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The Believer
@thebeliever.net
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A quarterly literature, arts, and culture magazine.
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The Believer @thebeliever.net · Dec 18
Our first-ever Sports Issue kicks off today! Check this thread for the play-by-play on what to expect.

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Winter 2025 - Believer Magazine
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“Watching this now, I’m struck by how young she appears; the maturity of her skating and the magnitude of her accomplishment have aged her in my mind.”

Belinda Huijuan Tang takes us back to Michelle Kwan's memorable 2002 Winter Olympic performance.

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Annotating Michelle Kwan’s “Fields of Gold” Performance, 2002 Winter Olympics - Believer Magazine
Two days before Michelle Kwan skated an exhibition performance to Eva Cassidy’s cover of Sting’s “Fields of Gold” during the 2002 Olympics, she fell while attempting a triple flip jump in the free-ska...
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February 9, 2026 at 6:41 PM
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"I think that’s just more of what we’re interested in—things that are less technical and more textural."

—from an interview with Yo La Tengo

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An Interview with Yo La Tengo - Believer Magazine
There are, when it comes down to it, two kinds of bands: bands whose sound is described by the invocation of other bands (“______ sounds like a poppier/slower/suckier ______”), and the bands whose sou...
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February 9, 2026 at 3:25 PM
thebeliever.net
“I’ve been a fisherman for so long that if I can go to my little workshop downstairs and start tying leaders and changing fly lines or cleaning things, I’m at peace.”

—Thomas McGuane, interviewed by Mattie C. Govan

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An Interview with Thomas McGuane - Believer Magazine
It will come as no surprise to longtime readers of Thomas McGuane’s work that while I was speaking with him, I was moved by his kindness, his incisive insight, and, above all, his mischievous sense of...
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February 6, 2026 at 8:01 PM
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"What does it say about the US education system that so many people are opting out, and how did we get here?"

—from "Tune in, Drop Out, Homeschool," an essay by Lauren Markham

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Tune In, Drop Out, Homeschool - Believer Magazine
It was Friday evening, an hour before showtime, and the art deco theater in San Luis Obispo, California, already had a line of well-dressed women circling the block, bound for the Wild + Free conferen...
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February 6, 2026 at 4:30 PM
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“Do everything right and they leave. Do everything wrong and they eat. An interesting sport in which virtue is not a component of success!”

—Thomas McGuane, interviewed by Mattie C. Govan

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An Interview with Thomas McGuane - Believer Magazine
It will come as no surprise to longtime readers of Thomas McGuane’s work that while I was speaking with him, I was moved by his kindness, his incisive insight, and, above all, his mischievous sense of...
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February 5, 2026 at 10:05 PM
thebeliever.net
"yesterday at the national gallery / some kids said of a frankenthaler / it reminded them of mario kart"

—from "Abstract Expressionism," a poem by Andrew Nurkin

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Abstract Expressionism - Believer Magazine
. yesterday at the national gallery ……….some kids said of a frankenthaler it reminded them of mario kart the ……….numeral seven rainbows by the sea a row of taffy thrown ……….from a float a bloody nose ...
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February 5, 2026 at 6:50 PM
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"McGuane fits comfortably into any comic canon you’d care to assemble, however international."

—from "The Late Style of Thomas McGuane," an essay by Mark Kamine

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The Late Style of Thomas McGuane - Believer Magazine
THE SWERVE OF MOLECULES Thomas McGuane’s recent book of stories, Gallatin Canyon (2006), compels a look back over nearly forty years of work. McGuane has steadily produced novels, stories and screenpl...
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February 5, 2026 at 4:11 PM
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"They are looking for something, and they don’t want to translate that need... I think my ability comes from listening for all this time and being able to translate."

—professional tennis racket stringer Roman Prokes

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A Microinterview with Roman Prokes - Believer Magazine
PART I THE BELIEVER: What was it like when you first began working as a pro racket stringer? And how did you meet Andre Agassi? ROMAN PROKES: I was working for Jay Schwartz—it was the two of us—and we...
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February 2, 2026 at 6:22 PM
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"It’s interesting for you as a writer... to kinda just come in with no hang-ups and just let the music dictate to you what you’re gonna be or what you’re gonna speak about."

—Q-Tip, interviewed by Touré

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An Interview with Q-Tip - Believer Magazine
Q-Tip was born Jonathan Davis and even though he’ll let you call him Q-Tip, most of his closest friends now use his Muslim name, Kamaal Fareed. He began his musical career in the late eighties as a te...
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February 2, 2026 at 3:26 PM
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"Together, these instrumental crosscurrents evoke a sense of the cavernous: a vast space full of suffocating darkness."

—Stu Horvath on “dungeonsynth,” an underground genre of black metal that became popular in fantasy game soundtracks.

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Playing from the Keep - Believer Magazine
In the early nineties, bands like Mayhem and Darkthrone kicked off the second wave of black metal in Norway, flooding the senses with screeching vocals, blast-beat drums, and blazing tremolo. But ther...
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January 29, 2026 at 5:23 PM
thebeliever.net
"I’ve always been really curious about that process of words becoming words."

—Melissa Faliveno, interviewed by Jeannie Vanasco

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An Interview with Melissa Faliveno - Believer Magazine
On weekends, when she was a child in small-town Wisconsin, Melissa Faliveno would wake before dawn and travel with her parents to roadside gas stations and rural convenience stores to tally every choc...
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January 29, 2026 at 1:54 PM
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"What is a Road Movie, really? Why do so many directors (from so many different eras) long to make them? And what makes movement any more inherently interesting than—or even all that different from—staying in one place?"

—from "On the Road" by Chuck Klosterman
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On The Road - Believer Magazine
I drove a car across the country once. It took three weeks and was financed by a rock magazine. Two years after the trip, a handful of people from California with exceptionally comfortable office chai...
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January 28, 2026 at 4:53 PM
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“[COPA] is a place for skills training, not play. This is a place to be improved, rated, sold off to the highest bidder.”

—Chris Feliciano Arnold on an elite soccer training facility

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Bola Cheia - Believer Magazine
Opened in 2020, the COPA Soccer Training Center in Walnut Creek, California, is a 117,000-square-foot, three-story-high labyrinth of sensor-­enabled practice spaces where boys and girls ages one throu...
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January 28, 2026 at 2:15 PM
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"I understood, the very first time I saw the painting, that wherever there was space, a ball, a hoop, and one human, there was the possibility of a miracle made possible by human ritual."

—Kiese Laymon on Ernie Barnes's In the Beginning

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The Worst Shot Ever Taken - Believer Magazine
I was sixteen when my mother gifted me a painting by Ernie Barnes. I’d seen one Barnes painting at that point on the cover of Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album, I Want You, on the brown carpeted floor of my Au...
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January 27, 2026 at 4:45 PM
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“Jocks and artists are enemies; I have known this since middle school. Leanne Shapton’s 2012 book, Swimming Studies, blurs these categories.”

—Meng Jin on Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton

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Sportive Reading - Believer Magazine
The Fight by Norman Mailer Sport: Boxing Setting: Kinshasa, Zaire Publisher: Little, Brown  Publication year: 1975 Page count: 239  Norman Mailer produced a handful of masterful books, mostly nonficti...
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January 27, 2026 at 2:47 PM
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“Tennis has an unfairly genteel reputation, in part because of its elaborate code of etiquette. Its origins, however, are rougher and quite literally diabolical.”

—Monica Datta on Sudden Death by Álvaro Enrigue

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Sportive Reading - Believer Magazine
The Fight by Norman Mailer Sport: Boxing Setting: Kinshasa, Zaire Publisher: Little, Brown  Publication year: 1975 Page count: 239  Norman Mailer produced a handful of masterful books, mostly nonficti...
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January 26, 2026 at 8:36 PM
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“Amane and his family were the victims of an elaborate fraud, and there was nothing he could do about it.”

Paul Collins and Andrew Nelson tell the story of a West African soccer player who was smuggled into Europe as a teenager.

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Ferryman of Dreams - Believer Magazine
1. “Kid, that’s not how things work here. And where are you from? What’s your nationality? How old are you?” The words jolted sixteen-year-old Amane Dramera into a state of confusion so that everythin...
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January 26, 2026 at 6:15 PM
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"People love football because it’s the most exciting sport on earth. I believe that when people talk about it, they should sound as excited as the fans."

— @minakimes.bsky.social, interviewed by @sarahenni.bsky.social

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An Interview with Mina Kimes - Believer Magazine
For most of my life, I was a die-hard sports fan who considered SportsCenter as much a part of a balanced breakfast as a bowl of Wheaties. But then I turned thirty, got divorced, moved to a new city, ...
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January 26, 2026 at 3:43 PM
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“As cliché as it sounds, I’ve come to believe sports are truly a great equalizer.”

Carrie Browstein takes some sports-related questions in her latest advice column.

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Ask Carrie: Winter 2025 - Believer Magazine
Q: My partner is the captain of a coed dodgeball league and has started hinting that he wants me to attend more games. I went to one recently and found myself feeling secondhand embarrassment for him....
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January 23, 2026 at 7:44 PM
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“Every match has the shadow of empire looming over it.”

—from Chris Almeida’s essay on cricket in India

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An Avoidable Incident - Believer Magazine
It was on the third day of a rowdy but otherwise unremarkable 2001 match in South Africa that the Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar—perhaps the most famous person in his country—began bowling. Quickly...
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January 23, 2026 at 4:33 PM
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“I’ve said it before, but I feel like everything I know about drama I learned at age nine while watching the 1986 World Cup.”

—Daniel Alarcon, interviewed by @jennitaur.bsky.social

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No One Gave It to You - Believer Magazine
During my senior year of high school, a guidance counselor who had it in for me gleefully noticed I was missing a semester’s worth of PE. I still have the paper on the Cupertino High School letterhead...
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January 23, 2026 at 2:33 PM
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"I’m always sort of operating from my younger mind, creatively, because I think most of us are born with more empathy than we hang on to."

Read our 2021 interview with Oscar-nominee Sean Penn, conducted by Ross Simonini.

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An Interview with Sean Penn - Believer Magazine
Since the 1980s, Sean Penn has been an American symbol of the cool, cigarette-smoking masculinity that peaked in the 1950s. His early films established him as a dedicated actor of brooding intensity, ...
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January 22, 2026 at 8:47 PM
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Big congratulations to Delroy Lindo on the Oscar nomination! Read our recent interview with him here: www.thebeliever.net/an-interview...
An Interview with Delroy Lindo - Believer Magazine
I am racing the rain in the back of a London cab with Mr. Delroy Lindo. I was advised by a well-traveled friend to trust only this as a means of conveyance—the pug-nosed solidity of the classic black ...
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January 22, 2026 at 3:06 PM
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“I feel like reading is like the weight lifting of writing. It’s making you better, but you don’t necessarily feel the payoff... it only shows up later in this mysterious way, if at all.”

—Marcus Burke, interviewed by @jennitaur.bsky.social

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No One Gave It to You - Believer Magazine
During my senior year of high school, a guidance counselor who had it in for me gleefully noticed I was missing a semester’s worth of PE. I still have the paper on the Cupertino High School letterhead...
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January 21, 2026 at 7:53 PM
thebeliever.net
Our Sports Issue explores what happens when sports writing meets literary journalism. Take a look inside here:
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Winter 2025 - Believer Magazine
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January 21, 2026 at 3:19 PM