“One very sunny day on a pitch somewhere in America near sprawling farms and a single loitering country road, my college soccer team was playing a tight match. We were getting kicked so high into the air we must have looked from the distance like maroon grasshoppers leaping over some malicious kids’ boots. The referee wasn’t calling anything. And, as tends to be the case when that happens, the tackles got worse and worse. But we were all doing the American thing, playing through it, shaking everything off, or trying to play through it and shake everything off. Yet it wasn’t minutes after I said to the referee that someone was going to get hurt that our best player had his tibia and fibula snapped in two, right in front of me. I remember the sound of the bones breaking: I remember his scream and then his screams and then the silence.” New Republic