n+1 Magazine

Sonny Rollins in Helsinki, 1972. Image via Wikimedia. 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 to the imposing portrait of Rollins on its cheap cardboard cover.

Fans display a banner reading "The Malvinas are Argentine" during the World Cup semifinal against England. Even by the arcane standards of soccer songs and chants, the Argentine team's locker room number required some explanation. "Thirty-two years later," it proposes "Scaloni will avenge / the Cup stolen from number ten! . . .

Jennifer and June-Alison Gibbons. Courtesy of David Tibet. The sad teenage stud must tend to his ruinous habit. Before school, he heads to the supermarket to buy Pepsi in bulk. "Same as usual, huh?" says the cashier. When he returns home, he arranges the cans of cola in the fridge, before taking three into bed with him, where he daydreams of living in Arizona or Hawaii, doing nothing except sinking three hundred sodas a day-a freedom apparently unattainable in his home city of Malibu.

Richard Earlom after Johann Zoffany, The Royal Academy of Arts, 1773. If you're in academia, you've probably already heard about the report. In April 2026, a panel of academics from different fields, some relatively well-known and some not, issued a Report on the State of Scholarship in Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.

Inside Zikrayat. Photo courtesy of Anna Heisterkamp. When Morocco's winning penalty hit the back of the net, the crowd inside Zikrayat, a Middle Eastern restaurant and lounge in Astoria, erupted in cheers. People danced in celebration and the high-pitched, howling trill of a zaghrouta pierced the air. It had been a tense game between Morocco and the Netherlands in Monterrey, Mexico, on June 29.

A Sky News helicopter films Andy Burnham's arrival by train in London. Wednesday evening. It's time to go to the pub! My girlfriend is unsure. Why? She's heavily pregnant. She finds the pub tiresome-she finds it dispiriting, to sit marooned with a Guinness 0.0 while everyone chats rubbish and tosses her only the most boring questions like, "How are you feeling?" Fair enough, I say, fair critique-but we must. It's the semifinals. It's England versus our good pals Argentina.

Kylian Mbappé takes a breather. 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.

At the Ecuador-Curaçao game in Kansas City. Photo courtesy of the author. Growing up, I identified myself with soccer. And I used soccer to identify myself. I'm from Ecuador and I used to be good at soccer, so at some point I began telling myself that I was good at soccer because I was from Ecuador.

Norwegians gather outside the Royal Palace after the Norway-Brazil game. Photo courtesy of the author. In Norwegian, to backpedal in the figurative sense is to row: Å ro. We make our discursive retreats not on a bike but in a vessel. And, really, the idiom is less overtly about retreat. More than a backwards motion, it evokes a mad dash towards land. To get elsewhere, anywhere but the awkward place we've cast ourselves with our careless speech, we use arms and oars at full, frantic force.

Scale model of Kiruna. Every morning between 1:15 and 1:45, the largest underground iron ore mine in the world, in Sweden's northernmost city, begins blasting. One way to locate your proximity to the Kiruna mine is by placing a full glass of water on your nightstand and setting an alarm. If you wake up and see ripples, you're near the damaged buildings, in "Old Kiruna." Some locals call this part of town the Wrong Side. Near the church or the hospital, the explosions can feel like tiny earthquakes.