I'm Christopher Lighten and this is open source.

In the strangeness of midsummer 2024,

the cosmopolitan novelist Joseph O'Neill,

is our bridge between the Republican Convention in Milwaukee and the Summer Olympics in Paris.

You know both sides of that gap, Joe O'Neill, politics, and global celebrity sports.

You're famous as an amateur cricket player in New York of all places, and as a writer

about cricket and the many meanings of sports in general.

Your new novel, Godwin, is deep into soccer football in a wild intercontinental search for

the next superstar, the next Leonel Messy, or Killian M'bepe. We've got a lot of ground to cover here in this wide world of competitive

striving, sports and politics. So let me plunge with my very general impression that

we're getting much better at games than we are at

self-government. We set higher standards in sports, we find more character and authenticity

in sports than in politics, we should be learning more from the

games and the players we love. What if it's true that Sports World is ready to

reveal us and our society to ourselves.

I'm interested in this question, obviously.

I mean, in our chat before this conversation,

you mentioned that you yourself have become more kind of gripped by sports and by the personalities of

sports in the last few years than ever before or then for a long time and I have exactly the same thing.

I just find myself watching more sports, taking more pleasure from it, and also escaping into it.

And I suppose it's easy to dismiss sports as a kind of circus entertainment, you know, necessary, psychologically, and everyone needs to go to the circus, obviously.

And of course, the logic would be that we are in such a kind of pessimistic, dark moment, not just in the US but in global and planetary affairs, that sports

...