#Nplusonemag

Klosterman may often be subversive, kind of lazily seditious, but he is, clearly, self-aware about his counterrevolutionary inclinations, accepting and even celebrating football as a stabilizing—some might say paralyzing—force on the American imagination.

The human hand has twenty-nine bones and twenty-nine major joints. It contains over one hundred ligaments, connected to thirty-four muscles in the palm alone, each one responsible for the minute negotiations that allow us to tie our shoes, thread a…

The following weekend, I returned to the storage lockers with my partner, Blair. Upon arriving, we removed the picnic table and wooden chairs and machinery and placed it all on the gravel road that ran through the facility.…

The Knicks were in the midst of blowing a fourteen-point lead halfway through the fourth quarter, and my excitement at this situation, the sheer merriment and life force of it all, mingled with my grief at what was unfolding, and my awareness of how…

I dropped my new friends off at the arena, a gray structure that blended into the surrounding parking lots. We waved goodbye, and they disappeared into the security line.…

Tacitly or openly, officials and observers on all sides of the deal—even those who otherwise seem to inhabit different universes—acknowledge that the US has lost the war. And should the war resume, as Israel hopes, the US will lose again.…

Denying that history could have been otherwise or making conquest subject to some unwritten statute of limitations are both ways of cloaking not just the US’s imperial past but its continuation into the present, with or without Kalaallit Nunaat.…

It’s like he saw it coming. “The Numbers,” the first poem in the vast first volume of the Poems of J.H. Prynne, opens: The whole thing it is, the difficult matter: to shrink the confines down. Prynne died in April, aged 89.

The Scottish national team, playing in the World Cup for the first time in twenty-eight years, is based out of Boston for the group stage. Fifty thousand Scots traveled here for the tournament, equal to nearly a full percent of Scotland’s population.…

The goals are all that really count, in the end—maybe they are all we need to watch. Watching the clips, we have gotten away with something: We have watched the World Cup without having had to watch any soccer.

The contours of the 2026 World Cup serve as a clear indicator of just how much the footballing relationship between Mexico and the United States has evolved over the four decades since the Azteca Stadium last hosted the tournament.…

A bit more than three years into his exile from New York City, St. Elmo Sylvester Hope sat for an interview with Down Beat magazine in Los Angeles.…

We have passed the point at which absurdity is an aberration. The Monster Energy and Crypto.com sponsorships for the evening: very real. The female quotient including no women fighters, only the “Octagon girls” in sequined hotpants and velvet bodices:…

Everybody started undressing but it wasn’t scary. In the dark, nobody could really see anybody else, like we didn’t have bodies. Without a body, in the presence of boys, I felt like a girl, like my ugliness was at bay.

On the field, every World Cup is a contest of idioms: between the Spanish-influenced juego de posición and post-German Gegenpressing, between philosophies that rely on holding the ball and those that assert themselves by working without it, between the…

The Dove Fresh Clubhouse offers a series of photo ops after which you can take a misty refreshing shower and treat yourself to a stick of deodorant; Home Depot presents “David Beckham’s Backyard” which does not look like what you might imagine David…

Stutter Steppers With the knockout rounds well underway, it’s time to contemplate one of soccer’s great perennial mysteries: Why do the best players alive miss so many World Cup penalty kicks?…

So what are ref cams for? Far from decentering refs, the body cams intentionally frame them as protagonists with whom we are supposed to empathize, whose eyes we should learn to see the world through.

Somewhere in the fifty-second minute, as the ball is passed calmly around Brazil’s back four, fireworks erupt down the street. In confusion, I look to my partner, who seems to have understood something that I have not—courtesy of Bahia’s inconsistent…

Thirty-one years after the birth of its democracy, South Africa remains plagued by the ghosts of colonization and Apartheid and continues to reproduce the same violence it sought to overcome.