Section
Sports
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What Future for College Football?
To reduce the manifold harms of college football, fiery calls for abolition pointed at university decision makers and public health officials won’t get the job done.
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Athlete Activists
In fall 2016, Colin Kaepernick shook the sports world. A quarterback on the San Francisco 49ers football team, Kaepernick kneeled in silence during the national anthem …
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The Book That Made Me: Gay
A professor of English and gender studies reveals how one’s identity can be transformed from the most unexpected sources—in this case, sports memoir …
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Rio, Capital of Disaster Capitalism
The Olympic rings loom large over Rio de Janeiro. Seven years after the city won its bid to host the games, the impending two-week extravaganza has swept changes across the Marvelous City, as Rio is known, dividing its already conflict-riven social, political, and economic urban landscape even more deeply. In contrast to the heady days…
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The Bonds of the Sea
What do war journalism and surfing have in common? On the face of it, not much: surfing is a frivolous pastime and war reporting a humanitarian endeavor to shine a light on violent conflict in ways that put the observer’s life on the line. However, the parallels between the two haunt journalist William Finnegan’s Barbarian…
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Caravaggio’s Hair
Human hair, as Álvaro Enrigue points out in Sudden Death, is the only part of the human body that does not rot. It accordingly plays a starring role in the novel, which is as interested in the persistence of human bodies as in their destruction. The tennis ball fiercely batted between the Spanish poet Francisco…
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Master of the Flying Nothing
This is the latest installment of El Mirador, an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on the American West, the US/Mexico borderlands, and Indian Country. Wrestling is based on iconography, on signatures. Wrestlers work in signature moves, in signature styles, in catchphrases and slogans…
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Enrigue’s Backspin
Four-fifths of the way through Álvaro Enrigue’s Muerte súbita (Sudden Death), the narrator admits that he doesn’t know what the book is about. It’s not about the birth of tennis as a popular sport. Nor is it about the European conquest of the Americas, or about the Counter-Reformation. It’s more a book about how one…
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Hopelessly Devoted: Why We Watch Sports
My father called me the other day to ask if I was in a good mood. The Mets were in first place, having triumphed in their season opener. These days Mets fan cherish even the briefest of moments on top. During the brighter era of the mid-eighties, my father, a trial lawyer, childhood Brooklyn Dodgers…
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Another Fistfight in Heaven
By the second page of Sherman Alexie’s newest collection of short stories, Blasphemy, it’s pretty clear he isn’t going to pull any punches. As the narrator of “Cry Cry Cry” observes with reference to his meth-snorting, faux-wisdom-spouting cousin, “Whenever an Indian says he’s traditional, you know that Indian is full of shit.” There’s nothing “traditional”…
