Get Access to Print and Digital for $23.99 per year.
Subscribe for Full Access
A philosopher’s flat-footed meditations on the beautiful game

What We Think About When We Think About Soccer, by Simon Critchley. Penguin Books. 224 pages. $20.

Begin, as Wallace Stevens didn’t quite say, with the idea of it. I so like the idea of Simon Critchley, whose books offer philosophical takes on a variety of subjects: Stevens, David Bowie, suicide, humor, and now football — or soccer, as the US edition has it. (As a matter of principle I shall refer to this sport throughout as football.) “All of us are mysteriously affected by our names,” decides one of Milan Kundera’s characters in Immortality, and I like Critchley because…

Subscribe or to continue reading.
’s new book, The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, will be published next spring by Texas University Press. His most recent review for Harper’s Magazine, “Tennis Lessons,” appeared in the September 2016 issue.

| View All Issues |

December 2017

Close
“An unexpectedly excellent magazine that stands out amid a homogenized media landscape.” —the New York Times
Subscribe now

Debug