Monthly Archive for November, 2010

From Grant Wahl, in Sports Illustrated

Zurich, Switzerland — How convoluted are the politics surrounding this Thursday’s FIFA vote to award the hosts for World Cups 2018 and ’22? Well, the first person I saw upon leaving airport customs here was Bora Milutinovic, the peripatetic Serbian-born, Mexican-based coach who managed the U.S. at World Cup ’94.

“My friend! My friend!” Bora squawked, and it’s true. Bora is everybody’s friend. He remains tight with the U.S. Soccer Federation, which is bidding to host World Cup ’22 (to be awarded with World Cup ’18 on Thursday). But Bora is publicly supporting the competing bid of Qatar — for a nice fee — joining other celebrity endorsers for the wealthy Arab emirate that include Zinédine Zidane, Sir Alex Ferguson and Pep Guardiola.

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By Thomas Rogers, in The Salon

Conservative commentators have been bemoaning the decline of the American man almost as long as the American man has been in existence. As it turns out, they are right: Men these days are a mere shadow of what we once were. We’ve become physically weaker than our ancestors. We’re slower runners. We can’t jump as high as we once did. As Peter McAllister, an archaeologist with the University of Western Australia and the author of the new book “Manthropology: The Science of Why the Modern Male Is Not the Man He Used to Be,” puts it, we might be the “sorriest cohort of masculine Homo sapiens to ever walk the planet.” I, for one, blame guyliner.

“Manthropology,” a tongue-in-cheek look at the science of maleness, examines what recent discoveries in the fields of archaeology and anthropology can teach us about the state of modern masculinity. Ice Age aboriginal tribesmen, he discovers, were able to run long distances at approximately the same speed as modern-day Olympic sprinters. Classic Grecian rowers could attain speeds of 7.5 miles an hour, which today’s rowers can only attain for short bursts of time. Our culture may be obsessed with muscles: He notes that, since 1982, G.I. Joe’s Sgt. Savage has gotten three times more muscular and Barbie’s Ken now has a chest circumference attainable by only one in 50 men, but the luxuries of our contemporary lifestyle have caused a steady decline in genuine physical power. The book may be a light, breezy work, but it puts our current debate around masculinity into fascinating context.

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