Team Spirit: The New Yorker
Adam Gopnik writes about Olympic nationalistic pride. “Sports are about human character inasmuch, and only inasmuch, as they show that you can master anything with enough effort. Seen in this light, our urge to give the full measure of our national devotion to the synchronized swimmers—and the shot-putters and even the heel-and-toe walkers and the beach-volleyball women in their bikinis—is logical and even admirable. We are embracing the marginalized masters among us in order to make a team, as we have embraced once marginalized people to make a nation.”