I figured out what I wanted to say about walking in Red Square. It’s like going to see The Nutcracker, only the KGB may or may not be sleeping with your wife. That’s what it’s like.
Went out for a long walk tonight—still about nine feet high on luxury and whatever drug Grigoriy gave me, knowing [...]

Somehow or other I was the only one in there with Lenin (I think it’s usually crowded, but it seemed like maybe they’d just re-opened after lunch…there was definitely a feeling that “something was different,” if that makes sense) and I wound up kind of breaking down. Here’s how it all took place.
First off they [...]

Why did it bite me? What did I do? Here’s what happened.
I guess McDonald’s in Moscow is a bigger deal than I realized, because by the time I’d been pushed from behind through the surging mass of leather-jacket-wearing cell-phone-talkers, there was barely enough light left for me to see the letters I didn’t understand on [...]

The Southgate Parallel is an attempt to quantify the subjective sense of belonging that accrues around a team over time, and that changes slowly, in response to a mystifying range of factors. It’s based on the assumption that there is an ineffable but shared perception of each well-known team’s “real level”: to take the Premier [...]

I could only find a place to stay for about half the nights, but I figured the chance to see Roman Abramovich break down in tears was worth a few naps on a park bench. Happy/sad face suddenly wrinkling up like a coin purse.

One of our projects for the off-season—partly as a response to Andy Bull’s terrific critique of contemporary sports media, partly as something we’ve been thinking about on our own—is to put together a Dictionary of Generic Narrative in Sports Journalism, which will catalog the master narratives that are repeated over and over again in modern [...]

So. One thing led to another, and now here we are. The Premier League season, which once seemed so endless, is over. People have been stabbed, and champions have been crowned. We’ve had arrests, protests, lawsuits, assaults, class conflicts, scandals, accusations, media brawls, affairs, divorces, funerals, break-ins, international diplomatic crises, and unplanned encounters between [...]

There is, however, at the center of the colossus, in the pelvis of the machine, a human being: a straight-faced, hard-working, pleasure-seeking person, who is often meticulously groomed. He likes various flavors and spices. He has experienced feelings of shyness. He may, at one time or another, have been moved to an obscure self-doubt by [...]

It was never supposed to be this way. Things like this aren’t supposed to happen in football. An exciting day—that’s what we thought we would see. A contest. A game! Now the sole remaining question—the final, terrifying, all-important question—is how can we go on? How can we placate the wrath of a God who may [...]

Hey, so I didn’t know what kind of links you wanted, so I just grabbed a bunch of different kinds. No, yeah, from that new place over on 8th Street. I know. There’s just no reason for anyone to go over there. I guess rents must get high once you start moving over toward 12th. [...]