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Phillips has written for Grantland, MTV News, The New Yorker, and other publications. His first book, the New York Times–best-selling ‘Impossible Owls,’ was published in 2018.

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‘22 Goals’: Ronaldo, 2002 World Cup Final in Japan

The second installment in Brian Phillips’s series chronicling the most iconic goals in the history of the World Cup belongs to soccer’s "original" Ronaldo

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‘22 Goals’: Diego Maradona, 1986 World Cup in Mexico

Brian Phillips’s first installment in his series chronicling the most iconic goals in the history of the World Cup belongs to soccer’s most talented and destructive genius

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Introducing ‘22 Goals’

Listen as The Ringer’s Brian Phillips leads you on a breathless tour of nearly a century of World Cup history through the lens of 22 of the most iconic goals ever scored

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The Two Sides of Tom Brady

Brady perfectly embodied two archetypes of the modern athlete: a golden-boy football hero and a ruthless clinician, aware of every advantage available to him

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The Subversive Playfulness of the ‘The Matrix’

The Wachowski sisters tackle the most gigantic questions known to humanity—reality, identity, knowledge, causality, memory—with a spirit of play. They understand that while from one angle nothing matters more than these questions, from another angle they’re curiously insubstantial. They mean everything and nothing at all.

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West Ham Are This Season’s Premier League Primordial Chaos Magic Club

Somehow, West Ham has found a way

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How Soccer Lost America (Then Got It Back)

It took several decades, but Americans eventually lowered their defenses and welcomed the world’s game

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It’s Time to Talk About Russell Westbrook (Again)

There have been many arcs in Westbrook’s career, but teaming up with LeBron James could be the defining moment for the most electrically non-defining player of his generation

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The Kyrie Conundrum

Kyrie Irving’s stance on the vaccine is a complicated and not very fun thing to talk about, because it’s a story in which two individually messy subjects intersect in compoundingly messy ways

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The Profane Poetry of ‘Succession’

Humiliation and hazing are constants in the world of the Roys. Language-wise, this means verbal inventiveness (often vulgar and hilarious) is both a source of power for the characters and a way for them to reveal their weaknesses.