Athletic contests are nearly as old as human society itself. They have grown and flourished across the millennia and around the world, and today form the basis of a global industry worth in excess of six hundred billion dollars. And such games are not just for the players: audiences' fascination with sports also make them a productive sphere through which to consider questions of spectatorship, tribalism and belonging. "Cabinet" 56, with a special section on "Sports," includes Leland de la Durantaye on the new geometries of tennis; Carla Wing on squash and the colonial history of rubber; and Hal Foster on the ritualistic dimensions of soccer. Elsewhere in the issue: Adam Jasper on how homes built by freed slaves in Liberia mimicked the Palladian style of US plantation mansions; Augusto Corriere on the disassembly and reassembly of a Munich theater during World War II; Carol Mavor on the aesthetics of middleness; and more.