metazine

A discussion at the Great Hall

Entering an era of super-teams and diva stars who insist on winning now and getting maximally paid, the NHL is more and more reminiscent of the NBA at its worst: A hypermediated, personality-driven PR event masquerading as a mostly noncompetitive sports league. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman is getting what he wanted—the game grown, at least in dollar value—and the result looks pretty damn ugly.

At its most abstract, the draft is simply a convocation of middlemen-orbited teenagers at the Barclays Center, who, at the discretion of other men in rooms far away, will very soon be called up on stage to put on a hat and respectfully embrace a very tall, very pale man, at which point someone will take a photograph.

I became a Sonny Rollins fan on my 13th birthday, when my dad took me for the first time to his favorite record store in Portland, Oregon. He gave me $50, which in 1987, netted me twelve LPs. One was a European bootleg of Moving Out.

The fan doesn’t stop at liking their object, they co-create it in both social and artisanal modes. In soccer we might say: You don’t become a fan when you think “soy hincha de la seleccíon, ” but when you sing it. Playing for the national team, for many, is the pinnacle—the perfection—of fandom. Like most perfections, it makes itself absurd.

All of us, from academics to fishermen, have now internalized a practice of reading the social world as a field of political or latently political signs.

No awkward fumbling in the dark, no failed maneuvers, no humiliating slurp sounds slipped out in the throes of passion—even a middle-aged beauty crowns the novice to be a carnal “king”! Have you ever heard of a more seamless first time? Then you remember this is a book written by a teenage girl who’s never been kissed, let alone had sex.

Oh well, my girlfriend says. My girlfriend is Canadian and it is quite difficult to explain to her that if you have any real fascination with English football, you cannot just walk away from a loss in the semifinals of the World Cup by saying “Oh well. ”

A man told me he had driven in from Philadelphia after dropping off his children at the game in New Jersey, preferring to watch it from Queens. Others had gone to MetLife hoping to catch a glimpse of the team without paying stadium prices.

Arriving at the hotel in Kansas City, I realized I had never been in a hotel full of Ecuadorians because in Ecuador, the hotels are full of tourists. It was a sea of bright yellow soccer jerseys. Vamos, carajo! Everyone was singing, walking around wrapped in the flag, greeting strangers warmly. It was more Ecuadorian than Ecuador.

A town ninety miles north of the Arctic Circle does not need two city halls, two high schools, and two fire stations. To establish a new city, the old one must die, and this project to destroy and rebuild central Kiruna—known as the “urban” or “social transformation”—has now been ongoing for more than two decades.

They see Big Tech as having eroded commonality: the common good, the social fabric, the institutions of collective interest.

Suddenly, rowing was everywhere. Rowing videos were all over Instagram, fed to me by accounts I did and didn’t follow. Businesses seized on it in their advertising; bars invited customers to “come row with us” during the next game. I saw Ro for Norge! , apparently our new national slogan, written on the pavement in pastel chalk.

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.