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www.nplusonemag.com

Literary criticism and political theory from a Brooklyn editorial. Long, often combative essays; the founding generation of millennial editors.

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Ground Zero Plus 25

A discussion at the Great Hall

Aug 19, 2026

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Hockey Is For Everyone

Entering an era of super-teams and diva stars who insist on winning now and getting maximally paid, the NHL is more and more reminiscent of the NBA at its worst: A hypermediated, personality-driven PR event masquerading as a mostly noncompetitive sports league. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman is getting what he wanted—the game grown, at least in dollar value—and the result looks pretty damn ugly.

Alan DeanAug 14, 2026

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Samuel Stein and Nikil Saval in conversation

A celebration of A Right to Housing?

Aug 12, 2026

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Barclay Blues

At its most abstract, the draft is simply a convocation of middlemen-orbited teenagers at the Barclays Center, who, at the discretion of other men in rooms far away, will very soon be called up on stage to put on a hat and respectfully embrace a very tall, very pale man, at which point someone will take a photograph.

Joshua Judd PorterAug 10, 2026

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Let Everything Change

I became a Sonny Rollins fan on my 13th birthday, when my dad took me for the first time to his favorite record store in Portland, Oregon. He gave me $50, which in 1987, netted me twelve LPs. One was a European bootleg of Moving Out. It was only two bucks, and I was drawn […]

Nate WooleyJul 31, 2026

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The Fan Zone

The fan doesn’t stop at liking their object, they co-create it in both social and artisanal modes. In soccer we might say: You don’t become a fan when you think “soy hincha de la seleccíon,” but when you sing it. Playing for the national team, for many, is the pinnacle—the perfection—of fandom. Like most perfections, it makes itself absurd.

Corley MillerJul 30, 2026

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Great, Gaudy Artifice

No awkward fumbling in the dark, no failed maneuvers, no humiliating slurp sounds slipped out in the throes of passion—even a middle-aged beauty crowns the novice to be a carnal “king”! Have you ever heard of a more seamless first time? Then you remember this is a book written by a teenage girl who’s never been kissed, let alone had sex.

Isabella TrimboliJul 27, 2026

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In the Grip of Politics

All of us, from academics to fishermen, have now internalized a practice of reading the social world as a field of political or latently political signs. TV watching habits, food choices, clothing, interpretive approaches to 19th-century British literature: Everything becomes an opportunity to take a political stand, and to position yourself in relation to others taking political stands—and in a profession where discourse is everything, such opportunities abound.

Greg AfinogenovJul 27, 2026

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Dima Maghrib!

A man told me he had driven in from Philadelphia after dropping off his children at the game in New Jersey, preferring to watch it from Queens. Others had gone to MetLife hoping to catch a glimpse of the team without paying stadium prices.

Aida AlamiJul 23, 2026

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Great Expectations

Oh well, my girlfriend says. My girlfriend is Canadian and it is quite difficult to explain to her that if you have any real fascination with English football, you cannot just walk away from a loss in the semifinals of the World Cup by saying “Oh well.”

David WingraveJul 23, 2026

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Watching Soccer

Arriving at the hotel in Kansas City, I realized I had never been in a hotel full of Ecuadorians because in Ecuador, the hotels are full of tourists. It was a sea of bright yellow soccer jerseys. Vamos, carajo! Everyone was singing, walking around wrapped in the flag, greeting strangers warmly. It was more Ecuadorian than Ecuador. In the hotel elevator, at random bars in town, at the vintage clothing shop, there were clumps and clusters of people in yellow. Everything was inside out.

Dushko Petrovich CórdovaJul 21, 2026

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When the Earth Gives Way

A town ninety miles north of the Arctic Circle does not need two city halls, two high schools, and two fire stations. To establish a new city, the old one must die, and this project to destroy and rebuild central Kiruna—known as the “urban” or “social transformation”—has now been ongoing for more than two decades.

Francesca BillingtonJul 20, 2026

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Getting Off With the Luddites

They see Big Tech as having eroded commonality: the common good, the social fabric, the institutions of collective interest. Luddism, as they conceive of it, is a communal, spiritual, and political project centered on three things: reclaiming collective agency away from Big Tech and its attention-fracking, data-capturing, social erosion project; re-enchanting public life through public events that help people experience connection; and fostering a world rooted in localism, public goods, care, fun, democracy, and what one Luddite I spoke to referred to as “collective effervescence.”

Sarah Thankam MathewsJul 20, 2026

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Rowing Up That Hill

Suddenly, rowing was everywhere. Rowing videos were all over Instagram, fed to me by accounts I did and didn’t follow. Businesses seized on it in their advertising; bars invited customers to “come row with us” during the next game. I saw Ro for Norge!, apparently our new national slogan, written on the pavement in pastel chalk.

Emily RustJul 17, 2026

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Disaster Rehearsal

At 7 AM on a Saturday in September 2025, I participated in a mass-casualty simulation drill held in the firefighter training area of O’Hare International Airport. Before the exercise began, the other volunteers and I gathered inside a retired hangar to receive our character assignments and our list of injuries. The backstory was that our […]

Morley MusickJul 16, 2026

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Political Inertia

Thirty-one years after the birth of its democracy, South Africa remains plagued by the ghosts of colonization and Apartheid and continues to reproduce the same violence it sought to overcome.

Oliver LaymanJul 16, 2026

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Waiting for a Hexa

Somewhere in the fifty-second minute, as the ball is passed calmly around Brazil’s back four, fireworks erupt down the street. In confusion, I look to my partner, who seems to have understood something that I have not—courtesy of Bahia’s inconsistent internet services, our broadcast is delayed. He’s on his feet, ecstatic: “It’s a goal for Brazil!”

Sara Van HornJul 15, 2026

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Seeing Like a Referee

So what are ref cams for? Far from decentering refs, the body cams intentionally frame them as protagonists with whom we are supposed to empathize, whose eyes we should learn to see the world through.

Jonathan TarletonJul 14, 2026

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Theater Kids

Stutter Steppers With the knockout rounds well underway, it’s time to contemplate one of soccer’s great perennial mysteries: Why do the best players alive miss so many World Cup penalty kicks? The kicker is an elite player with a clear shot at the net (twenty-four-feet wide and eight-feet tall) from dead center, twelve yards away. […]

Kathryn WinnerJul 13, 2026

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Real Canadian DNA

The Dove Fresh Clubhouse offers a series of photo ops after which you can take a misty refreshing shower and treat yourself to a stick of deodorant; Home Depot presents “David Beckham’s Backyard” which does not look like what you might imagine David Beckham’s backyard would look like, or any backyard really, but you can get your face painted in Home Depot–swatched colors (one imagines a child sweatily choosing between eggshell and ecru).

Ariella GarmaiseJul 9, 2026

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World Cupcophony

On the field, every World Cup is a contest of idioms: between the Spanish-influenced juego de posición and post-German Gegenpressing, between philosophies that rely on holding the ball and those that assert themselves by working without it, between the set piece-heavy structuralism now fashionable in the English Premier League and the crashing unpredictability of the South American game. At an official level, however, the World Cup’s cacophony of on-field styles cedes to a party-pooper monolingualism.

Aaron TimmsJul 7, 2026

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Camping

Everybody started undressing but it wasn’t scary. In the dark, nobody could really see anybody else, like we didn’t have bodies. Without a body, in the presence of boys, I felt like a girl, like my ugliness was at bay.

Aurora HuizaJul 7, 2026

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Semiquincentennial Blues

We have passed the point at which absurdity is an aberration. The Monster Energy and Crypto.com sponsorships for the evening: very real. The female quotient including no women fighters, only the “Octagon girls” in sequined hotpants and velvet bodices: also real. The United States Marine Band playing a rendition of “The Boys Are Back in Town": too real. A fighter operating under the moniker Black Beast: painfully real. The Black Beast losing to someone who took his victory speech as an occasion to announce, “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?”: still real.

Mychal Denzel SmithJul 3, 2026

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Sounds from Rikers Island

A bit more than three years into his exile from New York City, St. Elmo Sylvester Hope sat for an interview with Down Beat magazine in Los Angeles. He was a diminutive, softspoken man who looked like what his mother had once dreamed he’d become—a professor. But he was actually a working musician who seemed […]

Colin AsherJul 2, 2026

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From Mexico 1986 to North America 2026

The contours of the 2026 World Cup serve as a clear indicator of just how much the footballing relationship between Mexico and the United States has evolved over the four decades since the Azteca Stadium last hosted the tournament. While much remains to be seen—the Mexican national team has so far exceeded expectations and could well outperform the US—one thing seems clear: Football is no longer an exceptional realm that inverts the hierarchy of Mexico’s subaltern relationship with its northern neighbor.

Hugo GarciamarínJun 30, 2026

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The Clip Stage

The goals are all that really count, in the end—maybe they are all we need to watch. Watching the clips, we have gotten away with something: We have watched the World Cup without having had to watch any soccer.

Corley MillerJun 29, 2026

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No Place for Selfish Behavior

The Scottish national team, playing in the World Cup for the first time in twenty-eight years, is based out of Boston for the group stage. Fifty thousand Scots traveled here for the tournament, equal to nearly a full percent of Scotland’s population. They have won the city’s hearts by drinking up all the beer, buying up all the unwanted Red Sox tickets, and tumbling down the metal slide outside City Hall in their kilts.

Kathryn WinnerJun 26, 2026

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The Expansiveness, the New Air

It’s like he saw it coming. “The Numbers,” the first poem in the vast first volume of the Poems of J.H. Prynne, opens: The whole thing it is, the difficult matter: to shrink the confines down. Prynne died in April, aged 89. Now we can see the whole thing, the size and scope of what […]

Ben PhilippsJun 24, 2026

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Wake Up and Smell the Reality

Tacitly or openly, officials and observers on all sides of the deal—even those who otherwise seem to inhabit different universes—acknowledge that the US has lost the war. And should the war resume, as Israel hopes, the US will lose again. “You can’t kill your way out of . . . every national security problem”; but you can sure as hell die trying.

Colin VanderburgJun 23, 2026

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Strategic Amnesia

Denying that history could have been otherwise or making conquest subject to some unwritten statute of limitations are both ways of cloaking not just the US’s imperial past but its continuation into the present, with or without Kalaallit Nunaat. Buying Greenland was more than a threat to NATO, it was a threat to make American empire visible again.

Bathsheba DemuthJun 24, 2026