Word: foer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Jonathan Safran Foer hasn't always been like this. "I was a flamboyant child," he says. "I used to wear, like, very crazy outfits all the time--bow ties, big blazers, glittery stuff. I was a little mini-Liberace." Not anymore. Foer is so buttoned-down and serious he makes Philip Roth look like Andre...
...that Foer--it's one syllable, "like the number four"--isn't funny and charming, because he is. But there's something deeply, essentially earnest about him. Gone are the bow ties: he dresses to disappear, in a gray sweater and blue jeans. He is neither hip nor cool. Skinny and delicately handsome, he looks even younger than he is. He doesn't go out. He is a vegetarian...
...Where Foer succeeds brilliantly is in his reporting. He takes his readers onto the Glasgow terraces for an engaging first-hand account of the sectarian rivalry, a theme he echoes in his discussions with an organized group of hooligan supporters of Red Star Belgrade whose fan base were the shock troops of Slobodan Milosevic's "ethnic cleansing" campaign, and were later organized into militias...
...American, Foer must be commended for venturing onto terrain inherently foreign to his home readership. In the U.S. soccer is mostly a middle class suburban game played by boys and girls, and the idea that loyalty to a team can be an expression of identity so profound that it's worth fighting - even sometimes killing - for would seem utterly preposterous on the grassy fields of suburban Long Island where Foer first played the game as a child. America's professional soccer clubs - or "franchises," as they're uniquely known in the U.S. - were created from scratch in the 1990s...
...Real Madrid marketing chief Jose Angel Sanchez told British writer Martin Jacques, recently, "Eventually, you may get just six global brand leaders. People will support a local side and one of the world's big six. We have to position ourselves for that." Jacques goes further than Foer in posing some of the questions and tensions raised by globalization on the way the game is played, watched and organized. Where the loyalty of a fan base has traditionally been organized on the basis of local, often sectarian or political affinities, he notes, that hardly helps turn it into a global...