The Beijing Olympics has been a media and publicity success thus far; but what is missing from this picture of global harmony?

Daniel Gordon’s A State of Mind (2004) takes viewers inside North Korea through portraits of two young girls, Hyon Sun and Song Yon, as they train for the national Mass Games. All the publicity for and reviews of the film speak of the unprecedented access Gordon was given, enabled by the success of his previous film, The Game of Their Lives (2002), about the North Korean team that made it to the 1966 World Cup quarterfinals.

The fate of the Portuguese winger Cristiano Ronaldo has generated a huge debate among professional footballers, administrators and pundits on a topic that has troubled academic football scholars for quite some time: football as an institution of “modern slavery.”

For fourteen years, I have always had trouble reconciling my “Asian” body, the “Three Lions in My Heart” (because of my British nationality), and my Italian football jersey.

I’m starting to really panic about moving. I wake up in the middle of the night, remembering the toughest moments of the adjustment to life in Seoul and blowing them up into imaginary future catastrophes.

The Printculture Committee on Experimental Vehicular Transport is sending a probe vehicle out on the roads of Connecticut and Massachusetts, equipped with two tires, a water bottle, and a flashing red light (just in case). According to the latest reports, sunshine is predicted and suburban gardens will continue to flower with dogwood, azalea, and rhododendron. We'll file updates, commentary and pictures as news occurs. --- (May 29) Success: t...

Since I have nothing new to post today and have otherwise passed over the current Dance in silence, I offer a link to a piece written on the occasion of the 2005 NCAA Men's Basketball tournament: The Big Dance.

It seems like ancient history now, but during Printculture’s summer vacation the furor around Michael Vick’s involvement in dog fighting seemed like something I was more-or-less obligated to comment on. If you’re fortunate enough to have been able either to avoid the story or to repress your knowledge of it, the long and the short of it is that Atlanta Falcons’ quarterback Michael Vick pled guilty to charges stemming from a federal investigati...

I guess it comes down to whether you feel, in your heart of hearts, that “blog” is a word or just a modification of “log.” Whatever it is, I'm doing it, and will upload pictures from my iphone as soon as i can figure out how (there's no directory or clipboard). By the clicking of my thumbs...

C Bush's post about the seasonality of baseball got me thinking about my own spring time sports associations. In February, the lake near my apartment was frozen 6 inches deep, so the university sent out an e-mail inviting everyone to ice skate. The cold snap lasted for a couple of weeks, before the temperatures swung erratically up and down again. Nearly every morning, I drive by the school's boathouse, out of which the crew teams train, and ...

I won’t say it has never, ever happened before, but it’s certainly been a while since a baseball game has been canceled because of snow. But this has already happened a few times since the season –the baseball season, that is— started a little over a week ago. The cancellations in, say, Detroit and Cleveland were perhaps not so shocking, but the cancellation of the college game in Virginia stood out, as did the record cold opening days in Texa...

I’m far from being a truly hardcore sports fan, but I seem to talk about sports more than anyone else on printculture and I do think that the general meaning of sports particularly in American culture remains understudied by the less sporty. So, precisely because this is somewhat trivial (I wouldn’t dare try to compile a “Top Ten Events in Iraq in 2006” list) and partly because some of our readers may have missed these stories, here’s my quite...

With E Wesp's computer troubles overcome to some degree, we can now post the full version of his piece for today, even if he can't do it himself. Football has made a westward migration in the United States, starting in the capital-E East of the Ivy League before becoming a professional sport in Ohio back at the start of the 1900's. This seems to have set the region's claim to the sport, even as it faces challenges from the Friday Night Light...

In spring 1997 I was simultaneously writing the first chapter of my dissertation and gettting very good at playing Championship Manager. The latter was a soccer management game in which, as the coach of a soccer team, you hired and trained players, chose strategies, and generally did everything you could before game day, when your little bastards would run out there and attempt to win games while you sat back and watched how they did. Sometime...

After a little prodding from our own S Shirazi, I broke down and checked out the new Tuesday evening network offering Friday Night Lights. For those who don’t know, it’s a t.v. show based on the true if mythologized story of a miracle high school football season in small Texas town. (The book was also the basis of a very solid movie a few years ago –more on that later). My initial reaction was ambivalent: as a spectator-fan of the game, I lov...

So, the third season of Project Runway is rapidly coming to a close. Tonight, we find out which of the remaining designers will be going on to Fashion Week. (Unless, like me, you happened to read the New York Times article that mentioned the finalists, without so much as a spoiler alert.) Of course, like all reality shows of this ilk, people complain that the quality has declined even as everyone remains fairly addicted to watching it.

Josh Marshall wrote a short piece today about his reaction to reading a Washington Post article on how the Bush administration “screened political appointees for jobs in post-invasion Iraq based on loyalty to Bush and the conservative agenda.” As Marshall points out, at some level this is completely unsurprising: anyone who's been paying attention already suspected (or, really, knew) this was true in general, and is probably outrag...

Having spent the better part of yesterday playing a fantastically designed new bicycle racing game (and, let it be known, for those of you who are waiting for it, the lesser part of yesterday working on an essay that's due tomorrow), I find myself awake at midnight but knowing that the discretion of sleeping so I can write my essay tomorrow (after waking up at 6:30 to watch the amazing second mountain stage of the Tour de France) is the bette...

Madame de Stael's 1813 De l'Allemagne is widely credited with being one of the founding documents of the discipline of comparative literature. The book “described verbal art as the expression of a people, its culture, its spiritual life and institutions,” thereby initiating the kind of literary study that reflects on “national differences through the themes, attitudes, genres, devices, styles, and occasions of imaginative wri...

If I can say that three makes a trend, I’ve noticed a trend in television advertising: variations of “classic,” i.e. recognizable, moments in sports history. One Wheaties commercial plays the audio track for Vin Scully’s call of Kirk Gibson’s 1988 World Series homerun over video of its reenactment, so to speak, in the form of a regular-guy softball game (Joe’s Paint vs. Star Towing, the General Mills website explains). Those not familiar with ...

For those who haven’t followed the story, a quick recap of some recent events at Duke University. On the night of March 13, the historically party-hardy and super-elite men’s lacrosse team hired two, uhm, dancers for their Monday night party. One of the women was, uhm, allegedly raped at the party. The accusation is not of “date rape,” but of a beating, choking, and violent rape by three of the players in the bathroom of the house they were re...

Short track speed skating first came to my attention during the 1998 Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan. I was half-way around the world in Paris, France, where I’d gone to join my boyfriend, who was studying abroad and researching his dissertation. I had arrived right before the New Year, and it was early February; my sweetie had proposed on my birthday just a few weeks before (I accepted), and as if to test the “in sickness” part ahead o...

"I know him off the field so I know what type of guy he is,'' Browns cornerback Daylon McCutcheon said. "I think there's a difference between someone who talks smack and is nasty about it. This guy, he's a comedian all the time. He's always joking. I don't take it personally. I think it actually brings some excitement to the game." Even out of context, if you know professional football, you might guess that Daylon McCutcheon is here referri...

One of the small pleasures professional football can offer to the non-fan is its wealth of Faulkneresque names: Alge Crumpler, Major Applewhite, Simeon Rice, Jerame Tuman, Bo Scaife, Zeron Flemister, and on and on. My current favorite: Takeo Spikes, a 242 pound linebacker from Georgia whose first job was working in a chalk mining plant and whose father named him “Takeo” after hearing the Japanese word for “great general” on television. He, in ...

Distracted by more pressing concerns, I forewent my fairly regular Sunday pleasure of looking in on the National Football League. Like an accent that never quite goes away, my affection for the ill-starred Buffalo Bills keeps me tuned in, often long after that year’s playoff hopes have passed. Good thing I missed it. About 10 minutes into the game, the Bills were up 21-0 against their arch-rival Miami Dolphins; with a little over 10 minutes le...