Sports & Games

My earliest publications, on childhood in ancient Greece, grew out of my involvement with the movement to force the University of Toronto to provide day-care for the children of its...

Money Games chronicles how sports and entertainment have continued to converge throughout history. The pace at which this convergence has been happening is covered in the book’s nine chapters. My...

When first readers pick up The Sports Revolution, they might assume that it is yet another book about football in Texas, and with good reason. H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights,...

War is in our genes. Humans are “hard wired” to divide the world into “us” versus “them.” Men have a penchant for rape. We have all encountered claims like these...

My motivations for writing this book were largely historical and aesthetic. I wanted to explain the proliferation of various tropes of play in Victorian literary representations of modern life. Even...

What does it actually mean to say baseball "means" something? A case for dropping the tired clichés about national character and instead treating the game as an object of inquiry—one whose meanings accumulated over time, across North America, East Asia, and the Caribbean, and alongside every other form of modern mass entertainment.

Like a detective investigating a cold criminal case, to find answers I had to blow the dust off of ancient case files, open them up and look at them with new eyes. All of my witnesses are long dead, and making new discoveries about someone who died 160 years ago would seem to be unlikely – yet I managed to make a few.

A World Cup brings this together in a way that no other sporting event does. Everybody plays the same sport, but has different goals and national environments to work in - and it's the people who tell this story best.

Like many Americans who grew up following football and basketball, I simply took it for granted that athletic teams sponsored by universities would compete in highly publicized games and that...

My earliest publications, on childhood in ancient Greece, grew out of my involvement with the movement to force the University of Toronto to provide day-care for the children of its...

Money Games chronicles how sports and entertainment have continued to converge throughout history. The pace at which this convergence has been happening is covered in the book’s nine chapters. My...

When first readers pick up The Sports Revolution, they might assume that it is yet another book about football in Texas, and with good reason. H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights,...

War is in our genes. Humans are “hard wired” to divide the world into “us” versus “them.” Men have a penchant for rape. We have all encountered claims like these...

My motivations for writing this book were largely historical and aesthetic. I wanted to explain the proliferation of various tropes of play in Victorian literary representations of modern life. Even...

What does it actually mean to say baseball "means" something? A case for dropping the tired clichés about national character and instead treating the game as an object of inquiry—one whose meanings accumulated over time, across North America, East Asia, and the Caribbean, and alongside every other form of modern mass entertainment.

Like a detective investigating a cold criminal case, to find answers I had to blow the dust off of ancient case files, open them up and look at them with new eyes. All of my witnesses are long dead, and making new discoveries about someone who died 160 years ago would seem to be unlikely – yet I managed to make a few.

A World Cup brings this together in a way that no other sporting event does. Everybody plays the same sport, but has different goals and national environments to work in - and it's the people who tell this story best.

Like many Americans who grew up following football and basketball, I simply took it for granted that athletic teams sponsored by universities would compete in highly publicized games and that...