Summertime is full of travel, and this week's newsletter is all over the map. We start out with sports — kinda — but quickly move on to dining experiences I can only imagine and a movie that turned out to be better than it has any right to be. Let's take the journey together, friends.

Simon Kuper wrote a really good book in the 1990s called Football Against the Enemy, in which he crisscrossed the globe looking the role soccer plays in different countries and, more specifically, how the ruling class appropriates the sport to achieve its aims. In large chunks of the book, that means "authoritarian strongmen turn to soccer to project images of strength, reward supporters and even suppress any dissent that may crop up from time to time."

But that sort of thing happens in less oppressive countries, too, as Kuper notes when he turns his gaze to the U.S. He points out the 1992 presidential campaign where Bill Clinton and Al Gore, seeking to strike a contrast with George H.W. Bush, had a photo opportunity where they tossed around a football — the idea being that doing so made the Clinton-Gore ticket look vigorous and energetic as opposed to the older, more staid Bush.

Only in the copy of Football Against the Enemy that I own, the book doesn't use the word "football."

The edition I picked up at Powell's Bookstore in Portland had been regionalized for readers in the U.S., where the publishers correctly realized that the term "football" has an entirely different meaning than in Europe or South America. Hence, my copy is titled Soccer Against the Enemy, and all instances of the word "football" have been replaced with the word "soccer," including this one:

Always double-check those global search-and-replace results, kids.

It's an image that never fails to tickle me — the idea of a politician so desperate to come across as a Man of the People that they grab the nearest sporting good within reach and start interacting with it in a way that suggests not only does the politician not know a thing about sports they barely understand human behavior. Imagine a grinning Gavin Newsom striding before a crowd holding a hockey puck and he then tries to throw it like he's hurling a baseball, all the while looking expectantly at the audience for applause that will never come. We'd chase him from the stage, and we'd be right to do so.

That memory of a mangled passage in a book came back to me this past week when I read "Democrats Must Learn to Talk Sports" penned by one Nathaniel "My Dad Gave Us the War on Terror and All I Got Was This Lousy Punditry Career" Frum. 

In the piece, the younger Frum argues that Democrats need to become more relatable to the common voter, and the way to do that is to talk about sports. But not just any talk — Frum believes the way to appeal to voters is to start spewing genuine frontier gibberish about their favorite squadron.

In other words, Frum believes Democratic politicians need to combat their image as effete, out-of-touch snobs — an image I suspect exists primarily in his brain — by acting like the sports shouters you see on ESPN each morning.

So you're supposed to prove your authenticity and relatability by... arguing stupidly about meaningless things? I'm sorry, I'm not afflicted with Pundit Brain, so I'm having a hard time grasping this conceit.

I say this as a longtime sports fan: We can spot a phony coming from a mile away. That's why when Stanford graduate Carly Fiorina tweeted that she was rooting for Iowa in the 2016 Rose Bowl — when Iowa was playing her alma mater — I knew she was doomed. (As a product of the University of California system, I enjoy seeing Stanford alums debase themselves as much as the next guy, but even that was overdoing it for my tastes.) Nathaniel Frum seems to be advising politicians to make asses of themselves in front of an audience that can spot fair-weather fandom a mile away, but louder and with more feeling.

Even a modest familiarity with the world around us reveals this advice to be fantastically bad. 

If you happen to support a politician, you will likely be charmed by their sports allegiances, even if you don't share the same fandoms. But if you do not like the politician, you will continue to hate them with the fire of a thousand burning suns even if they like the same teams you do not. Nobody has ever won an election via their October surprise of converting to whatever team is headquartered in whatever electoral district is in play.

I don't recall reading quotes from too many of those people in the rural diners that the New York Times likes to frequent, where they concede, "Boy, I can't stand that Barack Obama, but he sure nailed the Midwest Regional with his NCAA tourney picks."

If you are a political candidate who wants people to vote for you, leave your sports allegiance at home. Instead, pinpoint the issues that matter to the citizens who may or may not be sports fans, and then outline how you plan to improve their lives. That's a magical formula perhaps even a second-generation Atlantic contributor can understand.

A couple of seasons ago, Top Chef — the only reality show worth a damn — took place in Wisconsin and centered one of its episodes entirely around the concept of the supper club. Since then, I have developed a low-key obsession with supper clubs, also fueled by a childhood memory of The Great Muppet Caper, when Kermit and Piggy dine at a supper club on the recommendation of John Cleese.

Wisconsin supper clubs are far different from their U.K. counterparts, where the emphasis appears to be more on the "club" side of things, with live entertainment in whatnot. A Wisconsin supper club focuses more on a sit-down dinner served in multiple courses with more of a social element than a standard restaurant.

And from what I can tell, supper clubs are very much a Wisconsin thing. While you will apparently find them in other parts of the Upper Midwest, a cursory search on Google indicates that supper clubs in places like Minnesota, Illinois and Iowa tend to be closer to the big cities. Wisconsin supper clubs are just about anywhere.

This obsession led me to a YouTube video from PBS Wisconsin last week — you know you're reaching your golden years when random PBS documentaries from broadcasters around the country start showing up in your algorithm — that lays out the basics of supper club. You have your cocktails, your relish tray, your salad, your main course, and then your dessert. And it all unfolds at a leisurely pace.

To be sure, there are some fancy supper clubs serving very high-end dishes, but that's not the appeal here. For goodness sake, the humble fish fry is a staple of Friday menus at supper clubs, and many places, things don't get any fancier than a properly cooked steak. And I think that's the supper club itch that I'd like to scratch — the idea of the meal as an event held around people you know, where you go at your own pace. (A nonstop stream of Old Fashioneds washing it down would probably help, too.)

There is one supper club element that has been part of my life, though I didn't realize its roots until watching that PBS video. My parents, both of sturdy Midwestern stock, always included a relish tray at big-event meals like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. I'm talking a very big plate of nothing but carrots, celery, radishes, green onions — the works. Looking back on it now, it's like we were expecting a family of rabbits to join us at dinner, but as a kid, it made perfect sense to me. Sure, I'll gnaw on this raw green onion before the entree arrives. Why not? And honestly? It took me a long time as a young adult not to be weirded out by the lack of a relish tray at big-event meals hosted by non-Midwesterners.

My friend Jason Snell is a pretty big wheel in the world of Apple, and the week of the company's Worldwide Developer Conference is his time to shine. And when you are a big wheel, you get invited to WWDC where you are briefed on a good many of the announcements Apple makes at the event. Sadly, that doesn't leave much time for getting news stories up quick, so what Jason really needs at these things is a flunky to put out a news story while he meets with the big brains at Apple.

Folks, this year, I am that flunky.

Owing to the timing of when I write this newsletter versus when WWDC is happening, there's no story as I write this sentence. But if all goes according to plan, you can read my WWDC coverage for Six Colors at a link that will appear as if by magic. I'm sure I did swimmingly.

Hey! Are you looking for a flunky on either a short- or long-term basis. No one flunkies like I do, as my resume attests.

Oh, and there's another episode of Magnum, Podcast you can listen to if you're so inclined — this one tackling a rather terrible episode late in the show's run. But honestly, that's when we have the most fun, I think.

Here's a collection of interesting things that will doubtlessly spark scintillating conversation at your next supper club.

I don't know if Quentin Tarantino is the patient zero of the modern crime movie, where the bad guys are quippy, the violence is stylized, and the needle drops are ceaseless, but boy, a lot of those movies can be laid at his feet. The trouble is that Quentin Tarantino is actually good at making those kinds of pictures, while his many imitators are less so. The derivative sameness found in that genre can be exhausting. There's a knock-off Tarantino flick called Smoking Aces that one reviewer equated to being hit in the face repeatedly with a frozen steak, and I think that is an accurate summation of my feelings about that particular movie.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that when the thumbnail for Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice surfaced in the Disney Plus app, I heaved a heavy sigh and made plans to watch something — anything — else. From the looks of things, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice seemed cut from the same cloth as dozens of movies before it that I've watched with diminishing returns.

And then, one of the panelists on The Flophouse podcast gave Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice enough of a recommendation that I decided to give it a watch. And you know what? While there are a lot of elements that have made the hipster crime drama genre a bit too familiar, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice manages to put its own spin on things by throwing in a time-travel element, thus introducing enough originality to liven up the proceedings.

The movie also benefits from casting Vince Vaughn as one of the leads. Cast in the right role,he brings a lot to the party. Vaughn can still fire off a quip with the best of them, and if you've seen him in pictures like Freaky — think Freaky Friday crossed with a slasher movie where Vaughn has to act like a teenage girl has body-swapped with him — you know that he's a very gifted physical comedian.

There's a lot to like about Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice beyond Vince Vaughn. James Marsden is always good company, and you can tell that Keith David found making the movie a real hoot. I wouldn't press Play expecting to see some great fight choreography, but the story is engaging enough, the performances are clever, and the argument over The Gilmore Girls was so on the nose, we called in my daughter to watch that scene and that scene only. Definitely, a movie that rises above its genre.

And that's your Phil for this week — thanks for reading. We'll do it again in seven days' time. Bring your own relish tray.