Overview

In an increasingly secular, fragmented, and distracted culture, nothing brings Americans together quite like sports. On Sundays in September, more families worship at the altar of the NFL than at any church. This appeal, which cuts across all demographic and ideological lines, makes sports perhaps the last unifying mass ritual of our era, with huge numbers of people all focused on the same thing at the same moment. That timeless, live quality makes sports very powerful, and very lucrative. And the media spectacle around them is only getting bigger, brighter, and noisier. More importantly, sports are sold as an oasis of community to a nation deeply divided: They are escapist, apolitical, the only tie that binds. In fact, precisely because they appear allegedly above politics, sports are able to smuggle potent messages about inequality, patriotism, labor, and race to massive audiences. And as the wider culture works through shifting gender roles and masculine power, those anxieties are also found in the experiences of female sports journalists, athletes, and fans, and through the coverage of violence by and against male bodies. Sports, rather than being the one thing everyone can agree on, perfectly encapsulate the roiling tensions of modern American life.

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Kyle Tait is a professionally trained voice actor and sports broadcaster based in Atlanta, Georgia. He's done voice work for TV and radio ads around the world, corporate training videos, whiteboard and explainer videos, documentaries, audiobooks, and more. He's narrated more than twenty titles on Audible and iTunes, across genres spanning from sports history to crime thrillers to self-help. In addition to his voice work, Tait is an established sports broadcaster, calling baseball, basketball, and football on ESPN3, as well as serving as a studio host on multiple national college networks with IMG College. Michael Serazio is an award-winning author and former journalist. He is a faculty member in the Department of Communication at Boston College. His books include Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerilla Marketing. He has written for the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Salon, the New Republic, and others.

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