Culture
NASCAR garage reacts to lawsuit: ‘It’s another edition of the soap opera’
TALLADEGA, Ala. — As Denny Hamlin was digesting the reaction to his race team filing an antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR this week, fiancée Jordan Fish sent him a clip from the film “Moneyball.”
“The first guy through the wall — he always gets bloody,” the actor depicting Boston Red Sox owner John Henry says in the film. “This is threatening not just a way of doing business, but in their minds, it’s threatening the game. Really what it’s threatening is their livelihood, it’s threatening their jobs. It’s threatening the way they do things.”
Hamlin found that clip relatable after 23XI Racing, the team he co-owns with Michael Jordan, joined with Front Row Motorsports on Wednesday to accuse NASCAR of being a monopoly in federal court. The reaction has been positive, Hamlin said, from people who want to see the status quo challenged — and it’s been a load off of his mind as he tries to race his way into Round 3 of the playoffs.
“It’s not like just one day we woke up and said, ‘This is going to happen,’” said Hamlin, who drives for Joe Gibbs Racing, before qualifying eighth for Sunday’s NASCAR playoff race at Talladega Superspeedway. “This has been on the plate for a while. It’s provided relief for me to put more focus on (driving) the No. 11 car and everything I have to do there since (the lawsuit) is out and now there are other people out to speak on it from the legality standpoint.”
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While it may have been a long time coming for Hamlin, others in the NASCAR garage were still processing the fresh news and what the outcome could mean for the future of NASCAR and its race teams.
“It’s obviously the biggest story in the sport,” said driver/owner Brad Keselowski of RFK Racing. “It’s another edition of the ‘As The World Turns: NASCAR’ soap opera. We’ll all find out together (how it turns out).”
Keselowski said he “wouldn’t expect” his team to join in the suit, a sentiment echoed by six-time champion owner Richard Childress. RFK and Richard Childress Racing both signed the 2025 charter agreement last month, which contains a provision that bans teams from taking any antitrust action against NASCAR. (23XI and Front Row refused to sign it.)
But Childress said teams were pressured to sign the new agreements, a claim which was made in the lawsuit.
“We didn’t have a choice to sign them,” Childress said. “It was just, ‘You sign it or you lose your charters.’ I couldn’t take that gamble, period. And I know a lot of owners I talked to felt the same way.”
So is NASCAR a monopoly, in his view?
“I’ll put it like this: If you want to race, you race in their park if you want to race NASCAR,” Childress said.
NASCAR again declined comment on Saturday and has yet to issue any public reaction to the suit. A court filing said 23XI and Front Row will file for a preliminary injunction next week, after which NASCAR must respond in its own filing within two weeks.
Meanwhile, drivers said they were following the story closely in the media and several acknowledged it was the most significant story to come along in NASCAR for years.
“This is huge for our sport no matter what happens,” Team Penske driver Joey Logano said. “It’s obviously big because we’ve never seen it before.”
But many said they were unsure of what the outcome would be, so they didn’t have a strong opinion one way or the other.
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“I’d like to see our sport be more prosperous,” Hendrick Motorsports driver William Byron said. “In watching other professional sports and where we could be, I am excited for that. So hopefully that comes to fruition.”
23XI co-owner Curtis Polk grabbed some drivers’ attention this week after he said their salaries are a fraction of what other athletes make compared to the overall revenue of various sports leagues. Driver salaries, which are not publicly revealed, have declined precipitously from their peak in the mid-2000s, those within NASCAR have said repeatedly.
“We’re probably one of the only sports, if not the only sport, where athlete salaries have gone down in the last couple decades,” Hendrick driver Kyle Larson said. “Obviously, we would love to see it trend upward instead of the opposite. But the teams probably have to make a lot more money to make it viable to pay the people who are working for their organizations.”
23XI drivers Bubba Wallace and Tyler Reddick expressed full support for the actions their team owners were taking, as did Front Row driver Michael McDowell.
“Me being an advocate for change and standing up for change, that’s what I look at,” said Wallace, the only Black driver in the Cup Series. “It’s a crazy time to be in NASCAR, but I stand behind my team 100 percent, and we’ll see where it takes us.”
McDowell, who won the pole position for Sunday’s race, said he was confident there was no more lean and efficient organization than Front Row — and yet team owner Bob Jenkins still has had to put “millions and millions and millions” of dollars into the team to be even remotely competitive.
“If he has to spend his own money, there’s a problem,” McDowell said.
As for Hamlin, he was asked whether he felt 23XI’s financial commitment to the sport has been appreciated by NASCAR. He pursed his lips and paused for 10 long seconds before eventually answering.
“Probably not,” he said.
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(Photo of Denny Hamlin during Saturday’s qualifying at Talladega: Sean Gardner / Getty Images)
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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