Josh Glancy

Americans are truly excellent at four things: ingenuity, marketing, making chicken wings and inventing their own sports. The first three, of course, are also all foundational pillars of American sporting glory; it would be nothing without the wings. And so, as the US gears up to face the Netherlands on Saturday, its first ever appearance in the knockout round of the World Cup this century, I am duty bound to issue a plea: for the love of all that you hold sacred, please America, don’t get into soccer. This would be a huge mistake. While covering the World Cup in Doha, I’ve watched the US men’s national team, or USMNT as they are unforgivably referred to, play in a couple of games. And I have to say I'm pretty concerned.

After cooking rice, most people scrape the charred, sticky residue off the bottom of the pot and never think about it again. Why would you? In South Korea, however, it is typical to pour hot water into the pot and bring it back to the boil, infusing the water with the flavor of scorched rice. Then you drink it. This delicacy is called sungnyung and, to an untutored palate (mine), can taste a bit like imbibing dishwater. Yet while dining with a group of high-powered Hyundai execs in Seoul recently, we all ended our meal by dutifully slurping down our reheated rice leavings. “Korea was terribly poor until recently,” one of my companions told me. “Sungnyung was a way of getting the most out of your rice bowl.

James Eskridge cuts a defiant figure as he rides around Tangier Island on his motorbike. The weathered, garrulous water man known to all as “Ooker” is the mayor, spokesman and public face of one of America’s most endangered communities. Buffeted by rising sea levels and relentless erosion, Tangier is not so slowly sinking into the shallow waters of the Chesapeake Bay, threatening its ancient community of crab-hunting, God-fearing, Cornish-sounding fishermen with extinction. The Chesapeake, site of the first British settlements in America, has some of the highest relative sea rise on the planet. If Tangier disappears beneath its waves, America will lose a living link to its pre-revolutionary past.