I write this en route from DC/Baltimore to Detroit (for a dear friend's wedding), then on to Raleigh (for a workshop), then back home (home?) to DC. Life has felt circular these days. Habitual, in some ways that I hadn't quite expected since I last wrote, but perhaps a little too heavy on the circling-back of the modern office: too much looping — of people in, being caught in, of spiraling in a world where terrorism is lauded as sophisticated, when a candidate who brought a modicum of hope will embrace torturers but not those they target.

In such circumstances, I look for something to punctuate sentences otherwise on the run. This past month, nothing did that quite like the culmination of the design process on my book's cover, which I'm delighted to share with you here. Homes for Living: The Fight for Social Housing & a New American Commons is now also available for preorder. I'll remind you of this closer to the pub date in February, but if you are eager to support, I would be thrilled for you to reserve your copy now through your local bookseller or wherever you prefer to get your books. (Might I recommend Greenlight Bookstore?) 

So that was one big em dash (one of these: —, my favorite, perhaps most overused piece of punctuation) in the last months. But the more therapeutic commas, or sometimes abrupt periods of this summer/fall cusp season have come from the return of Premier League soccer (née football) to my weekends.

I grew up playing, still play (DC folks, hook me up with a good pick-up game!), and in the midst of the pandemic, I was surprised to find the best league in the world broadcast on NBC in the middle of a Saturday afternoon—that, after a childhood where FIFA video game simulations were the closest we got to footage of such quality professional matches. That encounter set off my embarrassingly detailed assessment of the league to determine what team I should follow, with Goldilocks criteria galore that I paired with gut feelings and friends’ recommendations. I've since followed Arsenal closely, perhaps too closely. I'm regrettably unsuited for casual, detached fandom. I now love the club, which is (objectively of course) better than most in a league of billionaire (and thus inherently questionable) owners in which money increasingly rules over sport.

My lack of casualness has its drawbacks, but it is that adherence which allows these otherwise inconsequential matches, something I might intellectually think "does not matter," to take me out of a circle, loop, or spiral—to reset or redirect a day, to draw me off a couch with a roar that scares Kaju (I like to think its a roar) or to distract me with the news of a sooner-than-expected return from injury of a favorite player (trying to manifest here, Martin Ø).

It would be unlike me as a fan to not further bemoan or at least acknowledge various pitfalls of football's current era: the financial doping, the truly dreadful inconsistency of Premier League referees, the greed of the FIFA gods and its disregard for player welfare, or arguably the most common take of late: that Video Assistant Referee (VAR) is ruining the game through poor decisions and nervy reviews after passionate, post-goal knee slides. So I'll both bemoan and beseech: I too find VAR deeply frustrating, but I don't think its most significant detrimental effect is that which the majority claims. To me, VAR's primary knock on football is the way it stokes fans’ waning humility in the face of the game’s and its players’ magic.

The obsessive replays that feed this did not originate with VAR, but they have certainly taken on a new flavor with the process’s adoption. Watching any broadcast, we see fouls committed and runs run over, and over, and over, from angle after subpar angle. As we are served up more views of a play, slowed to a crawl and picked apart, we fans are increasingly strident in our belief that we not only know what precisely occurred, but also what should have. You hear it from the commentators who are quick to say a player “should have done better” on a tight angle or split-second decision. You see it in crowds’ veneration of a shot off the post and castigation of a player for an equally accurate shot pushed away from the goal face. You feel it in the unearned confidence of the Football Manager-adherent or Fantasy League top dog, drunk on stats and possession heat maps, calling for #TheirManagerOut.

Much of the beauty of football—that which truly punctuates days and weeks in its own particular way—is in the game’s complexity and thin margins: the ever-changing, often minute window for a potential shot’s passage through hurtling bodies and one pair of swatting palms, the execution determined by players’ muscle memory and a near supernatural sense of physics colliding with slick grass and a ticking clock. This, however, gets washed out when we’re tricked into believing that VAR checks or similar analysis allow us to surpass the limits of our perception. Through that looking glass, the beauty of the sport is obscured by our self-righteousness, our arrogance that we can somehow conceive of all the variables at play on the pitch in a particular moment. VAR isn’t the (whole) problem. We, its interpreters, are.

So that's my feeble call for appreciation of the magicians of the pitch, and my expression of appreciation for these little bits of perhaps meaningless passion through which we do, in fact, create real meaning—the guilty pleasures that provide a momentary break, the inconsequential indulgences that prompt a change of course in the loops of daily life.