Rugby: the game where grown adults willingly hurl themselves into one another’s clavicles for eighty minutes and then spend the after-party pretending their ears aren’t about to fall off. For decades this ritual was marketed as the exclusive domain of men whose necks are wider than their heads. Then someone in a blazer finally noticed…
The Women’s Rugby World Cup is back, and this time it has the geopolitical subtlety of a flying winger. From 12 October to 16 November, twelve nations will gather in England and Wales to trade bone-rattling tackles, concussion protocols, and the occasional diplomatic incident. The fixtures, released yesterday by World Rugby with the usual fanfare…
**The Beautiful Brutality: How the Women’s Rugby World Cup Became Humanity’s Most Honest Diplomatic Channel** In a world where international relations have devolved into Twitter spats between nuclear powers and trade wars fought over soybeans, there’s something refreshingly primal about watching women from thirty nations beat the living daylights out of each other—legally, on a…
