Liberated from apartments outside Atlanta, 75 kids play in a Martin Luther King Day soccer tournament. Local nonprofits use soccer to help children from warring countries, whether Angola or Burma or Sudan, adjust. With video (8:39) »
Berkeley, California, Sept 20 | One of the important implications of Martha Saavedra’s research into women’s sport in West Africa is discovery of the extent to which football helps define masculinity in much of the world.
“For a woman to play [football] in many places is a transgression,” says Saavedra, associate director of the University of California-Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, in our Sept 4 podcast. “People think of it as saying something about what it means to be a man.”
Deblois, Maine | In the part of the state that Mainers call Down East, soccer has flourished along with a bumper crop of wild blueberries.
Nairobi | Photographer John Barrett Reed traveled in 2005 to the Mathare Valley slums on the eastern edge of Kenya’s capital, hoping to provide new images of Africa for Western audiences who may have become desensitized. He concentrates his lens and writing on a slice of Mathare, home to 600,000 squatters, and uncovers the organic quality of football as [...]
Nicolas Sarkozy, France's president, has campaigned to relocate the remains of goalkeeper-cum-existentialist Albert Camus from their resting place in Lourmarin. More about language & literature »
Links
David Goldblatt calls The Global Game: Writers on Soccer "the first truly global survey of writing" on world football. Buy from Amazon » John Turnbull