metazine

At 7 AM on a Saturday in September 2025, I participated in a mass-casualty simulation drill held in the firefighter training area of O’Hare International Airport.

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 internet services, our broadcast is delayed. He’s on his feet, ecstatic: “It’s a goal for Brazil! ”

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? The kicker is an elite player with a clear shot at the net (twenty-four-feet wide and eight-feet ta. ..

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 Beckham’s backyard would look like, or any backyard really, but you can get your face painted in Home Depot–swatched colors .

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 set piece-heavy structuralism now fashionable in the English Premier League and the crashing unpredictability of the South American game.

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.