Raw, un-produced, nutritious fun

Tony Karon and I have a new weekly football-themed stream, named of course Eleven Named People, on Thursday nights at 9pm on Youtube.

For a few years, Tony Karon, editorial lead at AJPlus, and I taught what was probably the third or fourth seminar in the history of The New School about soccer, "The Politics of Global Soccer" also known as “Global Politics, Global Politics.” (To my knowledge, philosopher Simon Critchley and media studies professor Barry Salmon taught football-related courses before we did.) The course, a graduate seminar was inspired by a panel on “Africa’s World Cup,” I had organized and chaired ahead of the 2010 World Cup. That panel was legendary: Binyavanga Wainaina, Teju Cole, Austin Merril, Tony, and myself. The subsequent seminar ran for a few semesters, then was put on ice. Since then, we’ve wondered how to bring back what we loved about that course (and our students). Will Shoki and I had Tony on the first season of Africa Is a Country’s weekly news and opinion podcast, then Tony and I tried Twitterspaces. I then started this Substack. Off mic, we regularly talk football politics anyway; Tony summed it up as our “inimitable parse-and-move game.” So, I started pushing the idea of a weekly stream. Tony was game. So here we are. Last week Thursday at 9 pm EST we recorded live the first episode of “Eleven Named People, the Youtube stream.” In that program, we talked about football documentaries (we panned Paul Pogba’s genre invention, the “Pogmentary”), reviewed Zinedine Zidane’s life as a contradictory political figure, and felt there was little to celebrate of 30 years of free South African football. In Tony’s words, it was raw, un-produced, nutritious fun.

Watch Episode 2 on Thursday, July 14th, 9 pm here.

This was last week’s episode.