Dave Zirin and Sherry Wolf: Sports Shape the Way We Understand Our World

Dave Zirin and Sherry Wolf: Sports Shape the Way We Understand Our World

Dave Zirin and Sherry Wolf: Sports Shape the Way We Understand Our World

Sports are more than just games: when we play or watch sports, we are forming the ways we look at our world and understand issues of sexism, racism, homophobia and nationalism.

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Sports are more than just games: when we play or watch sports, we are forming the ways we look at our world and understand issues of sexism, racism, homophobia and nationalism. In this week’s special sports Issue of The Nation, academics, journalists and athletes report on how activists, fans, athletes and even corporations use sports to express both their politics and identity. 

On NPR’s Only a Game, Dave Zirin discusses why The Nation chose to devote an entire issue to sports and Sherry Wolf explains why the locker rooms of professional sports are America’s deepest closet despite opinion surveys showing broad acceptance of homosexuality among both sports fans and athletes. You can check out the Sports Issue here and Wolf’s article here

Kevin Donohoe

We cannot back down

We now confront a second Trump presidency.

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Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance. We face the enactment of Project 2025, a far-right supreme court, political authoritarianism, increasing inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis, and conflicts abroad. The Nation will expose and propose, nurture investigative reporting, and stand together as a community to keep hope and possibility alive. The Nation’s work will continue—as it has in good and not-so-good times—to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further solidarity in a nation divided.

Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation—to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.

The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

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Onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

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