metazine

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.

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: also real. The United States Marine Band playing a rendition of “The Boys Are Back in Town: too real. A fighter operating under the moniker Black Beast: painfully real.

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. He was a diminutive, softspoken man who looked like what his mother had once dreamed he’d become—a professor.

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.

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 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. They have won the city’s hearts by drinking up all the beer, buying up all the unwanted Red Sox tickets, and tumbling down the metal slide outside City Hall in their kilts.

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.

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. Buying Greenland was more than a threat to NATO, it was a threat to make American empire visible again.

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. “You can’t kill your way out of . . . every national security problem”; but you can sure as hell die trying.

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. Police on horseback wearing cowboy hats and actual spurs directed me away from the crowds, which added some Texas flair to the mundane act of sitting in traffic.

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 absurd it was to feel grief about such a thing in a hospital, which, I know firsthand, is a scene of real grief.

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. Blair climbed in first, swinging their legs through a hole in the rafters and rifling through box after box.

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 needle, lift a glass, or juggle.

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.