Excerpts from The Believer: An Interview with Mina Kimes

“My goal isn’t to be the best, because I’m not and never will be. It’s just to be better than I was yesterday—which is a very sports-brain thing.”

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Why Mina Kimes believes the NFL remains so culturally dominant:

• Every game matters
• It expanded its fan base through fantasy
• It’s inherently complicated and there’s always more to learn
• Its best players are extremely fun to root for

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For most of my life, I was a...