Sports Digest
Spanish-language fútbol and the blood sport of ableism
This week at Public Seminar, our contributors offer food for thought to accompany your Thanksgiving leftovers.
If you tuned in to one of the three NFL games played yesterday, you might enjoy Ivan Pech and Sean Jacobs’s discussion of the buildup for 2026 FIFA World Cup, when US soccer’s pay-to-play model will collide with fútbol’s communal joy, irreverent humor, and Spanish language.
Meanwhile, Adam Koehler Brown interviews author and professor Dagmar Herzog about authoritarian team-building and the fantasy of physical perfection explored in her latest book. The New Fascist Body illuminates how old and new fascisms in Germany are bound together by extreme hostility toward the disabled and “the promise of a sense of superiority.”
Eight Months to Learn Spanish
Sean Jacobs and Ivan Pech Luna
If the average American thinks a Super Bowl halftime show tests the limits of cultural comfort, the 2026 World Cup will be something else entirely. It will be a revelation, and, ultimately, a gift. The tournament will show that soccer, once dismissed as a “foreign” or “fringe” sport, has fully arrived. More importantly, it will invite Americans to see themselves as part of a broader whole: the Americas—a region that lives, plays, and, increasingly, speaks in Spanish.
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Fascism’s Body Politics
Dagmar Herzog and Adam Koehler Brown
Needless to say I’ve been following the AfD’s shenanigans for a long time, but it took me a while to make sense of the antidisability messaging. I kept thinking “why are they so obsessive about keeping children with cognitive differences outside of the classroom?” They’re fine about the kid in the wheelchair, but they’re not fine about the “slower” kids. Why is it that in every regional party program they rail explicitly against the idea of “inclusion” of children with impairments in the regular schools? And there’s lots of possible explanations. But then the biggest thing I realized is they want to re-invisibilize imperfection.