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Think of the globe as one big spinning soccer ball. It may as well be. Like stitching on a ball, soccer is the common thread among countries around the world. David Beckham is the world's most famous athlete, inspiring hairdos in Japan and statues in Thailand. Soccer leagues crossed borders in Europe long before the European Union. Now owners comb continents searching for star players to import. "More than basketball of even the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, soccer is the most globalized institution on the planet," writes Franklin Foer in Foreign Policy, in an excerpt from his forthcoming book on soccer and globalization.

But if the pitch on which world athletes compete portends what globalization will become, Foer says, you can see its limits. "A tangle of intensely local loyalties, identities, tensions, economies, and corruption endures—in some cases not despite globalization, but because of it," he writes. When a Swedish coach took over England's national team, much to the country's chagrin, the result was nonetheless a very familiar brand of "old-fashioned, gritty English football," Foer says. Likewise, foreign capital can't overcome the inept management of Brazilian leagues, and the lasting bitterness of the rivalry between Glasgow's Celtic and Rangers clubs is nothing less than an "unfinished fight over the Protestant Reformation." For readers weary of numbing economic and militaristic analysis of globalization, Foer's essay is an engaging look at how global cultures are coming together—and staying intact.

Related:
Tech jobs and customer service call centers migrate from U.S. to India, from Wired and CBS' 60 Minutes
Disney: America's global legacy from the Christian Science Monitor
Earlier:
Religion as a catalyst for global development
Global resistance to 'McWorld'
The world's changing borders, maps, and cities

From the New York Times :

MIDRAND, South Africa—Consider the giant bullfrog, but better from a distance. Vile tempered, toothy, carnivorous and the size of a medium pizza at adulthood, it bites hard enough to dent a broomstick. It has been known to lunch on rinkhals, a cousin of the cobra. It has attacked lions and even elephants when provoked. … In the land of prowling cheetahs, submerged hippos and leaping antelopes, the giant bullfrog does not attract much notice. … South Africans in the poor northern provinces tend to view them as dinner. Richer South Africans notice them only when they show up in their swimming pools or squashed under the wheels of their cars. Even encyclopedias of frogs tend to focus instead on the exceedingly ugly African clawed frog or the mammoth goliath of Zaire, as big as a small cat. … Under the direction of Caroline Yetman, a doctoral student in zoology at the University of Pretoria, a veterinarian here inserted tiny transmitters under the frogs' skins in an effort to discover more about their natural habitat.

CIVITA DI BAGNOREGIO, Italy — Almost from the moment this hilltop town rose, it began to fall, and for most of the many centuries it has been living, it has also been dying. The Etruscans … were good at battle strategy but apparently bad at land surveys, and when they looked up, up, up to this improbably high summit in the middle of an extremely deep canyon, they saw a position that would be easy to defend, at least from invaders, and clambered to the top. They failed to see a longer-term threat: the flimsy, fickle ground beneath them. "The clay soil here falls away like fresh ricotta," said the mayor, Erino Pompei, whose name bears an uncanny resemblance to that of another ill-fated hamlet at odds with geology. … Civita is stunning: an extremely compact warren of medieval buildings— the ones, that is, that have not tumbled over the edge—on a kind of butte that resembles a ridiculously tall, top-heavy cupcake. Although the rate at which it is crumbling is more or less glacial, Mr. Pompei said the battle to contain the process was intensifying. At the start of this year, he said, engineers began a soil-fortification project that will cost more than $15 million and take 10 years.

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