Graphic Truth: Catching the Independence Wave

Read: The Guardian’s complete World Cup player guide⁠. If you’ve found yourself Googling unfamiliar players or wondering who to watch, this is the best guide I’ve come across: a searchable database with profiles of all 1,248 players at the tournament, plus quick breakdowns of every squad. Bookmark it now – you’ll get a lot more out of the final week of the World Cup. ⁠ – Alex G.

Watch: “Incendies.” Inspired by the Lebanese Civil War, this 2010 film directed by Denis Villeneuve is not for the faint of heart. It tells the story of Nawal, a woman from the Levant who struggles to survive the extremist violence in her country as she searches for her missing son. Jumping ahead to the present day, her twin children are second-generation immigrants in Canada with little knowledge of their eccentric mother’s harrowing past. Upon her death, Nawal wills a strange request to her children that leads them on a shocking journey of self-discovery. – Ted

Watch: Joey D’Urso’s social media videos that connect World Cup opponents. We at GZERO have brought you some of the bigger storylines from the World Cup that broach both sports and geopolitics, but D’Urso – a journalist who once worked at the BBC and The Athletic – gets a little more detailed, finding geopolitical links between individual nations that are facing each other in the knockout stages of the world’s top international football tournament. Case in point: he examines the feud between Mexico and Ecuador, who played each other in the last 32. There are also a few explorations of how certain other South American countries provided a secret home for Nazis following World War II. For geopolitical nerds like us, this account is gold. – Zac

Read: “The Return” by Hisham Matar. A brilliant memoir about the writer’s return to Libya in 2012 after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. Hisham’s father Jaballa, was a prominent opponent of the authoritarian leader, and in 1990, while the family were living in Egypt, Jaballa was kidnapped, jailed, and never again seen. The book follows Hisham’s childhood of loss and exile, his relationship to a country led by a regime that destroyed his family, and his journey back to his homeland to uncover the truth behind his father’s fate. – Farida