Why can a soccer match make billions of people tense when almost nothing in their daily lives depends on the result? Martina Moneke argues that sport is one of civilization’s greatest inventions: a symbolic form of conflict that creates genuine consequence without catastrophe. 2026 FIFA World Cup - Belgium v. Egypt in Seattle -- SounderBruce, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Martina Moneke I was tense. Not mildly interested. Not casually curious. Genuinely tense. As the

Representational image of a footvolley player in action -- Charliew92, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Rufus Wiena My phone buzzed. It was my girlfriend. ‘Get out of there,’ she said. Her voice was shaking. I was in Graz, Austria, at a European footvolley tournament. I had come to compete. I was leaving for my safety. Hours earlier, a four-time European champion with over 25,000 Instagram followers had posted a story asking his fans what should be done with me. The res

UFC Freedom 250, the mixed martial arts event produced by the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Sunday, June 14, 2026, in the Grand Foyer of the White House -- public domain image By Gary M. Feinman In a March 2026 paper published in the journal Science Advances, which focused on variability in governance along the autocratic-democratic axis, my coauthors and I found that one of the strongest associations for the 40 case observations, which were part of our study, was between t