Chuck Klosterman probes the meaning of football

Football, an ambitious collection of essays from veteran cultural critic and novelist Chuck Klosterman attempting to capture the sport’s past, present, and future, arrived in stores Jan. 20. This was just in time for introspective pigskin devotees to pick it up during the dreaded, dead week between the NFL’s conference championship games and the Super Bowl, when they must confront the unappetizing binary of either pretending to enjoy a football-adjacent televised event now called the “Pro Bowl Games” or meekly accepting the first agonizing week since August with no football whatsoever.

For those who think this sounds a bit dramatic, Football is, if nothing else, the most thorough exegesis since Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes of how the sport bewitches a man’s mind, body, and