Note: Today I am so excited to be joined by writer and acclaimed poet, Maggie Smith, for an intimate get together on Zoom at 2pm ET! We’ll talk craft, how to discover something special on the page, and even do a little writing together. I’ll email the Zoom link out to all paid subscribers about half hour before, around 1:30pm ET so it’s fresh in your inbox!
The World Cup has been consuming us all—in our stadiums, in our cities, in our living rooms at 2pm on a Tuesday when half of us are pretending to be on a work call. Fifty billion eyeballs. The biggest sporting event on the planet. The final is just days away. And somewhere in the middle of it, Donald Trump gets to hand the winning team their trophy, preening for the cameras as if he made the winning goal himself.
The Americans won’t be the ones on that stage. On July 6 in Seattle, the USMNT’s tournament ended the way it usually does: a round-of-16 exit, 4-1 to Belgium, the fourth time in five World Cups they’ve gone out at exactly this stage.
But here’s what that scoreline can’t touch: the story of who was on that field.
More than half the 26 men on the USMNT roster hold dual citizenship. Six were born outside the United States. Folarin Balogun—who scored twice in the Americans’ opening 4-1 victory over Paraguay—was born in Brooklyn to Nigerian parents, and is eligible to play only because of a legal provision the Trump administration has sought to eliminate: birthright citizenship.
Ricardo Pepi was born in El Paso to Mexican parents. Haji Wright’s father is from Ghana, his mother from Liberia. Cristian Roldan was eligible to represent Guatemala or El Salvador before he chose us. They chose US. For three and a half weeks, they played their hearts out for a country that is actively debating whether people like them belong.
This is the tension no one in the broadcast booth wanted to sit with for too long: the most beautiful expression of American pluralism happened on the same soil where that pluralism is under siege.
Soccer has always known something the rest of us are still learning: you don’t win alone. You win because eleven people with different bodies, different histories, different mother tongues figured out how to move together—how to read each other, trust each other, cover each other’s blind spots. The whole sport is a lesson in what the promise of this country was supposed to be: that whoever you are, wherever you came from, you get to play.
We could use that lesson right now, especially with the Americans on the outside looking in for the rest of this tournament.
The question was never whether America could assemble a great team on a soccer field. We proved we could do that. The question is whether we can do the same in real life—whether we can look around at who we actually are, who’s actually here, who’s been here all along, and say: this is our starting eleven. This is who we build with.
The World Cup ends July 19. The work doesn’t.
Build your dream team of eleven people—living, dead, fictional, or your actual neighbor—for fixing the world. Not the country, the world.
Not a sports person? No problem. Just give us your eleven and tell us what each one would do. But if you want to play the soccer metaphor: strikers make the bold moves, midfielders connect and strategize, defenders hold the line, and the goalkeeper doesn’t let anything past.
Your team can include activists, artists, scientists, grandmothers, poets, engineers, troublemakers, your 4th grade teacher (Shoutout to my own, Laurel Schmidt!) Octavia Butler as striker. Your kid’s kindergarten teacher in goal. Your team, your call.
Give each person one sentence on why they’re on your squad. Then send your roster to someone who needs to remember we still have players worth fielding.
You can post it here on Substack as an essay, or as slides of pictures of your players on instagram or paint a team portrait of all of them together. You can write a song about them, a poem, or use any other medium you’d like to. As always, TAG ME so I can share!
Substack Lives coming up including Joan of Arcadia show creator Barbara Hall and more!
July 9th @ 2pm ET: How to wield artistry in a weaponized world with multi-hyphenate and award-winning poet, Mahogany Browne.
July 28th @ 2pm ET: Documnetary filmmaking and the art of making a tv show succeed with executive producer of House M.D. and the director of Artist in Residence, Katie Jacobs.
September 14th @ 2pm: Joan of Arcadia, Madame Secretary, and Judging Amy fans: Brace yourselves, we have the one and only show creator-extraordinaire Barbara Hall in the house for a conversation you won’t want to miss.
October 14th @ 2pm: A conversation with one of our most gifted fiction and short story writers and educators on the craft of dark humor in storytelling, managing chronic illness as a writer, and her new murder mystery, The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford, Nafissa Thompson-Spires.
Upgrade to a paid subscription to hang in the comments and ask questions of our amazing guests, as well as catch up on the replays of recent interviews with guests like Roxane Gay and R.O. Kwon!
PLUS:
✨ TODAY! Sunday July 12th @ 2pm ET: I’m hosting a smaller more intimate live gathering over Zoom for our paid subscribers this summer with the brilliant poet, essayist, and recipient of the NEA, Maggie Smith! Come join us to talk about finding beauty and meaning in everyday life, writing through loss and change, and the craft of making art that endures, how to infuse poetry into your art and daily life, and we’ll even get to spend a little time writing together. The link for this Zoom will be sent out today to our paid subscribers about 30 minutes before 2pm.
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