Sports Chatter
Simon Kuper discusses the drivel in the drip-feed that is mainstream sports journalism – from rumour and innuendo to occasional smut and toilet humour. The consumer, he argues, is now the consumed, in an arena of social media and sports talk radio – where talking about sport has become ‘independent of sport itself’, and men […]
Reform and Revolution: The Destruction of the University
In the fall of 2015, universities across South Africa were engulfed by fires ignited by students’ discontent with the racial discrimination and colonialism that still defines the country’s institutes of higher education. The protests broadcast on televisions around the world were neither without precedent nor without parallel. The University in Africa, and indeed South Africa, […]
The Lexicon of Love
The language of football is arguably nowhere more verbose and loquacious than in Brazil – full of the picturesque and partisan, the witty and fantastical. It is where, as James Young writes, the nexus between the twists of life on and off the pitch is revealed. Look behind the words and you might find the […]
A Fine Madness
By Masande Ntshanga Here’s how this starts: halfway through Mishka Hoosen’s debut novel, Call it a difficult night:, I get the impulse to remove its pages from the binding and to rearrange them into a remix of the book – an impulse, no doubt, that stems from the novel’s relentless adherence to a searing psychological […]
Climbing- A Letter from San Francisco
By Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko Loss is life’s only language. Moving from mask to face to soul, the journey we share. Anyway, got this job online after going broke for a week and not eating for something like four days straight. I hate fishing for food from the garbage waiting on my next pay stub, so I […]