Review: Foxcatcher
Marcus Aurelius, the last of the Five Good Emperors, commented that “the art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.” What is more tragic than the forlorn shadow of a fallen athlete...
Category: Sports
The Shameless Sentimentality of Super Bowl ads
Last night marked one of the biggest annual sporting events in the US, a collection of glitz and glamour on the gridiron. This year’s event had some additional fireworks in the form of a halftime...
Interview: Iepe Rubingh
Iepe Rubingh is a Berlin-based, Dutch performance/visual artist whose last foray into filmmaking involved designing a large-scale installation for Tom Tykwer’s cinematic love triangle “3”....
Racism in Olympic Coverage
Gabby Douglas’ hair, female Chinese athletes as stoic automatons, ‘plastic Britons,’ and advertisements featuring monkeys on gymnastic apparatus—if one thing has characterised media coverage...
The Bloody London Olympics: The Social Cost of Benefit Cuts
The UK has entered a lethal age of austerity, right in time for the 2012 Summer Olympics. As elite athletes from all over the world to descend upon London to compete in the most-watched sporting...
The peculiar rite of watching the Super Bowl ads
One of the most anticipated annual television events of the year unfolded in the United States over the weekend. Akin to the Doctor Who Christmas Special in the UK, it is practically a national...
“We are all Canucks”: The Vancouver hockey riot, Canada Post labour dispute and violence
It’s a truism, perhaps, to claim that sport functions as a release valve for social and economic pressures—but the Vancouver street riots that followed the conclusion of the Stanley Cup finals,...
World Cup 2010: looking past the diversity storyline
The world will probably best remember World Cup 2010 as the dawn of the Age of the Vuvuzela, but a few other things also happened, most of them soccer-related. This World Cup feels more diverse than...
How the World Cup discredits nationalism
For all of its nationally based competition, and the feelings of pride (the Netherlands) and shame (France) that the World Cup stirs up, the competition does nothing more than show the flimsiness of...
World Cup: The Trial of the Vuvuzelas
We rejoin Popular Opinion CourtTV's coverage of the Vuvuzela Trial, already in progress: “… Welcome back to Popular Opinion Court TV's coverage of the Vuvuzela Trial. I'm , the prosecution has...