Dec 13, 2022
Read: The day the world wept for Algeria. Now that soccer fans around the globe are going nuts over Morocco in the Qatar World Cup, it's a good time to remember how 40 years ago its neighbor was cheated out of the opportunity to go all the way in Spain ‘82. Shame on you, Austria and Germany. — Carlos
Read: “Family Lexicon.” First published in 1963, Natalia Ginzburg’s “Family Lexicon” is a first-person, non-fiction, autobiographical novel that captures the idiosyncrasies, pre-occupations, whimsies, and anxieties of her Jewish Italian family and their friends, set mainly in and around Turin before, during, and after the Second World War. Its matter-of-fact tone and sudden shifts from the personal to the oddly comic leave the reader to imagine the depths of its characters’ underlying emotional lives. — Willis
Watch: “The Two Escobars.” Andrés was a star on Colombia’s (exceptionally good) 1994 World Cup Team. Pablo was the world’s most notorious drug lord. After Andrés scored an own goal that shattered Colombia’s hopes in the tournament, he was murdered. This exceptional ESPN 30 for 30 documentary shows how the rise of Colombia’s drug cartels was directly tied — for better and worse — to the country’s emergence as a formidable soccer power in the mid- 1990s. — Alex
