion in 2025) in sales in 1983 to $100 million ($300 million in 2025) in 1985. Arcades also faced a decline in 1983 and 1984 but soon recovered as new technology entered arcades.

Surviving the market crash

Prior to the mid-1980s market slump, Sega introduced the Convert-a-Game system in 1981, which allowed for easier conversion of the game software in arcade cabinets, so that players could enjoy new releases without changing entire cabinets. The Nintendo VS. system used this hardware when it debuted in arcades in 1984, introducing the Famicom system to the U.S. market as Nintendo developed the console for the North American market. Games like Tennis and Excitebike debuted on the VS. system as Nintendo decided which games would be available for the U.S. launch.

After the dramatic video game market crash, Nintendo was aware of how retailers and consumers perceived video games, so it marketed the system as a toy rather than a game. Originally titled Advanced Video System, Nintendo altered the console’s design to feature neutral gray and black and altered the system from top-loading one to a front-loading insertion system similar to a VCR, which made it distinct from earlier consoles like the Atari 2600.

To further separate the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), the company heavily promoted optional accessories. The Beam Gun returned as a light gun, now named Zapper, and the Robotic Operating Buddy (R.O.B.) was added to further sell the NES as an advanced electronic entertainment system rather than a video game console. R.O.B. was short lived, but NES went on to revitalize the home console industry. Gail Tilden, advertising manager for Nintendo of America and one of the early female executives in the video game industry, coined the terms "Game Paks" for the cartridges and console for the "Control Deck," helping to separate it linguistically from the earlier industry.

Originally titled Advanced Video System, Nintendo altered the console’s design to feature neutral gray and black and altered the system from top-loading one to a front-loading insertion system similar to a VCR, which made it distinct from earlier consoles like the Atari 2600. (Photo: Evan-Amos/Wikimedia Commons)

The consistent figure in Nintendo’s eventual domination of the video game industry in the 1980s was Mario. Miyamoto had envisioned Mario as Nintendo’s “go-to” character for various games, leading Mario to become a multimedia star—the video game industry’s Mickey Mouse. Mario has been featured in more than 200 games as well as various TV series, comics and films, including a blockbuster animated film in 2023 with a sequel scheduled for release in 2026.

Super Mario Bros. advanced game development and was ultimately the perfect game to introduce players to the NES and the company’s star. The first level, World 1-1, became a template for all future games, acting as a tutorial for players familiarizing themselves with the game controls and new system. The game has sold more than 58 million copies to date across several Nintendo platforms.

Super for Nintendo

Nintendo’s rise has not always been without controversy, as video games have consistently faced criticism for perceived addiction among young players and the content of games. Nintendo as a business has also faced claims in the North American market of monopolistic practices. To avoid the oversaturation of variable-quality games, Nintendo required approval of games and the NES included a chip in the console that essentially locked out unlicensed games. Although this gave Nintendo oversight of game stock, it also limited outside innovation.

Nintendo’s success also gave the company tremendous power over retailers, blocking out other consoles through threats to remove its stock if retailers like Walmart granted space to other consoles. The company’s dominance further extended to the portable game market with the introduction of the Game Boy in April 1989, which included one of the best-selling games of all time, Tetris.

Nintendo has weathered competition throughout its history, ultimately ceding some market share, but survived on the strength of Mario and its engaging library of games. Sega initiated the console wars that dominated the early 1990s video game market when it released the Genesis in North America in the summer of 1989. Sega struggled initially when the Genesis, which was named Mega Drive in Japan, was released about the same time as Super Mario Bros. 3.

The Nintendo Game Boy, released in April 1989, included one of the best-selling games of all time, Tetris. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

The competition heated up after Sega, following Nintendo’s approach, introduced its own mascot and go-to character, Sonic the Hedgehog, in 1991, through the eponymous platform game. Nintendo also launched its Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) the same year as the fourth generation of consoles introduced 16-bit technology to the market.

Sega hired Tom Kalinske, who made his name launching Flintstone Vitamins and worked with Mattel to revitalize Barbie, to battle Nintendo head on. He positioned the Genesis as the cooler system, targeting high school and college gamers rather than younger children. Sega’s in-your-face marketing also included targeting retailers who refused to cede space to a Nintendo competitor. The company launched a Sega store in Bentonville, Arkansas, Walmart’s headquarters, and an advertising strategy that included billboards on local highways to force Walmart to relent and give shelf space to Sega.

Ultimately, the competition from Sega—which for a short time won the majority of market share, partly because Sega leveraged controversy to market more mature and violent games like Mortal Kombat—pushed Nintendo to secure its niche as a family game maker while continuing to embrace new technology. This led to Sega’s downfall.

Kalinske had negotiated two separate opportunities for Sega to advance that Sega of Japan, which had a contentious relationship with the brasher Sega of America under Kalinske’s leadership, rejected. The first opportunity was with Silicon Graphics to create a more advanced graphic chip, and the second opportunity was with Sony to develop a new disc-based 3-D system. After Sega of Japan rejected these opportunities, Silicon Graphics partnered with Nintendo on the Nintendo 64 system while Sony went ahead and developed its own system, the Playstation. Both systems far outsold Sega’s next generation system, Sega Saturn, with Playstation becoming the best-selling console of all time after its release in 1994, only later surpassed by Playstation 2.

Meanwhile, Super Mario 64 introduced a 3-D world that Mario could explore, and he continued to star in some of the most popular video game series of all time, including Mario Kart, Mario Party and dozens of sports games including Mario Tennis and Mario Golf. Nintendo’s portable systems continued to evolve, adding color, dual screens and 3-D graphics over time, and following the Nintendo 64 with the disc-based Gamecube and then the interactive Wii. The portable and console systems combined in 2017 when the hybrid Switch was released, allowing both portable play and television docking.

Mario continues to be at the center of everything Nintendo does, and Mario Kart was the featured game when the Switch 2 launched in summer 2025. Now, fans of the plumber can also engage with him and the other members of the Nintendo Universe at Super Nintendo World, a themed land at Universal Studios theme parks, the latest of which opened in Florida in May 2025. Even after over four decades, Mario continues to be super for Nintendo.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the С�� Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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Forty years after the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System, the name remains synonymous with worldwide gaming and technological innovation.

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