Well, I see that John has been kind enough to set up a "Sports" category over there in the sidebar. And so I'll begin my first contribution to New APPS over there, though I'll point out in advance that it won't treat sport in isolation, but rather as a filtered list of annotated links that read sport in its multiple intersections with philosophy, art, politics and science.
So welcome to the first edition of the News APPS High Five, presented by sportsBabel, sports links so hot even philosopher-geeks need to wear sweatbands.
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1. Copyright and Football, Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman, Freakonomics
A very interesting article about the particular "innovation culture" that is football, and how creativity thrives -- particularly in the professional game -- despite the fact that any innovation can be copied almost instantly without any "legal" protection. One personal critique of the article is that the innovation culture of football is treated essentially as a dialectic in which offenses and defenses are continually engaged in a game of one-upmanship to find temporary competitive advantage on the field of play. But it fails to consider the regulatory environment of competition -- that is, the political (and increasingly economic) structures of the football league proper. Intellectual property laws are certainly part of said environment, but so is almost every rule change made by the league an opportunity for competitive advantage. And when we are describing the professional leagues of the NFL or NCAA we cannot discount the role of television in rule changes and thus the equation of innovation.
2. How Baseball Explains The Nature Of Language, Alva Noë, NPR
Noë uses the case of baseball to discuss writing, speech and the broader project of linguistics. For me, a strength of the article perhaps lies in where it doesn't quite reach: namely, that while speech is about 70,000 years older than writing, it is gesture that precedes them both. Sport is first and foremost a gestural practice! And when put together with his assertion that "the linguist works is in the domain of style" it suggests important questions about gesture and style (and sport for that matter), particularly as they concern aestheticization or politicization.
3. Gene Doping Detectable With a Simple Blood Test, ScienceDaily
The philosophical foundations of modern sport are further challenged with this report that describes a blood test developed by German scientists that can detect evidence of gene doping in an athlete's body up to 56 days after the initial infraction. Funded by the World Anti-Doping Agency, it is a cost-efficient test that presumably can be used in future large-scale operations, such as a major sporting competition like the Olympics. (As an aside, the Deleuzians in the audience will be interested to note that the gene doping methods in question often use transgenic DNA introduced to the body by viruses.)
4. Lockout Looms Over 2010-11 NBA Season, Larry Coon, ESPN.com
Labour disputes in professional sports leagues are nothing new. For the third-party fan they often seem to degenerate into predictable discussions of millionaire athletes arguing with billionaire owners about who will get what slices of the economic pie. Not in this article, however. Coon, widely respected around the league as the author of the NBA Salary Cap FAQ, offers a thorough yet accessible look at the labour troubles facing the NBA and the likelihood of a possible lockout.
Gustavo Artigas
The Rules of the Game (Part 2-C)
2000-2001
sporting event
5. The Rules of the Game, Gustavo Artigas (click on #8)
This one is a little dated, but it's one of my favourite artworks that explicitly remixes those structural elements we call modern sport. The Rules of the Game is a two-part project engaging questions of border politics between Mexico and the United States: the first consisted of a fronton ball court erected against the border wall in Tijuana, while the second part (pictured above) had two Mexican soccer teams playing a game and two American basketball teams playing their own game, all on the same court at the same time, merging these two layers into one.
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