n+1 Foundation

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. At an official level, however, the World Cup’s cacophony of on-field styles cedes to a party-pooper monolingualism.

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 (one imagines a child sweatily choosing between eggshell and ecru).

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...

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

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.

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.

They see Big Tech as having eroded commonality: the common good, the social fabric, the institutions of collective interest. Luddism, as they conceive of it, is a communal, spiritual, and political project centered on three things: reclaiming collective agency away from Big Tech and its attention-fracking, data-capturing, social erosion project; re-enchanting public life through public events that help people experience connection; and fostering a world rooted in localism, public goods, care, fun, democracy, and what one Luddite I spoke to referred to as “collective effervescence.”

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.

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. In the hotel elevator, at random bars in town, at the vintage clothing shop, there were clumps and clusters of people in yellow. Everything was inside out.