How Football Explains The World

An original and insightful investigation of the role of football in today's world - around the world. Serious football writing at its best, in the tradition of Simon Kuper's Football Against The Enemy.

'Funny, sharp, waspish, alert and reflective.'

Significantly entertaining if you like soccer, and entertainingly significant if you do not.

'He engages each city and team with the spirit of a true fan, and he emerges with impressions so vivid they feel like they've been whispered into your ear over a nice pint of lager... This superbly written and elegantly reported book.'

'An excellent reporter... An eccentric, fascinating exposé of a world... The book starts off like a house on fire.'

Franklin Foer is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a fellow at the New America Foundation. For seven years, he edited The New Republic magazine.He is the author of How Football Explains the World, which has been translated into 27 languages and won a National Jewish Book Award. He has been called one of America’s ‘most influential liberal journalists’ by The Daily Beast. He lives in Washington, D.C.

What in the world has the power to liberate women in Iran while provoking antagonism between Catholics and Protestants in Scotland, to lure Nigerians to the cold of the Ukraine while heating up class warfare in the US heartlands, and both profit local gangsters and create local - and international - celebrities? 
 
Foer presents an unexpected, uniquely revealing tour of the politics and culture of football from Milan to Tehran. He examines the game's role in sustaining ancient hatreds and rivalries (Serbia's Red Star and Croatia's Dinamo); in supporting the migration of players and the rise of the football oligarchs (such as Silvio Berlusconi, President of AC Milan - and of Italy); and in defending the virtues and vices of old-fashioned nationalism. As Foer brilliantly illuminates, the Balkan War, anti-Semitism, Jewish identity, racism, social integration, media manipulation, and American patriotism have all been influenced by, as well as have had a dramatic effect on, football. 
 
On his travels, Foer encounters a collection of fans that is stranger than fiction: from a British hooligan with a Jewish mother, a Nazi father and a career as a soldier of fortune, to a fan club in Serbia that turns into a brutal anti-Muslim paramilitary unit. The result is an unforgettable parade of uniquely memorable fans - each set into his - or her - unique political and cultural context.

Franklin Foer

World Without Mind is an argument in the spirit of those brave democracy protestors who stand alone before tanks. Franklin Foer asks us to unplug and think. He asks us to recognize and challenge Silicon Valley’s monopoly power. His book is a vital response to digital utopianism at a time when we desperately need new ethics for social media.

A provocative, enlightening, and above all, important book that is asking the most important question of our times. It is nothing less than an examination of the future of humanity and what we like to call ‘free will.’ It is also a good read – Foer writes with an engaging vibrancy that makes the book a page-turner.

Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind is a fascinating biography of the biggest players in big tech – a handful of humans that, through their decisions, govern the lives of seven billion tech consumers. Foer shows that these decisions are robbing us of our humanity, our values, and our ability to grapple with complexity. World Without Mind is an important and urgent book that should be required reading for anyone who’s ever shopped on Amazon, swiped the screen on an Apple device, or scrolled through the Facebook newsfeed – in short, for all of us.

As the dust settles from the great tech upheavals of the early 21st century, it turns out that the titans of Silicon Valley have not ushered us into a utopia of peace and freedom. Instead, as Foer so convincingly shows, by monopolizing the means of distribution, they have systematically demonetized and degraded the written word. World without Mind makes a passionate, deeply informed case for the need to take back culture – knowledge, information, ideas – from the Facebooks and Amazons. Its message could not be more timely.

Essential reading - while we still know what reading is - Foer's terrifying analysis of the cyber state we're in is both portrait gallery of the robber barons, the monopolists, the tax dodgers and the fantasists who own the data troughs from which we feed, and passionate plea for the retention of those values of privacy, nonconformity, contemplation, creativity and mind, which the Big Tech companies are well on their way to destroying, not out of cynicism but the deepest ignorance of what a person is and why individuality is indispensable to him. This book leaves us in no doubt: no greater threat to our humanity exists.

A sustained and perceptive critique from a humanist perspective of what the big tech companies are doing to our culture ... World Without Mind thus joins a lengthening list of blistering critiques of our networked world ... What sets it apart is the style and verve of the writing ... World Without Mind is full of sharp insights, elegantly expressed.

The book flits between history, philosophy and politics and politics, but it is also a first-hand tale… His recounting of this clash between old and new media is authentic and absorbing.

[An] elegant polemic against the power and ambition of the big tech companies… Foer argues passionately that we are sleepwalking into a world where “we’re constantly watched and constantly distracted”… It’s Silicon Valley’s world. We just live in it.

Foer conjures concise, insightful psychological profiles of each mover-and-shaker, detailing how they've mixed utopianism and monopolism into an insidious whole … World Without Mind is a searing take, a polemic packed with urgency and desperation that, for all its erudition and eloquence, is not afraid to roll up its sleeves and make things personal.

Foer’s denunciation of online journalism, which comes in his book’s best chapter, is powerful… His book comes as a rousing recommendation of a subscription model newspaper that avoids the ravages of virality.

Foer’s writing is deft enough to make this a polemic in the best sense of the word, which is to say a relentless intellectual argument, executed in the tradition of George Orwell and Christopher Hitchens.

An uncanny prophecy of big tech’s public reckoning.

Now, suddenly, it’s open season in Silicon Valley… Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind belongs to this turn. And it couldn’t have appeared at more opportune moment… Foer is writing for a readership that is ready to re-evaluate the role technology plays in their lives, and to pay closer, less credulous attention to the companies that are building it… Your receptiveness to these claims will probably have a lot to do with how technology has touched your life. Foer is candid about how it’s touched him. He writes as someone with skin in the game.

The backlash against Silicon Valley has resulted in a flood of critical books, and Franklin Foers World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Data is one of the most trenchant, with a sustained attempt to shed some light on the distinctive culture of the digital revolution.

Why Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple threaten our future

A timely and powerful must-read on how the big tech companies are damaging our culture – and what we can do to fight their influence 
 
Four titanic corporations are now the most powerful gatekeepers the world has ever known. 
We shop with Amazon, socialise on Facebook, turn to Apple for entertainment, and rely on Google for information. They have conquered our culture and set us on a path to a world without private contemplation or autonomous thought: a world without mind. 
 
In this book, Franklin Foer makes a passionate, deeply informed case for the need to restore our inner lives and reclaim our intellectual culture before it is too late. At stake is nothing less than who we are, and what we will become. It is a message that could not be more timely.

Franklin Foer

Praise for World Without Mind

World Without Mind is an argument in the spirit of those brave democracy protestors who stand alone before tanks. Franklin Foer asks us to unplug and think. He asks us to recognize and challenge Silico ...

A provocative, enlightening, and above all, important book that is asking the most important question of our times. It is nothing less than an examination of the future of humanity and what we like to call ‘f ...

Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind is a fascinating biography of the biggest players in big tech – a handful of humans that, through their decisions, govern the lives of seven billion tech consumers. Foer sho ...

World Without Mind is an argument in the spirit of those brave democracy protestors who stand alone before tanks. Franklin Foer asks us to unplug and think. He asks us to recognize and challenge Silico ...

A provocative, enlightening, and above all, important book that is asking the most important question of our times. It is nothing less than an examination of the future of humanity and what we like to call ‘f ...

Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind is a fascinating biography of the biggest players in big tech – a handful of humans that, through their decisions, govern the lives of seven billion tech consumers. Foer sho ...

World Without Mind is an argument in the spirit of those brave democracy protestors who stand alone before tanks. Franklin Foer asks us to unplug and think. He asks us to recognize and challenge Silico ...

A provocative, enlightening, and above all, important book that is asking the most important question of our times. It is nothing less than an examination of the future of humanity and what we like to call ‘f ...

Franklin Foer’s World Without Mind is a fascinating biography of the biggest players in big tech – a handful of humans that, through their decisions, govern the lives of seven billion tech consumers. Foer sho ...

Books by Franklin Foer

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