"To give you a sense of my social group’s pickleball-playing habits, consider that one friend requested that his bachelor party be a long weekend at an Airbnb with a pickleball court in the backyard, where we proceeded to play for at least five hours a day, for four consecutive days." "When I think about the history of racket sports rising and falling in popularity in the U.S. over the last half century, I imagine a dialogue among players across time: “Table tennis is fun”; “But isn’t real tennis better?”; “Except, now I want to play inside: racquetball!”; “Actually, squash is more fun”; “But pickleball is less intensive!”; “Well, now I want more exercise: Real tennis!” This is what culture is: a never-ending dialogue between the norms of the recent past and the acute backlashes of the present. While I like pickleball, I think any honest assessment of racket-sport history tells us that no one racket sport seems to dominate American culture for more than five years."