Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, is a 52-year-old Swiss-Italian with dark eyebrows and an intensely round, perfectly bald head, like a soccer ball that had a dream of becoming an accountant. He splits his time between Zurich, Doha, and anywhere in the world that wants him—a stadium ribbon-cutting in Mauritania; a second-division match in England; a G-20 luncheon in Indonesia. Infantino has been a ubiquitous figure in the sport for years; before he was in charge, he enjoyed cult status as the guy who pulled names out of a box to determine the matchups at major tournaments. At last year’s men’s World Cup, TV cameras cut to his seats in the V.V.I.P. section so often it seemed as if they were under a contractual obligation to do so. Which, it turned out, they were.

But one morning last November, Infantino woke up and felt like an entirely new man.

“Today I feel Qatari,” he announced at a press conference in Doha. “Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel [like] a migrant worker.” Infantino, looking out at a room of journalists from behind an array of sponsored sports drinks, was none of those things, he helpfully clarified. But as a child in Switzerland, he had been bullied for his red hair and freckles. “Plus, I was Italian,” he said, “so imagine.”

Fed up with criticism of the host nation’s labor record, infuriated by the desire of some national teams to wear armbands asserting their support for LGBTQ equality, and genuinely angry that actual discussions of human rights were overshadowing FIFA’s broad platitudes about human rights, he delivered an hour-long apologia for autocracy. He railed against “what we Europeans have been doing the last 3,000 years.” He endorsed a future World Cup in North Korea. And he praised the good soccer was doing for women’s rights in Iran, where the regime was at that moment violently suppressing protests for women’s rights.

Infantino’s remarks drew swift condemnation. Activists called his comments “crass” and dismissive—an “insult” to the lives of workers. In an on-air response that went viral, Melissa Reddy, a Sky Sports reporter, argued that the speech offered a glimpse of soccer’s new reality. “This will be the World Cup that really underpins just how dirty the game is,” she said.

How people around the world are revealing their hidden histories in fabric

12 min read

Royalists, Recipes and Real Hardship

Ann Fanshawe (1625 – 1680) is known chiefly for her writing, including a memoir detailing her time in the Royalist court at Oxford during the English Civil War, her exile with her husband during the Interregnum and her life as a diplomat’s wife in Europe following the Restoration. She is also known for her recipes influenced by her time spent in Spain and Portugal, among them the first recorded recipe for ice cream. She is remembered as a stoical and dutiful wife, performing the role she had been trained for despite the interruption of a war that divided the country, and finding purpose amid war, political upheaval, exile and personal loss.

Civil War

The English Civil War was fought from 1642 to 1651 between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists, over the right to rule the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. Choosing a side was a complex choice, with class, financial, geographical and religious considerations. The Royalists, also known as Cavaliers, supported King Charles I and his divine right to rule, and were often stereotyped as flamboyant and wealthy, with Catholic sympathies. The Parliamentarians tended to be more puritanical, and fought for the abolition of the monarchy.

The country was divided up into Royalist and Parliamentarian held regions. Parliament seized London and forced many prominent Royalists out. They were based mostly in the South and South-East, controlling most major ports, including London, Hull, and Portsmouth, the largest arsenals and the Navy. The King held the North, the port of Newcastle, most of Wales and Cornwall. Those that found themselves occupied by their enemy fled if they were able, abandoning their homes and belongings.

The bold red-carpet looks that were derided at the time but now considered cool

September 23, 2022 – March 11, 2023

February 11 – March 12, 2023

As I was going to enter college that fall my parents felt that I should build myself up at a summer camp of some sort. They sent me down to a place in the Ozarks on a beautiful lake. It was called a camp but it was not just for boys. It was for both sexes and all ages. It was a rustic, comfortable place. But I was disappointed to find that most of the young people went to another camp several miles down the lake toward the dam. I spent a great deal of time by myself that summer, which is hardly good for a boy of seventeen.

It was a dry summer. There were very few days of rain. But the Ozark country with its gentle green hills and clear lakes and rivers did not turn ugly and brown as most countries do in seasons of drought. The willows along the lake remained translucently green, while the hillside forests, toward the end of July, began to look as though they had been splashed with purple, red, and amber wine. Their deepening colors did not suggest dryness nor stoppage of life. They looked, rather, like a flaming excess, a bursting opulence of life. And the air, when you drove through the country in an open car, was faintly flavored with wine, for the grapes grew plentifully that season. While the cornfields yellowed and languished, the purple grapes fairly swarmed from their vines, as though they had formed some secret treaty with nature or dug into some hidden reservoir of subterranean life, and the lean hill-folk piled them into large white baskets and stood along the sunny roads and highways crying, “Grapes, grapes, grapes,” so that your ears as well as your eyes and nostrils and mouth were filled with them, until it seemed that the whole body and soul of the country was somehow translated into this vast efflorescence of sweet purple fruit.

Perhaps it was the intoxicating effect of the wine-flavored air, perhaps it was only the novelty of being so much by myself, but I fell that summer into a sort of enchantment, a sort of moody drunkenness, that troubled and frightened me more than a little.

I had led an active boy’s life. I had always been the typical young extrovert, delighting in games and the companionship of other boys, having little time for reading and abstract thinking, having little time for looking inward upon the mystery of myself, and so this dry summer on the beautiful lake, as I fell slowly into the habit of deep introspection, brooding and dreaming about myself and life and the meaning of things, I felt as though I were waking up from a long dream or sinking into one. I was lonely and frightened and curiously content.