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The Power of Sports

Media and Spectacle in American Culture

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The Power of Sports

By: Michael Serazio
Narrated by: Kyle Tait
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About this listen

In an increasingly secular, fragmented, and distracted culture, nothing brings Americans together quite like sports. On Sundays in September, more families worship at the altar of the NFL than at any church. This appeal, which cuts across all demographic and ideological lines, makes sports perhaps the last unifying mass ritual of our era, with huge numbers of people all focused on the same thing at the same moment. That timeless, live quality makes sports very powerful, and very lucrative. And the media spectacle around them is only getting bigger, brighter, and noisier.

More importantly, sports are sold as an oasis of community to a nation deeply divided: They are escapist, apolitical, the only tie that binds. In fact, precisely because they appear allegedly "above politics", sports are able to smuggle potent messages about inequality, patriotism, labor, and race to massive audiences. And as the wider culture works through shifting gender roles and masculine power, those anxieties are also found in the experiences of female sports journalists, athletes, and fans, and through the coverage of violence by and against male bodies. Sports, rather than being the one thing everyone can agree on, perfectly encapsulate the roiling tensions of modern American life.

©2019 New York University (P)2019 Tantor
Football (American) Social Sciences Sociology of Sports Words, Language & Grammar Writing & Publishing Basketball
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Political football

Politics of sports is one that is hidden, its silence is due to those with power wanting the silent conservatism to be the norm. This book covers this and goes over so many issues we accept to simply be the economics of sports or the nature of sports, yet its intentionally set-up that way, a way that mirrors society and all of its flaws. Serazio perfectly captures this, this book and Dave Zirin’s work are my favourite go-to analysis about the politics behind sports, an area that the left choose to conscientious abandon and the right make a taboo topic.

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