Quartz Weekend Brief—Soccer’s old geezers, men in heels, romancing jihad, chocolate diets
Good morning, Quartz readers!
How did we let a bunch of geezers swindle global soccer for this long?
Of the 14 top soccer officials and businessmen arrested on FIFA-related corruption charges this week, all but five were over the age 60. But the geezer-in-chief, 79-year-old FIFA president Sepp Blatter, has not been indicted; on Friday, he was re-installed as the leader of world soccer for the fifth time. In a rambling speech just before his re-election, Blatter noted, correctly, that the World Cup is the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Though all but one of the people pulled from their Zurich hotel rooms by Swiss police were from outside the US, they were detained on behalf of the US attorney general, because bribe money allegedly flowed through the American financial system.
The length of America’s legal arms tends to upset global opinion—especially in Europe, where banks prefer lower capital requirements and a freer hand with rogue nations. But, in this case, hatred of FIFA (paywall) largely won out over distaste for American power-mongering—except, not surprisingly, from Russia’s Vladimir Putin and FIFA sponsor Gazprom. It may yet go down as the US’s best foreign policy move in years.
But while the US may end the reign of this particular group of geezers, don’t count on the game to change. Blatter’s long-serving predecessor was brought down by a very similar scandal involving sports marketing firms, kickbacks, and tournament rights.
So maybe we should blame capitalism? It’s the commercialization of the World Cup—with the idea of covering the costs, paying the players, and building the stadiums—that created such opportunities for the abuse of power. But there’s got to be a way to have an idealistic global tournament of sport that doesn’t require either massive government funding or massive corruption.
Let’s ask the people at the Olympics. They must… ah. Well, back to the drawing board.—Tim Fernholz
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Five things on Quartz we especially liked
Why did men stop wearing high heels? Not, as the legend goes, because Napoleon disliked them. Jenni Avins explores the history of male vertical enhancement and observes that since heels became a symbol of non-masculinity in the Victorian age, it’s now only the men most secure in their manliness—cowboys and rock stars—who wear them.
Your all-non-white summer reading list. The New York Times’ literary critic, Janet Maslin, came under fire choosing a summer book list of all-white authors. Divya Guha and the Quartz India staff respond with an all-Indian selection of writing in English that spans fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
The madness, brilliance, and reawakening of John Nash. Akshat Rathi eulogizes the mathematician, schizophrenic, Nobel laureate, and subject of the film A Beautiful Mind, who died with his wife Alicia in a car crash last weekend.
The most powerful Holocaust film you’ve never seen. A British propaganda picture depicting the Nazi concentration camps after liberation, made with Alfred Hitchcock’s help, has just been released after 70 years under wraps. Hanna Kozlowska finds that it “poignantly, almost quietly, portrays the power of human resilience.”
What Charles Darwin teaches us about working from home. Elizabeth Yale visits Darwin’s country retreat and reflects on how science has flipped since his day: He did his ground-breaking work on evolution surrounded and supported by a large family, while today’s scientists struggle to support their families on low-paying grants and fellowships.
Five things elsewhere that made us smarter
Romancing the jihad. French journalist Anne Erelle (a pseudonym) posed as a young Muslim girl to form a relationship with an Islamic State fighter over Skype, who tried to get her to come to Syria to marry him. In an extract from her upcoming book in the Guardian, she shows how the jihadists recruit young women in the West.
How Sepp Blatter controls soccer. Of all the recent Blatteriana, this is probably the most comprehensive overview of the how the FIFA head manages his kingdom, by a team at Bloomberg Businessweek who conclude, “if the best his opponents can do is promise to out-Sepp Sepp, perhaps he’s precisely the man soccer deserves.”
The silence of the judges. There’s no real evidence that mandatory sentencing laws—which have put a vast number of Americans, mostly black men, in jail since the 1970s—are responsible for the subsequent drop in crime. Judge Jed Rakoff explains in the New York Review of Books why the data are so hard to analyze and criticizes his fellow judges for not speaking out more about the injustice they (often reluctantly) participate in.
Why the world’s oldest person keeps dying. If you’ve noticed that the death of the oldest person in the world seems to be announced with growing frequency, you’re not alone. FiveThirtyEight’s David Goldenberg spins an informative mini-treatise on the statistics of extreme old age.
How to do bad science and fool everyone. John Bohannen recruited real subjects for a real study that produced statistically significant results showing that chocolate will make you slimmer. The media lapped it up. And it was pure bunk. He explains for io9 how he did it and how the diet industry peddles false claims based on seemingly real research.
Our best wishes for a relaxing but thought-filled weekend. Please send any news, comments, Sepp Blatter anecdotes, and chocolate-based diets to [email protected]. You can follow us on Twitter here for updates throughout the day.