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marchforourlivesla · 6 years

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Thousands of demonstrators at L.A.’s March for Our Lives rally marched from Pershing Square to Grand Park, carrying handmade signs and banners that said, “Protect kids, not guns” and “I shouldn’t be afraid to send my child to school."

Joining demonstrators around the country, tens of thousands of Southern California residents enraged by the gun violence that has ravaged American schools and other public places flocked to downtown Los Angeles on Saturday to call for stricter gun control laws.

Under grey skies, demonstrators in L.A.'s March for Our Lives rally walked from Pershing Square to Grand Park, carrying handmade signs and banners that said, "Protect kids, not guns" and "I shouldn't be afraid to send my child to school."

The sound of drums, tambourines and call-and-response chants rippled through the crowd of thousands of students, parents and grandparents and echoed off the historic buildings of Broadway's theater district.

"What do we want? Gun control! When do we want it? Now!"

At a rally in front of L.A. City Hall, Mayor Eric Garcetti led the crowd in a call and response chant: "Whose streets?" he said, as the crowd roared, "Our streets!" "Whose Lives?" "Our Lives!" "Whose nation?" "Our nation!"

The mayor said it was an historic day led by the country's future leaders, "the students who are here today."

Garcetti pointed out California's bans on assault rifles, bump stocks and waiting periods on gun sales as a model for federal legislation and closed with a message for President Trump.

"Get with the program Mr. President, or get the hell out of the way!"

Comedian Amy Schumer, cousin of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) who also attended the march, spoke to the survivors of the Parkland shootings.

"We stand together for your senselessly slain classmates and friends and say this has to stop!"

At the end of the march, actress Rita Ora sang a rendition of the 1960s protest song "For What It's Worth," and some members of the crowd chimed in. She told the demonstrators: "You're going to inspire the whole damn world."

Crowds gathered Saturday in more than a dozen California cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, San Diego, Santa Clarita, Long Beach and elsewhere.

Speaking at an afternoon rally in Santa Ana, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, touted Proposition 63, which he proposed and campaigned for, as California's answer to the NRA's sway over federal gun policy. The 2016 voter-approved initiative banned ammunition magazines that hold more than 10 rounds and makes it a crime not to report lost or stolen guns.

"We changed the trajectory of the debate, not just in this state but all across the rest of the country," Newsom, who is running for governor, said of the state's laws. "Gun control saves lives!"

Organizers with NextGen America, a group started by California billionaire and activist Tom Steyer, who has already put $1 million into a nationwide youth voter registration effort, were helping to sign up new voters in Santa Ana.

"As much as we love your voice, we want to make sure your voice is counted on Nov. 6," Steyer told the crowd. He said he plans to spend $30 million helping Democrats flip the House of Representatives this year, $3.5 million of it organizing young people in California.

At a rally outside San Francisco City Hall, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein noted her support for an assault weapons ban in her tough re-election campaign and urged demonstrators to extend their activism to the November mid-term elections.

"There is a bill in the Judiciary Committee to ban assault weapons with 30 cosponsors," she told the crowd. "The problem is the gun industry. They will go out and they will support mightily people in other states that will refuse to do this. Here's what I'm asking you to do...Will you march? Will you register? Will you see that people vote and see that you vote and your friends vote for those that would rid this country of guns?"

The crowd responded: "Yeah!"

The worldwide day of action against gun violence was sparked by student activists who have pushed lawmakers to forgo campaign contributions from the National Rifle Assn. and enact stricter gun control laws in the wake of a Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. that left 17 students and teachers dead.

In the thick of the march on Broadway, a group of teenagers that included Myles Pincus, 15, carried a long banner adorned with red handprints that read, "NRA has blood on its hands."

Pincus, a student at Fusion Academy, urged people not to conflate the issues of mental health and gun violence as they advocated for change. He said he had "myriad" mental health issues, and ostracizing people like him won't solve anything.

"I don't need to go to school and get patted down just because I have depression," Pincus said. "This is not a mental health issue. This is a gun issue, period."

Many teenagers at Saturday's rallies said they looked forward to turning 18, when they could vote for candidates who will support national gun control measures.

California election officials staffed a booth where adults could register to vote, and 16- and 17-year-olds could pre-register. The initiative, which activates teenagers' voting eligibility when they turn 18, has pre-registered more than 88,000 people since its launch in 2016.

Sheva Gross, a child development professor at UCLA, came to the march with her daughters Talia, 8, and Flora, 11. Gross carried a sign adorned with peace signs that read, "I'm so mad, I can't even think of a slogan."

The girls have gone through lockdown drills at their Culver City elementary school that make them nervous, Flora said. She added: "To not come home again, like, ever — it's overwhelming."

Gross was in the classroom with future teachers and child welfare workers 15 minutes after the San Bernardino massacre and an hour after the Parkland shooting. She said the fear in her students' eyes was evident.

"They grew up with this, and they're terrified," Gross said, breaking into tears. Flora hugged her.

Retired school principal John P. Johnson, 68, and his wife Margy came from Corona to march for their 13 grandchildren. Johnson, who knows the AR-15 well from his time in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam, held a sign that read: "Veterans against assault weapons."

"There is no reason to purchase an AR-15 here or anywhere in the world," Johnson said. "It's used for the battlefield. The bullets kill within seconds."

Brianna Cornejo-Perez, a 14-year-old student at Santa Monica High School, came to the march with her mother, a former teacher. A fellow student in Santa Monica had posted a Snapchat photo of himself holding a gun, making fun of gun control and the Parkland shootings, unnerving her.

"We used to have lockdown drills — now we have active shooter drills," Cornejo-Perez said. "It's a bit scary."

Cornejo-Perez and her mother said they support school psychologists, anti-bullying campaigns, and other resources for kids who don't fit in, rather than armed security guards or police officers.

Giselle Jimenez, 17, of Alexander Hamilton High School, held a sign reading, "Silly me, I didn't know that not wanting kids to be slaughtered by assault rifles was being political."

"A school shooting could happen anywhere," Jimenez said. "The next victims could be me, my sister, any one of my friends."

Ariel Burgess, 22, who recently graduated from UCLA, said there was a shooting the month she was accepted to the university. It made her question whether she would be safe there.

"Every shooting I'm saddened but never surprised," she said. With "every shooting, the urge to change gun laws gets stronger, but nothing gets done."

Cara Rosenbaum, 32, of Leimert Park held a sign that read, "My daughter is due in May. I'm afraid to send her to school."

She said it's terrifying to think about bringing a child into the world and having to worry every day about whether she will come home from school.

"As I'm preparing for parenthood, there are so many things I need to think about," she said. "The safety of my child while she's trying to get an education should not be one of those things."

At the end of the march, about a dozen pro-gun activists gathered outside Los Angeles Police Department headquarters. They waved American flags and held signs reading, "Ban Jihad, not guns" and "Guns will ensure our freedom."

They were separated from the March for Our Lives participants by yellow caution tape, a line of officers, a line of police bicycles, and a line of volunteers who wore orange vests and black shirts that said, "We can end gun violence."

"How long have you been pro-mass shooter?" one man shouted across the barriers.

"All lives matter!" a pro-gun protester shouted back.

Another said, "My best friend is black!"

Jarime Uzziel, 43, said he was "standing against additional gun control." He said he wants teachers to be trained and able to carry firearms.

Natali Valle, 20, stood on the other side and shook her head, pulling her friend into a hug. They had come by to see if the counter-protesters had any valid points, and quickly decided the answer was no.

"When people argue back and forth, there's no communication happening," said Valle, a student at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut. "This division is … what's causing America to fall apart."

Times staff writer Sonali Kohli contributed to this report.

[email protected]

UPDATES:

6:35 p.m.: This article was updated with new comments from speakers in Santa Ana and San Francisco.

5:05 p.m.: This article was updated to include comments from speakers at an afternoon rally in Orange County.

3:50 p.m.: This article was updated to include comments from Mayor Eric Garcetti and others.

2:35: This article was updated with more comments from demonstrators.

1:35 p.m. This article was updated with quotes from pro-gun counter-protestors, and from singer and actress Rita Ora.

12:30 p.m.: This article was updated with more quotes from demonstrators.

11:50 a.m.: This article was updated with more comments from demonstrators and more details about other marches around Southern California.

10:20 a.m.: This article was updated with new comments from demonstrators.

This article was originally posted at 8:40 a.m.

#gavin newsom #eric garcetti #national rifle association of america #chuck schumer

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magg0t-bible · 6 years

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Top 20 Favourite Alt-J Songs

The title is pretty self explanatory so I’m just gonna jump right in

(Also I’ll be briefly explaining what I like about each one, so another long post. Feel free to skip through if you just want to know the songs)

20. Left Hand Free

Generally a really nice bop. It is arguably their most poppy song, and quite different from most of their other music, but it’s still recognisably them, which is what I love. Honestly all I have to hear is the guitar intro and I’m already dancing like an idiot

ALSO there’s a really cute interview/live performance that the band did on KEXP (I’ll insert the link at the end if I can be bothered) where they’re playing this song and in the bit where it goes back to “ain’t shady baby I’m hot”, Gus starts clapping to the beat and makes Joe laugh so much that he can’t even sing it properly and it’s v cute

(Also the little “speakeasy” about halfway through is sexy ngl)

19. Interlude 3 ❦

Strange choice I know, but hear me out. I love the simplicity of this interlude, because it’s literally just 58 seconds of piano and quiet vocalising over the top, but it WORKS SO WELL. Plus it’s placed between a heavier song and a more gentle song on the album, so it’s an interesting way of transitioning.

18. Taro

I have such good memories of the first time I heard Taro. I associate it with getting up early in the morning and going for a walk, as cheesy as that sounds - it just generally fills me with so much happiness. I think it’s very well composed, and that INSTRUMENTAL!! I love it!!!

Not to mention the lyrics about the two war photographers (Robert Capa and Gerda Taro) are very interesting. In general I just really love the different topics that Alt-J write about in their songs.

17. Arrival In Nara

This is such a beautiful, peaceful and gentle song. The piano in the first half sets the song up so nicely, and it’s complemented well with the really light vocals. Especially when Joe and Gus harmonise for the “though I cannot see I can hear her smile as she sings”....I’m dead

16. Intro (This Is All Yours version)

Even though this song does take some time to build up, I’d definitely say it’s worth the wait. The layers are built up so gradually and effectively, and by the time the drums come in, it’s just....it’s just amazing. Wow.

15. Ms

I actually used to skip this song when I first listened to An Awesome Wave, not because I didn’t like it, just because it didn’t really stand out to me that much. WELL.

You know that meme that’s been recreated a million times that says “when you listen to that one song on the album you always skip and it’s actually fire”? Yeah, that’s Ms. The lyrics are beautiful, the a cappella on “the dark seeks dark” works so nicely, and the instrumental after “the nights of all my youth pressed into one glass of water/the shadow burns across like embers tide paper” is so incredibly relaxing.

14. 3WW

I remember one day early in 2017, I said to myself, “it’d be really nice to see Alt-J live, but they haven’t made any music in like, three years. Oh well.”

THE. LITERAL. NEXT. DAY. My friend texted me saying that they’d released a teaser for a new song. So after running round my house hyperventilating and whisper-screaming (don’t worry, I was home alone), I went onto YouTube and listened to the 30-second teaser of 3WW.

AND MY MIND WAS BLOWN. Even more so when I listened to the full song. Gus’ vocals in the beginning are AMAZING - so glad he finally got a solo. Ellie Rowsell’s vocals halfway through are so perfectly placed, and she was definitely the right woman for the job. The instrumentation is absolutely beautiful. Overall the song is just a masterpiece.

13. Hunger Of The Pine

The first song I ever heard from This Is All Yours. I love the way it begins, with Joe singing without any accompaniment apart from that repeating note. It’s another song that builds up nicely, especially by the time the drums come in, and that Miley Cyrus sample?! I had no idea it was her, it just blends in so well.

This is definitely the sort of song you should listen to with headphones on, preferably also with your eyes closed. It’s such an experience and it really takes me places.

(Also shoutout to Gus and his awesome French skills towards the end)

12. The Gospel Of John Hurt

This song is quite similar to HOTP, in the way that it focuses on layers and starts in a very simplistic way before building up. I really like the drums in the second verse and chorus, and the tempo change right after that. I also thought it was cool that the first time Joe sings “Jeremiah” it’s kind of gentle and airy, but then the second time it’s more like “JeremiAHHHHHH” idk it’s cool

And every chorus after the tempo change just makes me feel like my soul has been awoken because W O W

11. Dissolve Me

The first few months of 2017 were a bit difficult for me, and An Awesome Wave as a whole really helped me through them. However, Dissolve Me stood out because of the line “she makes the sound, the sound the sea makes, to calm me down”. My difficulties were to do with my anxiety, and listening to this song helped me to relax like you wouldn’t believe. So it holds a special place in my heart for that reason.

My favourite part has to be the ending when Joe and Gus are harmonising with the “ohhh” and then the chords from the intro come back, and they take it in turns to sing “she makes the sound the sea makes, knee deep in the north”. Absolutely spectacular, even more so live.

10. Something Good

This song definitely lives up to its title. As far is I’m concerned, if you tell me that you can listen to the drums in the intro and not want to dance, you’re a liar. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

The vocals in the verses are honestly so groovy, and the choruses are somewhat gentle, but they still make me want to get up and dance. The drums throughout the whole song also give it a really nice vibe.

9. Interlude 1/The Ripe & Ruin ❦

I have a surprisingly strong connection with this song, and I’ll explain why. The lyrics are generally about finding balance in your life, but they more specifically describe a woman who constantly counts her steps while walking and makes sure to “abide by the law that she herself has set”. One of my idiosyncrasies has always been pretty much exactly this, and I’ve always thought I was weird for doing it, so this interlude makes me feel lot less alone. Plus the lack of music makes it feel much more intimate.

8. In Cold Blood

AN ACTUAL BANGER. That’s pretty much all I need to say.

The way it instantly begins. The fact that the numbers in the beginning are backwards binary code for ∆, meaning it’s the world’s most cryptic name drop. The line “all above crowd around so fucking loud”. The brass in the chorus. The way the music at the end of the chorus just instantly stops, Joe sings “in cold blood”, and then the music comes right back. I LOVE IT ALL.

7. Tessellate

Tessellate was the song that led me to discover Alt-J, thanks to my extreme obsession with the Ellie Goulding cover that spent a long time being my favourite song ever. I will admit that my younger, unappreciative self wasn’t huge fan of the original song initially, partially because I saw some of the dodgy looking people in the music video lip syncing to the song and naturally thought they were the band. But over time, I decided to give Alt-J another go, and it was probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. And I obviously LOVE Tessellate now.

6. Adeline

I’m pretty sad I didn’t get to see this song live, but listening to it at home with headphones is a magical enough experience. It has such powerful lyrics, the way everything gradually builds up is just so beautiful (yes I say that a lot, but they do it a lot okay), it’s just incredible. Especially that end bit where Gus is singing “ohhhhh my Adeline” and you hear the “YAAA YAAA YAAA” over the top. MIND=BLOWN.

5. Matilda

I can honestly say that it was love at first listen with Matilda. Given that I’d been introduced to Alt-J with Breezeblocks and Tessellate, it was nice to listen to something that was a little more light and gentle (in my opinion). I love the way the song references the film Léon, and the drum beat right at the start of the first verse is so peaceful and nice to listen to.

4. Fitzpleasure

When I first got into Alt-J and I’d only heard An Awesome Wave, Fitzpleasure was actually my number 1 favourite song of theirs. I obviously still love it, given that it’s now number 4. The bass line (and guitar in general) is so COOL!! It’s such a groovy sounding song and I love the way it switches between Joe singing a cappella and heavy bass. 10/10.

(P.S. yes I know what the song is about, and no, we are not discussing that today.)

3. Pleader

My favourite Relaxer song, the music video for which has made me cry on multiple occasions. The introductory violins, the way everything is layered, the vocals, the lyrics, basically this song just makes me feel every single emotion at once and it gives me goosebumps and it’s AMAZING. What a killer song to end an album with.

2. Bloodflood

This may come as a surprise, but I actually took ages to listen to this song. I didn’t actually listen to An Awesome Wave from start to finish, I kinda just put it on my laptop and listened to each song gradually, which I now realise was not the best idea. But HOLY MOLY. BLOODFLOOD.

I don’t think I need to say much about this song, because every Alt-J fan knows why it’s amazing. However, it is only number 2, because in terms of personal connections and meaning, there is only one song that can top it.

And that song is......

*drumroll*

1. Nara

WOW. Where to even start. The first time I listened to This Is All Yours (actually from start to finish this time), Nara just stuck out to me for some reason. I have always been a huge supporter of the LGBT+ community, and hearing a song about a gay relationship is just really nice for me. It’s incredibly powerful due to its description of how difficult it is to be gay in a situation where that isn’t truly accepted.

As well as that, the repetition of “hallelujah, Bovay, Alabama” at the end always hits me right in the feels. It’s such a simple motif, yet it works so well as an outro, especially if you understand why they chose those specific words.

So there you go, my top 20 favourite Alt-J songs. Congratulations if you made it this far.

Honourable Mentions

(aka songs that could’ve been on the list but I only thought of them after I’d finished writing the list and I couldn’t be bothered changing it so here they are)

Breezeblocks

Bloodflood pt. II

Deadcrush

Every Other Freckle

Intro (An Awesome Wave version)

Last Year

Portrait

353

Ok I promise I’m done now

[Here’s the interview if you’re interested, Left Hand Free is at 7:14]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrqIws8Q7H4&t=441s

#alt-j #alt j #top 20 songs #basically just ranting about a band that has my WHOLE MF HEART #garden of eden

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brajeshupadhyay · 4 years

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Investors, No Longer in Denial About Grim Outlook, Drive Market Down

At least for a day, reality triumphed over hope on Wall Street.

After a frenzied, almost unstoppable three-month climb that seemed to defy both gravity and logic, the stock market plunged on Thursday, as investors decided they could no longer go on behaving as if the American economy had already recovered from the pandemic.

The signals leading to this moment were hard to ignore, even for the most bullish of investors. Coronavirus infections are rising in 21 states. Congress is divided on extending more aid. And on Wednesday, the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, warned that the depth of the downturn and pace of the recovery remained “extraordinarily uncertain.”

For investors, who often make buying and selling decisions by looking at the future, it was altogether too much.

Stocks suffered their worst drop in nearly three months as the S&P 500 stock index fell 5.9 percent — just days after it had recouped its losses for the year. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped nearly 1,900 points, or 6.9 percent. Oil prices also cratered, reflecting the sudden unease that swept across financial markets.

“Chairman Powell threw a bucket of cold water on the thought that the economy is going to go back to where it was in 2019 any time soon,” said Matt Maley, chief market strategist at Miller Tabak, an asset management firm. He added that the market was “ripe for a pullback anyway.”

The rally that hit a pothole on Thursday began in late March after the Fed signaled that it would create as much new money as needed to steady cratering financial markets, and the federal government provided an economic rescue package worth trillions of dollars. The twin actions reassured investors that the government would not let the bottom fall out of the market, giving them the confidence to begin buying stocks again.

Even as tens of millions of Americans applied for unemployment benefits and the national unemployment rate spiked to its highest level since the Great Depression, the S&P 500 rallied by nearly 45 percent. It was the fastest recovery off a market low for the benchmark index since 1933.

In recent weeks, investors couldn’t stop buying the stocks of companies beaten down by the virus, betting that they would rebound quickly as states reopened. But early data from some states that have eased quarantine restrictions, such as Texas and Arizona, have been worrisome. There has been a resurgence of the virus in those states, even as cases in the United States topped two million. On Wednesday, Texas set a record for hospitalizations — which have increased 42 percent in the state since Memorial Day — for the third consecutive day.

“The idea that Covid is fully behind us, or that a V-shaped recovery is in front of us, were put on hold today,” said Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers in Greenwich, Conn.

Even if the rise in cases doesn’t lead to another large-scale lockdown, analysts say it does dash hopes for a return to a more normal environment over the summer and makes a full rebound in particularly exposed industries less likely. And that dragged down some stocks on Thursday.

“Travel and leisure — call it the epicenter stocks — are the ones getting hit the most,” said King Lip, chief strategist at Baker Avenue, a wealth management firm in San Francisco. The cruise lines Norwegian and Carnival were down 16.5 percent and 15.3 percent on Thursday, while United and American Airlines both tumbled roughly 16 percent. Boeing plunged 16.4 percent.

Updated June 5, 2020

Does asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 happen?

So far, the evidence seems to show it does. A widely cited paper published in April suggests that people are most infectious about two days before the onset of coronavirus symptoms and estimated that 44 percent of new infections were a result of transmission from people who were not yet showing symptoms. Recently, a top expert at the World Health Organization stated that transmission of the coronavirus by people who did not have symptoms was “very rare,” but she later walked back that statement.

How does blood type influence coronavirus?

A study by European scientists is the first to document a strong statistical link between genetic variations and Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. Having Type A blood was linked to a 50 percent increase in the likelihood that a patient would need to get oxygen or to go on a ventilator, according to the new study.

How many people have lost their jobs due to coronavirus in the U.S.?

The unemployment rate fell to 13.3 percent in May, the Labor Department said on June 5, an unexpected improvement in the nation’s job market as hiring rebounded faster than economists expected. Economists had forecast the unemployment rate to increase to as much as 20 percent, after it hit 14.7 percent in April, which was the highest since the government began keeping official statistics after World War II. But the unemployment rate dipped instead, with employers adding 2.5 million jobs, after more than 20 million jobs were lost in April.

Will protests set off a second viral wave of coronavirus?

Mass protests against police brutality that have brought thousands of people onto the streets in cities across America are raising the specter of new coronavirus outbreaks, prompting political leaders, physicians and public health experts to warn that the crowds could cause a surge in cases. While many political leaders affirmed the right of protesters to express themselves, they urged the demonstrators to wear face masks and maintain social distancing, both to protect themselves and to prevent further community spread of the virus. Some infectious disease experts were reassured by the fact that the protests were held outdoors, saying the open air settings could mitigate the risk of transmission.

How do we start exercising again without hurting ourselves after months of lockdown?

Exercise researchers and physicians have some blunt advice for those of us aiming to return to regular exercise now: Start slowly and then rev up your workouts, also slowly. American adults tended to be about 12 percent less active after the stay-at-home mandates began in March than they were in January. But there are steps you can take to ease your way back into regular exercise safely. First, “start at no more than 50 percent of the exercise you were doing before Covid,” says Dr. Monica Rho, the chief of musculoskeletal medicine at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago. Thread in some preparatory squats, too, she advises. “When you haven’t been exercising, you lose muscle mass.” Expect some muscle twinges after these preliminary, post-lockdown sessions, especially a day or two later. But sudden or increasing pain during exercise is a clarion call to stop and return home.

My state is reopening. Is it safe to go out?

States are reopening bit by bit. This means that more public spaces are available for use and more and more businesses are being allowed to open again. The federal government is largely leaving the decision up to states, and some state leaders are leaving the decision up to local authorities. Even if you aren’t being told to stay at home, it’s still a good idea to limit trips outside and your interaction with other people.

What’s the risk of catching coronavirus from a surface?

Touching contaminated objects and then infecting ourselves with the germs is not typically how the virus spreads. But it can happen. A number of studies of flu, rhinovirus, coronavirus and other microbes have shown that respiratory illnesses, including the new coronavirus, can spread by touching contaminated surfaces, particularly in places like day care centers, offices and hospitals. But a long chain of events has to happen for the disease to spread that way. The best way to protect yourself from coronavirus — whether it’s surface transmission or close human contact — is still social distancing, washing your hands, not touching your face and wearing masks.

What are the symptoms of coronavirus?

Common symptoms include fever, a dry cough, fatigue and difficulty breathing or shortness of breath. Some of these symptoms overlap with those of the flu, making detection difficult, but runny noses and stuffy sinuses are less common. The C.D.C. has also added chills, muscle pain, sore throat, headache and a new loss of the sense of taste or smell as symptoms to look out for. Most people fall ill five to seven days after exposure, but symptoms may appear in as few as two days or as many as 14 days.

How can I protect myself while flying?

If air travel is unavoidable, there are some steps you can take to protect yourself. Most important: Wash your hands often, and stop touching your face. If possible, choose a window seat. A study from Emory University found that during flu season, the safest place to sit on a plane is by a window, as people sitting in window seats had less contact with potentially sick people. Disinfect hard surfaces. When you get to your seat and your hands are clean, use disinfecting wipes to clean the hard surfaces at your seat like the head and arm rest, the seatbelt buckle, the remote, screen, seat back pocket and the tray table. If the seat is hard and nonporous or leather or pleather, you can wipe that down, too. (Using wipes on upholstered seats could lead to a wet seat and spreading of germs rather than killing them.)

Should I wear a mask?

The C.D.C. has recommended that all Americans wear cloth masks if they go out in public. This is a shift in federal guidance reflecting new concerns that the coronavirus is being spread by infected people who have no symptoms. Until now, the C.D.C., like the W.H.O., has advised that ordinary people don’t need to wear masks unless they are sick and coughing. Part of the reason was to preserve medical-grade masks for health care workers who desperately need them at a time when they are in continuously short supply. Masks don’t replace hand washing and social distancing.

What should I do if I feel sick?

If you’ve been exposed to the coronavirus or think you have, and have a fever or symptoms like a cough or difficulty breathing, call a doctor. They should give you advice on whether you should be tested, how to get tested, and how to seek medical treatment without potentially infecting or exposing others.

Stocks of smaller companies also plummeted on Thursday, with the Russell 2000 index of such companies dropping 7.6 percent. The prospect of another economic slump also hit petroleum prices, with benchmark American crude oil slipping more than 8 percent. The energy sector was the worst-performing part of the stock market, falling 9.5 percent. The natural gas pipeline company Oneok and the oil and gas producer Occidental were both down about 16 percent.

Some of the companies had recently pulled in opportunistic traders hoping to ride the wave, analysts said. But on Thursday, the high-volume sell-off in their shares suggested those speculators were dumping their holdings.

The market may well rebound, as markets tend to do. But analysts see bumps ahead, especially around the passing of another stimulus bill. With the presidential elections just months away, partisan dynamics make it less likely that Congress will be able to approve another large rescue package.

Some on Wall Street even think that the performance of the stock market would have to be much worse than Thursday’s drop — and the economic conditions far more dire — for policymakers like President Trump, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Mitch McConnell to band together and act.

“Thinking Pelosi and McConnell and Trump are all going to come together, it will only happen if the news is really, really bad,” said Michael Purves, the chief executive officer at Tallbacken Capital Advisors, a financial market research firm.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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On June 14, the world’s single greatest sporting event begins: the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

The planet’s best teams and players — including Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Argentina’s Lionel Messi — will descend on Russia to play on soccer’s biggest stage. It’s a tournament where legends are born, hearts are broken, and, when all is said and done, a team is crowned the World Cup champion: the pinnacle of the world’s most popular sport.

At least half the world will tune in to the competition, even if most Americans probably won’t. That’s in part because the US national team didn’t qualify, but that’s not the whole story. Ahead of the last World Cup in 2014, which featured Team USA, 87 percent of Americans said they knew little to nothing about soccer, and around 67 percent had no plans to watch.

Here’s my plea: Watch the World Cup even without the US in it. I bet you’ll start to enjoy soccer and the tournament as the rest of the world does. “Soccer is the working man’s ballet,” Simon Kuper, co-author of Soccernomics, which was updated for this World Cup, told me. “You can see beauty and genius right away. It’s hard to appreciate the genius of Einstein, but one can easily appreciate the beauty of Messi.”

If you’re on the fence about whether to tune in, in part because you don’t know much about the World Cup, don’t worry. What follows is a guide that helps answer all the most embarrassing questions you wouldn’t want to ask out loud. At least, that’s the goal (get it?).

Let’s get this ball rolling.

Simply put, the World Cup is the single most beloved sporting event on the planet.

“The World Cup brings together the most people on the globe,” Grant Wahl, the author of Masters of Modern Soccer, told me. “More countries care about this sport and this tournament than any other event.”

The first World Cup took place in Uruguay in 1930 after soccer became a popular event at the Olympics. FIFA, soccer’s governing body (more on this group below), wanted to stage an international competition where professionals — instead of amateurs at the Olympics — could play and draw big crowds.

It has since turned into a global phenomenon that enthralls soccer fans every four years. It is the world’s most-watched sporting event and generates billions of dollars from sponsorships, ticket and shirt sales, broadcasting licenses, and much more.

(Top) Uruguay scores a goal during the first FIFA World Cup against Argentina in Montevideo, Uruguay on July 30, 1930. (Bottom) Germany scores against France during the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Allsport/Hulton; Matthias Hangst/Getty Images

Here’s how the World Cup works: All the world’s 207 national teams are split up into six regions. Over a roughly two-year period, they compete in regional qualifying tournaments to earn one of the 32 spots at the World Cup. The host of the tournament — in this case, Russia — receives an automatic spot, even if it doesn’t have a particularly good squad. (Sorry, Putin.)

FIFA gives regions with more and better national teams a greater number of spots. That’s why the tournament will feature fewer teams from Asia or Africa, for example, than Europe.

The qualifying 32 teams are then put into eight groups of four — labeled Groups A through H — by a random, though seeded, draw. After the draw, the group that is deemed the hardest to win, meaning that all four teams are fairly evenly matched, is called the “Group of Death.” This year, however, there is some debate as to which one deserves that title.

Once the group stage begins, the teams compete in a round-robin format, where each country plays the other three in the group just once. A win is worth 3 points; a tie, 1 point; and a loss, 0. The two teams with the highest point totals at the end of those three games move on to the knockout rounds.

Zac Freeland/Vox

That’s when the World Cup gets really fun — and soccer fans’ blood pressure rises to unhealthy levels. In the group stage, a team could tie a game, or even lose, but still play on. But in the knockout rounds, the losing team is eliminated from the entire tournament while the winner goes to the next round.

Recall that soccer has two halves, each 45 minutes long, for a total of a 90-minute game (plus “stoppage time” for injuries and substitutions, at the referees’ discretion). If the scores are tied at the end of those 90 minutes, the knockout game goes into a 30-minute overtime; if both sides remain tied after that, they go to penalty kicks.

The win-or-go-home nature of the knockout rounds makes every pass, every slide tackle, every save, and, yes, every goal matter even more.

Christina Animashaun/Vox

There’s a round of 16, which then turns into a quarterfinal, which becomes a semifinal, ultimately leading to the biggest game in all of soccerdom: the World Cup final. It’s like Game 7 of the World Series and the Super Bowl all rolled into one, but the entire world cares about it.

You can tell how much winning the final means to players and fans just from Germany’s celebrations after it won the last World Cup in 2014. The country held a huge party when the players returned home.

Midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger celebrates in front of fans during the German team victory ceremony In Berlin on July 15, 2014. Alex Grimm/Bongarts/Getty Images

(Quick note: The losers of the two semifinal games play each other before the final to determine who comes in third place. It’s technically part of the tournament, but it’s more about making the almost-finalists feel good, I guess.)

FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, chooses where it will hold its quadrennial flagship tournament based on bids (and maybe some bribes) from countries. In December 2010, it made a startling decision: Russia would host the 2018 competition. (It also tapped Qatar for the 2022 tournament, but more on that later.)

That was somewhat surprising; other candidates angling for the tournament included a joint Belgium-Netherlands bid, a solo England bid, and a joint Portugal-Spain bid. At the time, those options seemed more attractive to soccer fans because, well, they have great soccer facilities and cultures — and are also not run by an autocrat like Vladimir Putin.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff conducts the official hand over of the FIFA World Cup from Brazil to Russia with President Vladimir Putin and FIFA President Joseph “Sepp” Blatter. Alexander Hassenstein; FIFA/Getty Images

There were some irregularities with the vote. A member of Russia’s World Cup lobbying group sent a painting to a FIFA executive, for example. And three weeks before the tally, news broke that FIFA had suspended two voting members for accepting bribes in exchange for votes. However, a commissioned FIFA report cleared Russia of any “undue influence.”

Awarding authoritarian countries with top global sporting events is actually a trend. As my colleague Zeeshan Aleem pointed out, fewer countries now want to host the Olympics because of how costly it is. But dictatorships that don’t have to worry about financial accountability to citizens remain interested in hosting big sporting competitions.

The same is true for the World Cup. “The World Cup became very overpriced,” said Kuper, who is also a columnist for the Financial Times. He noted that Germany upped the ante when it hosted in 2006 by having top-of-the-line stadiums and facilities, spending roughly $4 billion to host the competition.

There were other instances of countries going all out to win the bid. In 2002, South Korea and Japan built 16 total stadiums, and refurbished four others, to host the tournament. Brazil spent around $15 billion to host the 2014 competition.

That upped the ante for hosting the 2018 World Cup. So far, it looks like Russia has reportedly spent — wait for it — $12 billion total to host the World Cup, with nearly 60 percent of that money coming from the country’s federal budget.

That massive spending total includes building the Krestovsky Stadium in St. Petersburg. It cost about $1 billion, seats around 70,000 fans, and is now the second-largest stadium in the country. As you might imagine with a project like this — and because it’s Russia — there was a lot of corruption surrounding the stadium’s creation. One prominent example: A Russian deputy governor received around 50 million rubles, or $800,000, in kickbacks from the subcontractor who built the scoreboard.

“It’s a systemic problem. You can’t build something legally, safely and sensibly in Russia without constant cost overruns, corruption, and mismanagement,” Lyubov Sobol, a researcher at the anti-Putin Foundation for Fighting Corruption, told the Financial Times in 2016.

But FIFA likely won’t mind. Russia (and Qatar) effectively told the organization, “Look, whatever you want, we’ll spend the money — we don’t care because we’re not accountable, really, to our population,” Kuper told me. Having lavish facilities, frankly, makes the World Cup aesthetically pleasing, which in turn reflects well on Russia and FIFA.

Here’s one thing that might make both Russia and FIFA look bad, though: Russia’s notorious hooliganism. There is currently a disturbing rise in neo-Nazi soccer fans in Russia. During a European soccer tournament in the summer of 2016, Russians attacked English fans — cutting one person’s Achilles’ heel and lodging glass into another person’s neck.

A Russian soccer fan holds up flares during the UEFA EURO 2016 match between England and Russia at Stade Velodrome on June 11, 2016 in Marseille, France. Ian MacNicol/Getty Images

“It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” a British police officer told Sky News. “The Russians came with serious intent to carry out barbaric violence. They were highly organized, very effective. We saw football hooliganism on a different level.”

Russian soccer fans are also known for their rampant racism. FIFA even fined Russia around $30,000 in early May for failing to stop bigoted chants from supporters during a game against France. (The French team has a lot of black players.)

So the World Cup may look aesthetically pleasing thanks to Putin’s heavy spending, but the Russian fans could make the tournament look really ugly.

We’ve talked a lot already about this soccer governing body known as FIFA. What the heck is it, and why is the World Cup called the FIFA World Cup, anyway?

FIFA stands for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association. It’s the soccer organization that runs the World Cup and has a super-French name because, well, it was founded in Paris in May 1904. It runs other big tournaments worldwide too, but the World Cup is its main showpiece.

It’s best to think of FIFA as the global administrative hub of soccer that aims to regulate and promote the sport worldwide. Oddly, it runs like an actual global political body. It has a president who leads the entire organization, a Congress that passes dictates for the game, and even committees that provide strategic guidance and oversight.

FIFA is also made up of six semiautonomous regional bodies that help govern their respective areas. These regional bodies administrate all things soccer for their areas, including the six different qualifying tournaments for the World Cup. Soccer in the United States, for example, is governed by the the Confederation of North, Central America, and Caribbean Association Football — known more commonly as CONCACAF.

Like most large international bodies, FIFA has had its share of major scandals.

Here’s the most recent big one: In 2015, the US Department of Justice indicted nine FIFA officials and five corporate executives for racketeering conspiracy, money laundering, and wire fraud as part of “a 24-year scheme to enrich themselves through the corruption of international soccer.” It’s worth noting that FIFA is technically a nonprofit, even though it makes billions of dollars.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch enters a news conference at the U.S. Attorneys Office of the Eastern District of New York, preparing to speak after the arrests FIFA officials for racketeering, bribery, money laundering and fraud on May 27, 2015. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Two charged members included Alfredo Hawit, then the president of CONCACAF, and Juan Ángel Napout, formerly the South American region’s chief. The scandal eventually led Sepp Blatter, then the head of FIFA, to resign.

FIFA’s corruption has caused some prominent soccer fans to wrestle with their love of the World Cup. Look no further than John Oliver: In 2014, he worked through his conflicting anti-FIFA and pro-World Cup feelings during the early days of his show Last Week Tonight.

It’s worth your time to watch, if for no other reason than you’re going to need a laugh before the next section.

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If you’re not sitting down while you read this, grab a seat. It’s about to get rough.

Here’s really all you need to know: America didn’t qualify for the tournament, even though it should have. (The women’s national team, it should be noted, is the best in the world and won the last Women’s World Cup in 2015.)

The US, like every other country, went through regional qualifying in order to make the World Cup. The United States, because it’s in North America, competes in CONCACAF.

There are multiple rounds in CONCACAF’s qualifying tournament, but the fifth and final one sees the six best teams compete in what’s called the “Hexagonal,” known colloquially as “the Hex.”

In that round, each team plays the others twice — home and away — for a total of 10 games. The top three teams with the highest point total automatically make it to the World Cup, while the fourth-place team has to go into a playoff with an Asian runner-up to qualify. (Again, a win gets a team 3 points; a tie earns 1 point; a loss means a team receives no points.)

The United States made it to the Hexagonal. That meant America had to place among the top four teams in a group consisting of Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, and Trinidad and Tobago to make it into the World Cup.

As you can tell from the results list below, the United States didn’t perform well in the round. It lost its first two games against Mexico and Costa Rica, and then struggled mightily to work its way back into the fold.

The 10 games in which the US men’s national team competed in during the “Hexagonal” to make it to the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia. Screenshot from US Soccer

Ultimately, the US ended up in fifth place after a disastrous 2-1 loss to Trinidad and Tobago in the final game on October 20, 2017. But had America won, the team would be at the World Cup.

That, in a nutshell, is the tragedy. Trinidad was by far the worst team in the group and hadn’t won any of its previous nine matches — with the US beating Trinidad 2-0 about four months earlier.

Players Michael Bradley (left) and Christian Pulisic of the United States mens national team after their loss against Trinidad and Tobago during the FIFA World Cup Qualifier match on October 10, 2017. Ashley Allen/Getty Images

What’s worse, Panama and Honduras had to respectively beat Costa Rica and Mexico, the two best teams in the Hexagonal, to knock out the US if it lost to Trindad. And, of course, that’s exactly what happened. That meant Mexico, Costa Rica, and Panama would automatically qualify, leaving Honduras to play Australia for a World Cup spot (Australia won, knocking out Honduras).

Final standings of the “Hexagonal,” the final qualifying round for North, Central, and Caribbean soccer teams to make it to the 2018 World Cup. Screenshot from Major League Soccer

Let’s be clear: The United States is by no means a world soccer power, but it is a major force within its own region alongside Mexico and Costa Rica. America had played in every World Cup since 1990, often comfortably making it into the tournament through the regional qualifier.

But now you won’t see the United States in Russia because of its tragically poor performance. “It was one of the greatest failures in the history of American sports,” Wahl, who also writes about soccer for Sports Illustrated, told me.

There are tons of rants from former US soccer professionals about what happened. I particularly recommend this one from Alexi Lalas, a Team USA legend who now serves as an analyst for Fox Sports 1. Let’s just say he speaks for me as he goes off on how poorly the US played throughout the Hex.

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If you follow soccer, the tournament favorites won’t surprise you: Based on soccer mathematician David Sumpter’s model, they are (in order) Germany, Brazil, France, Spain, and Argentina.

That makes sense: All those teams are ridiculously stacked with talent, and each has won at least one World Cup.

There are good reasons to think those countries will perform well. Germany won the last World Cup in 2014, and many of the same players from that squad are back for 2018. Brazil has won five World Cups — the most in history — and features one of the world’s best players in Neymar. Brazil is also arguably the most complete team in the tournament.

Defensive midfielder Christoph Kramer holds the World Cup trophy in front of the press after Germany defeated Argentina to win the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Matthias Hangst/Getty Images

France is a perennial world soccer power and conceivably has one of the easiest paths to the final, especially since it was placed in a relatively easy group with Peru, Denmark, and Australia. Spain won the World Cup in 2010 and is full of wily tournament veterans that know how to win.

And Argentina remains one of the world’s best teams, and its captain, Lionel Messi, is arguably the best soccer player to ever live.

But each of these teams has its problems that could keep them from glory.

Germany, for example, has a new crop of young players that still don’t mesh well with the older players who lifted the last trophy. Brazil underperformed in the last tournament, even though the competition took place in Brazil. The team embarrassingly crashed out with a 7-1 loss to Germany in the semifinals and now seeks redemption.

France was riddled with personality clashes in the past and lately has failed to rise to the big occasion, Wahl told me. For example, France made it to the finals of the European championship two years ago, but lost 1-0 to an inferior Portugal side.

Spain’s best players — primarily midfielder Andres Iniesta — are quite old and there are questions about who, exactly, will score goals for the team. And finally, Argentina has lost four straight finals in major competitions, including falling to Germany in the last World Cup.

Of course, there are still other great teams in the tournament like Belgium, Croatia, and Uruguay. With so many talented squads vying for the top prize, this could be a World Cup to remember.

There’s no way to do an exhaustive list here, as there are too many top players at the World Cup to count. Still, it’s worth mentioning a few names.

All lists like this must start with Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Argentina’s Lionel Messi. One of these two players have won the Ballon d’Or — the world’s best player award — every year since 2008, each earning the title five times. (In 2007, Ronaldo was named the second-best player in the world, and Messi third.)

Crucially, neither player has won a World Cup, hurting each man’s chances of being considered the best player in soccer history. Messi came the closest after leading Argentina to a World Cup final in 2014, but ultimately lost to Germany. Ronaldo, at least, won the European championship in 2016 with Portugal.

But there are other world-class players in this tournament. Brazil’s Neymar is seen as the heir apparent to Ronaldo and Messi, angling to snatch the world’s best player award from them soon (he was named the world’s third-best player in 2015 and 2017). France’s Antoine Griezmann was 2016’s third-best player and could potentially lead his country to World Cup glory.

Christiano Ronaldo (top left), Lionel Messi (right), and Neymar. Phil Walter; Marcelo Endelli; Stu Forster/Getty Images

Spain’s Andres Iniesta is arguably the best midfielder on the planet even at 34 years old. This will be his last World Cup, though, and he’ll surely want to win a second trophy before he retires from international competition. But Belgium’s Kevin De Bruyne will want to prove that he’s the new creative force on the global stage.

What’s also fun is that every World Cup heralds the global discovery of relative unknowns because of how well they play. In 2014, for example, Colombia’s James Rodriguez surprised global soccer by netting six goals, earning him a coveted place at the soccer giant Real Madrid after the tournament.

Here’s who could become this year’s Rodriguez: Egypt’s Mohamed Salah had a record-breaking season playing for Liverpool in England, and nearly singlehandedly led his team to the World Cup for the first time since 1990. He’s arguably already an elite player. That’s all the more special because he comes from the Middle East, a region that rarely produces top talent.

France’s 19-year-old Kylian Mbappe is shockingly talented for someone so young. He could use the World Cup to show that his prodigious gifts are for real and help lead his team to a title.

Finally, Sweden’s Emil Forsberg is a very skilled midfielder who has already made a name for himself playing in Germany. The problem is world recognition has eluded him and he has yet to become a household name. That could all change with a string of great performances if he helps his team beat expectations and go far into the knockout rounds.

Kylian Mbappé of France (left) and Emil Forsberg of Sweden. Catherine Steenkeste; TF-Images/Getty Images

Don’t forget the goalkeepers! No, they won’t strike wonder goals, but they could stop them with miraculous, lightning-quick reflexes and acrobatic dives. Five keepers in particular stand out among the talented throng: Germany’s Manuel Neuer, Spain’s David De Gea, Costa Rica’s Keylor Navas, France’s Hugo Lloris, and Belgium’s Thibaut Courtois. You can expect these goalies to make game-winning saves when it matters most.

Ohhhh yeahhhh.

This year’s is called “Live It Up,” and it’s performed by Nicky Jam, Era Istrefi, and — I can’t believe I’m typing this — West Philadelphia-born-and-raised Will Smith. The song was produced by Diplo, the mastermind behind some major hits.

Take a listen:

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It’s undoubtedly a catchy jam, but that hasn’t stopped a controversy from brewing about a World Cup song. One of the major critiques is that the song has, as some have argued, a “Latin American feel.” That vibe, critics on social media say, doesn’t make much sense since the 2018 World Cup takes place in Russia. That’s led some to wonder why a Russian group — or at least an Eastern European musician — didn’t take the lead on the anthem (though Istrefi is from Kosovo).

Let’s be real: A World Cup song hasn’t been a perfect representation of the host country since 1994. That’s when Daryl Hall (sans Oates) performed “Gloryland” for the competition held in the US.

In 1998, FIFA gave the World Cup song, “Cup of Life,” to Puerto Rico’s Ricky Martin, even though the tournament took place in France. (I would’ve preferred “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” frankly.)

And when South Africa held the tournament in 2010 — the first time an African country hosted the competition — the song “Waka Waka (Time for Africa)” was performed by … Shakira.

(There are more examples, like when Pitbull sang the song for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil — yes, really — but you get the idea.)

Many people wanted an African musician to sing the 2010 tournament’s official song instead of the Colombian pop star. But Kyla-Rose Smith, a member of the South African band Freshlyground, didn’t think FIFA choosing Shakira was such a big deal.

“I think that the World Cup is a global event but it’s also a business, a huge marketing exercise,” she told PBS in 2010. “FIFA requires a musician of a certain global reach to appeal to all the different kinds of people who are involved and witness and watch the World Cup. So I understand the choice of someone like Shakira.” (Freshlyground did get to perform in the background for “Waka Waka.”)

FIFA eventually offered some music slots to African artists, like Somali hip-hop star K’naan (a personal favorite of yours truly), as part of its sponsored music content.

But it’s likely the official World Cup song will stir up controversy every four years until FIFA chooses an artist that better represents that competition’s host nation.

You can hear snippets of every official World Cup song since 1982 here:

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Qatar. Yes, you read that right: Qatar.

In 2010, FIFA awarded the 2022 World Cup to the tiny Middle Eastern nation, the first time a Mideast country will host the tournament. That’s noteworthy, but the Qatar selection has become a major controversy.

Qatar is an extremely authoritarian country that subjugates women and others based on their sexual or gender orientations, according to Human Rights Watch. The country’s human rights deficit extends into how it mistreats migrant workers who are literally building the subsequent World Cup facilities.

Qatar relies heavily on those laborers, which comprise about 95 percent of the total workforce, or 2 million people. Most come from places like Asia or Africa and work nearly 12 hours day and live in terrible conditions.

A 2013 report from the International Trade Union Commission estimated that 4,000 migrant workers would die between 2014 and the 2022 World Cup. “Whether the cause of death is labelled a work accident, heart attack (brought on by the life-threatening effects of heat stress) or diseases from squalid living conditions, the root cause is the same — working conditions,” the report concluded, using data from the Indian and Nepalese embassies.

Part of the problem is that the country is extremely hot and typically reaches temperatures above 100 degrees. That puts thousands of workers in life-threatening heat as they race to prepare facilities for the 2022 competition.

An undated artist’s rendering of what a 2022 Qatar World Cup stadium will look like. 2022 Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy via Getty Images

The Qatari summer heat is so bad that FIFA moved the World Cup to the winter, setting the final match for December 18, 2022, Qatar’s National Day. That’s a huge deal: All modern World Cups take place in the summer, in part so the event doesn’t interfere with regular season schedules for professional soccer leagues in England, Spain, or elsewhere.

That’s not all: FIFA president Gianni Infantino wants to expand the tournament to include 48 teams, 16 more than will compete in the 2018 World Cup. “I firmly believe in an enlargement because I am convinced that it is good for the development of football,” he told the BBC in April. That may be true, but it would certainly be good for FIFA’s wallet.

Having that many teams, though, would be a problem for Qatar. After all, it’s a very tiny country and is already struggling to have everything ready for 32 teams in 2022. If Qatar has to host 48 squads, it would likely exceed its capacity. That’s why there’s some talk of asking Kuwait to co-host the competition. Kuwait, for now, seems interested.

There’s nice symbolism in having the World Cup take place in the Middle East for the first time ever. But you have to wonder: Is giving the honor to Qatar really worth it?

So after all that, who’s going to win, you ask. Well, I obviously don’t know, but I’m going to choose France.

Here’s why: France is in an easy group (Group C), and should — should — comfortably finish in first place. That means it would meet the runner-up of Group D in the round of 16, which I believe will be Croatia. Croatia is a very solid team, but France has the firepower to get past them.

In the quarterfinals, I believe France will play either Uruguay or Portugal (if pressed, I’d say Uruguay). France should dispatch either of those talented squads too. That takes the French team to the semifinals, where I think they will face off against Belgium, one of the strongest teams in the tournament. That would be quite the heavyweight fight, but I think France has a bit more experience and quality than the still-young Belgian side, as talented as it is.

France’s team during an international friendly match against Russia at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis on March 29, 2016. FRANCK FIFE/AFP/Getty Images

Some eagle-eyed readers will ask why I think France won’t play Brazil, a top favorite, in the semifinals. Well, I have Brazil winning its group but losing to my projected Group F runner-up Mexico in a stunning upset. (Hey, you have to live a little with these brackets!) But if it’s Brazil and France in the semifinals, France still has a good shot of pulling out a win.

Beating Belgium would pit France against Germany — the reigning champions — in the final (in my bracket, at least). I think France ekes out a win there against a tiring German squad, wresting the trophy away from Berlin. Recall that France beat Germany 2-0 in the European Championship’s semifinal in 2016, and it might pull off similar magic again.

Of course, there’s a really good chance I’m wrong on a lot, or all, of the above. But you have to live dangerously sometimes, and I’m doing so by picking Spain’s archrival to win it all.

My mom, a die-hard Spanish citizen and fan, has probably just disowned me. (Sorry, Mom!) My sister-in-law, who loves the French squad, hopefully thinks I’m cool now. Meanwhile, my wife — who already can’t wait for World Cup month to be over — likely has her head deep in her hands. Still, she’ll root for Germany just to spite me.

I should say this: In my heart, I want Spain to win and for Iceland — the smallest nation ever to play at the World Cup that is already one of the tournament’s best stories — to go deep in the competition. But I’m trying to be as levelheaded as a huge soccer fan can be when thinking about the World Cup.

Once the whistle blows, all debates and subplots subside. At that point, you just have to sit back, watch, cheer, and enjoy the beautiful game.

A view of a 2014 FIFA World Cup game in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Jamie Squire/Getty Images

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Press: Game of Thrones: How They Make the World’s Most Popular Show

TIME – The battle for Westeros may be won or lost on the back of a lime green mechanical bull.

That’s what it looks like on a January Monday in Belfast, as Game of Thrones films its seventh season here. Certainly no one believes the dragons that have thrilled viewers of HBO’s hit series exist in any real sense. And yet it’s still somewhat surprising to see the British actor Emilia Clarke, who plays exiled queen Daenerys, straddling the “buck” on a soundstage at Titanic Studios, a film complex named after this city’s other famously massive export.

The machine under Clarke looks like a big pommel horse and moves in sync with a computer animation of what will become a dragon. Clarke doesn’t talk much between takes. Over and over, a wind gun blasts her with just enough force to make me worry about the integrity of her ash blond wig. (Its particular color is the result of 2½ months’ worth of testing and seven prototypes, according to the show’s hair designer.) Over and over, Clarke stares down at a masking-tape mark on the floor the instant episode director Alan Taylor shouts, “Now!” Nearby, several visual-effects supervisors watch on monitors.

Clarke and I talk in her trailer before she heads to the soundstage, at the beginning of what is to be a long week inhabiting a now iconic character. Behind the scenes it’s more toil than triumph, though. The show’s first season ended with Daenerys’ hatching three baby dragons, each the size of a Pomeranian. They’ve since grown to the size of a 747. “I’m 5-ft.-nothing, I’m a little girl,” she says. “They’re like, ‘Emilia, climb those stairs, get on that huge thing, we’ll harness you in, and then you’ll go crazy.’ And you’re like, ‘Hey, everybody! Now who’s shorty?!’”

She has reason to feel powerful. On July 16, Clarke and the rest of the cast will begin bringing Thrones in for a landing with the first of its final 13 episodes (seven to air this summer, six to come later). Thrones, a scrappy upstart launched by two TV novices in 2011, will finish its run as the biggest and most popular show in the world. An average of more than 23 million Americans watched each episode last season when platforms like streaming and video on demand are accounted for. And since it’s the most pirated show ever, millions more watch it in ways unaccounted for. Thrones, which holds the record for most Emmys ever won by a prime-time series, airs in more than 170 countries. It’s the farthest-reaching show out there—not to mention the most obsessed-about.

People talk about living in a golden age of TV ushered in by hit dramas like The Sopranos, Mad Men and Breaking Bad. All had precisely honed insights about the nature of humanity and of evil that remade expectations of what TV could do. But that period ended around the time Breaking Bad went off the air in 2013. We’re in what came next: an unprecedented glut of programming, with streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu jumping into an ever-more-crowded fray. Now, there’s a prestige show for every conceivable viewer, which means smaller audiences and fewer truly original stories.

Except for Thrones, which merges the psychological complexity of the best TV with old-school Hollywood grandeur. You liked shows with one antihero? Well, Thrones has five Tony Sopranos building their empires on blood, five Walter Whites discovering just how far they’ll go to win, five Don Drapers unapologetic in their narcissism. Oh, and they’re all living out their drama against the most breathtaking vistas not of this world.

The phenomenon is fueled by a massive worldwide apparatus that, in a typical 10-episode season, generates the equivalent of five big-budget, feature-length movies. Even as the series has grown in every conceivable way over the years—it shoots around the globe; each episode now boasts a budget of at least $10 million—it remains animated by one simple question: Who will win the game in the end? And if Thrones has taught us anything, it’s that every reign has to end sometime.

1. the fiction

It all started with a book. In 1996, George R.R. Martin published A Game of Thrones, the first novel in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. (Back then, he conceived of it as a trilogy. Today, five of the planned seven volumes have been published.) As a writer for shows like CBS’s The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast in the late ’80s, Martin had been frustrated by the limits of TV. He decided that turning to prose meant writing something “as big as my imagination.” Martin recalls telling himself, “I’m going to have all the characters I want, and gigantic castles, and dragons, and dire wolves, and hundreds of years of history, and a really complex plot. And it’s fine because it’s a book. It’s essentially unfilmable.”

The books became a hit, especially after 1999’s A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords a year later. Martin, who writes from his home in Santa Fe, N.M., was compared to The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien. Like Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Martin’s Westeros is a land with a distinctive set of rules. First, magic is real. Second, winter is coming. Seasons can last for years at a time, and as the series begins, a long summer is ending. Third, no one is safe. New religions are in conflict with the old, rival houses have designs on the capital’s Iron Throne, and an undead army is pushing against the boundary of civilization, known as the Wall.

Thrones’ vast number of clans includes the wealthy and louche Lannisters, including incestuous twins Cersei and Jaime. She is the queen by marriage; he helped ensure her ascendancy through violence. Their brother Tyrion, an “imp” of short stature, is perhaps the most astute student of power. Then there are the Starks, led by duty-bound Ned. His children Robb, Sansa, Arya, Bran, Rickon and “bastard” Jon Snow will be scattered throughout the realm’s Seven Kingdoms. Daenerys is a Targaryen, an overthrown family that also—surprise—has a claim to the throne. Soon enough, Thrones devolves into an all-out melee that makes the Wars of the Roses look like Family Feud.

In the wake of director Peter Jackson’s early-2000s film trilogy of Tolkien’s masterpiece, Martin was courted by producers to turn his books into “the next Lord of the Rings franchise.” But the Thrones story was too big, and would-be collaborators suggested cutting it to focus solely on Daenerys or Snow, for instance. Martin turned them all down. His story’s expansiveness was the point.

Two middleweight novelists, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, had come to a similar conclusion and obtained Martin’s blessing at what the author calls “that famous lunch that turned into a dinner, because we were there for four or five hours” in 2006. The two writers thought Thrones could only be made as a premium-cable drama, and they walked into HBO’s office with an ambitious pitch to do so that year. “They were talking about this series of books I’d never heard of,” says Carolyn Strauss, head of HBO’s entertainment division at the time. “[I was] somebody who looked around the theater in Lord of the Rings, at all of those rapt faces, and I am just not on this particular ferry … I thought, This sounds interesting. Who knows? It could be a big show.”

HBO bought the idea and handed the reins to Benioff and Weiss, making them showrunners who’d never run a show before. Benioff was best known for having adapted his novel The 25th Hour into a screenplay directed by Spike Lee. Weiss had a novel to his credit too. The two had met in a literature program in Dublin in 1995 and later reconnected in the States. “I decided I wanted to write a screenplay,” Benioff told Vanity Fair in 2014. “I’d never written a script before, and I didn’t know how to do it, so I asked [Weiss] if he would write one with me, because he had written a bunch already.” It never got made.

The Thrones pilot, shot in 2009, got off to a rocky start. Benioff and Weiss misjudged how much planning it would take to bring Martin’s fantasy to life. To portray a White Walker—mystic creatures from the North—they simply stuck an actor in a green-screen getup and hoped to figure it out later. “You can maybe do that if you’re making Avatar,” says Weiss. “But we need to know what the creatures look like before we turn on the camera.” They also had trouble portraying Martin’s nuanced characters. “Our friends—really smart, savvy writers—didn’t [realize] Jaime and Cersei were brother and sister,” says Benioff of the ill-fated first cut. Ultimately, they reshot the pilot.

When Benioff and Weiss look back at that first season, they see plenty to nitpick. Their fealty to Martin’s text, for example, made Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion “Eminem blond,” per Benioff. (His hair was later darkened.) Still, the elements that have made the show a monster success were there—and audiences (3 million for Thrones’ first season finale) picked up on them. Arguably the most groundbreaking element was a willingness to ruthlessly murder its stars. Ned Stark, the moral center of Season 1, portrayed by the show’s then most famous cast member (Sean Bean, who starred in The Lord of the Rings), is shockingly beheaded in the second-to-last episode. By the third season’s “Red Wedding,” a far more gruesome culling, the show had accrued enough fans to send the Internet into full on freak-out mode.

Thrones had by then become the pacesetter for all of TV in its willingness to forgo a simple happy ending in favor of delivering pleasure through brutality. Even if you don’t watch, Thrones’ characters and catchphrases have permeated the culture (the apparent death of Snow was an international trending topic all summer in 2015). Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons and The Tonight Show have lampooned the show. And the recent South Korean presidential election was called on a national news network with depictions of the candidates duking it out for control of the Iron Throne.

2. the production

Wandering around the Belfast set, the scope and the orderliness of the enterprise is staggering. The wights, zombie-like creatures with spookily pale faces and dressed in ragged furs, form a tidy line as they wait to grab breakfast burritos. Outside the stage door, a few smoke cigarettes, careful not to ash on their worn-in tunics. “At first we had a season with one big event, then we had a season with two big events, now we have a season where every episode is a big event,” says Joe Bauer, the show’s VFX supervisor. Bauer and VFX producer Steve Kullback oversee a group of 14 FX shops from New Zealand to Germany that work on the show almost continuously.

One of those big events this season is a battle whose sheer scope, even before being cut together with the show’s typical brio, dazzled me. In order to get on set, I agreed not to divulge the players or what’s at stake. (Thrones has been promising this clash all along, and when the time comes, the Internet will melt.) It will be all the more impressive knowing that the cast and crew were shot through with a frigid North Atlantic wind that whipped everyone during filming and sent them all flying to the coffee cart during resets. (The cold, a prosthetic artist tells me, is at least good for keeping the makeup on.)

The setting is as grand as the action. The battle was filmed in what was once a Belfast quarry, drained, flattened out with 11,000 square meters of concrete and painted over with a camouflage effect—all of which took six months and required special ecological surveys. This kind of mountain moving, or leveling, is par for the course for Thrones.

Each season starts with producers Christopher Newman and Bernadette Caulfield circulating a plot outline on a color-coded spreadsheet, dictating what will be shot by the show’s two simultaneous camera units, which can splinter into as many as four. It’s perpetually subject to change, given the complications of a television show this ambitious—over seven seasons they’ve shot in Croatia, Spain, Iceland, Malta, Morocco and Canada as well as locations around Northern Ireland. While I’m in Belfast, my plan to watch Jon Snow in action is canceled because of inclement weather (that same wind) that makes filming from a drone hazardous. At this point, Caulfield will grab onto any small comfort. “Now the dragon doesn’t get any bigger,” she says, “so we know that much.”

Another breakdown goes out to department heads, and a massive global triage begins. Costumer Michele Clapton, for example, begins figuring out if she’ll have to dress any new characters or armies and then sets out on the most complex work. “I know that Daenerys’ dresses will take the longest,” she says. Each look, no matter the character, may take as many as four craftspeople to bead, stitch and—if there’s meant to be wear and tear—break down. Deborah Riley, the production designer, begins looking for references to new locations in the outline. Tommy Dunne, the weapons master, starts forging gear for the season’s big battles. “My big thing is the numbers,” he says. “I hope they won’t frighten me.” He made 200 shields and 250 spears for last season’s epic Battle of the Bastards.

Benioff’s and Weiss’s jobs amount to maintaining constant conversation with numerous producers. The pair are usually in Belfast for about six months a year. Wherever in the world they happen to be, they get daily video from the shoots and field an endless stream of emails from staff on location. During my visit, wolves described in the script as “skinny and mangy” showed up to the shoot looking fluffy and lustrous. Around the world, new message notifications lit up smartphone screens.

When Benioff and Weiss aren’t shooting, they’re writing. And when they aren’t shooting or writing—which happens rarely—they’re promoting. The two make a complementary pair. Benioff, who wears his hair in a Morrissey quiff, is the more sardonic one. Weiss, with silver rings in his ears, is nerdier and given to hyperbole. They say they’re still having fun making Thrones, despite the stakes, and still regularly find themselves surprised by its scale. Weiss recalls seeing the buck Clarke rides to simulate Daenerys’ dragons for the first time: “We knew it would be a mechanical bull. We didn’t know it would be 40 ft. in the air and six degrees of motion with cameras that swirl.” Says Benioff: “It’s like the thing NASA built to train the astronauts.”

Despite nonstop production, Weiss says, “There’s still a kid-in-a-candy-shop feel. You’re going to look at the armor, crazy-amazing dresses—gowns Michele is making—then you’re going to look at the swords, then watch pre-vis cartoons of the scenes that will be shot and you’re weighing in on shot selection. Every one of these things is something we’ve been fascinated with in our own way since we were kids.”

“Especially dresses,” cracks Benioff. Weiss adds, “Especially the gowns.”

3. the players

The first few seasons’ worth of swordplay and gowns turned the show’s cast into recognizable stars. But it’s the complexity of their characters, revealed over time, that made them into icons. “My friends always say to me, ‘It’s like you’re two different people. I see articles about you in BuzzFeed’—but then they see my Facebook posts,” says Maisie Williams, who plays the tomboy turned angel of vengeance Arya Stark. Williams was two days past her 14th birthday when the show debuted. There’s TV-star famous, after all, and then there’s some-percentage-of-23-million-people-has-been-actively-rooting-for-you-to-kill-off-your-co-stars-for-six-years famous.

Thrones’ story doesn’t ask its actors to break bad or good, and viewers stay tuned in large part because of the characters’ moral mutability. Consider Cersei, played by Lena Headey, who is either a monster or a victim. The character has become more popular with fans even as she’s wrought greater carnage, including blowing up a building full of people last season. “At the beginning, people were like, ‘Oh my God, you’re such a bitch!’” she says. “What’s moving is that people love her now and want to be on her team.” That Headey, a Brit, uses an exaggerated American accent as she delivers the harsher interpretation of her work is revealing of nothing, or a lot.

She’s thought through every element of her character, though, including the incestuous relationship with Jaime that provided the show its first narrative jolt. “I love to talk about all of it,” she says, citing her frequent emails to Benioff and Weiss. “Cersei’s always wanted to be him. Therefore, for her, that relationship is completion. There’s been an envy, because he was born with privilege just for being a man. I think their love was built on respect.”

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the Danish actor who plays Jaime, is a bit less excited to discuss the subject. “I’ve never really gone too deep into the whole sister-brother thing because I can’t use that information. I have to look at her as the woman he loves and desires. Lena’s a very good actress, and that’s kind of what carries the whole thing.” He adds, “I have two older sisters. I do not want to go there. It’s just too weird.”

Even a character like Jon Snow, as close to a pure hero as possible as Season 7 begins, has outgrown the box he originally came in. Snow, an illegitimate child never embraced by his father’s wife, is a James Dean daydream of Sir Walter Scott. “I made mistakes and felt that he wasn’t interesting enough,” says Kit Harington of the way he’s played Snow. We’re in a Belfast hotel bar, and Harington is squeezing in a coffee before he makes an evening showing of Manchester by the Sea. “That sounds weird, but I’ve never been quite content with him. Maybe that’s what makes him him. That angst.” His character has been slowly absorbing lessons about duty and power—and “this year there is this huge seismic shift where all of what he’s learned over the years, suddenly …” Harington trails off. “He’s still the same Jon, but he grows up.”

Dinklage, too, found in Tyrion a character who surpassed his expectations. The actor says he’d never read fantasy beyond The Lord of the Rings. “That’s the part of the bookstore I don’t really gravitate toward,” he says. “This was the first time in this genre that somebody my size was an actually multidimensional being, flesh and blood without the really long beard, without the pointy shoes, without the asexuality.”

Thrones catapulted Dinklage, the only American in the main cast, from a well-regarded film and theater actor to among the most-recognized actors on earth in part because the asexuality is quite absent. Tyrion thirsts for wine, sex and, crucially, love and respect. As the offspring of a wealthy and powerful family, the first two are easy to come by. The latter not so much. “He covers it up with alcohol, he covers it up with humor, he does his best to maintain a modicum of sanity and he perseveres,” says Dinklage. “He’s still alive. Anyone who’s still alive on our show is pretty smart.”

Indeed, with just 13 episodes left, everything is possible—alliance, demise or coronation. “Every season I go to the last page of the last episode and go backward,” says Dinklage. “I don’t do that with books, but I can’t crack open page one of Episode 1 not knowing if I’m dead or not.”

4. the drama

The size of Thrones’ controversies have, at times, been as large as its following. Its reliance on female nudity, especially Daenerys’, was an early flash point. “I don’t have any qualms saying to anyone it was not the most enjoyable experience. How could it be?” says Clarke. “I don’t know how many actresses enjoy doing that part of it.” That aspect of the role has faded as Daenerys found paths to power beyond her sexuality. This evolution from a passive naïf into a holy terror who rules by the fealty of her subjects is what has earned Daenerys, according to Clarke, the audience’s loyalty. “People wouldn’t give two sh-ts about Daenerys if you didn’t see her suffer,” she says.

More controversial still has been the prevalence of sexual violence. Many of the major female characters have been assaulted onscreen. In a 2015 sequence, Sansa, the Stark daughter played by Sophie Turner, was raped by her husband. According to the logic of the show, the plot gave her character a reason to seek revenge and power of her own. It nonetheless generated substantial blowback online and clearly turned some fans away from the series for good. “This was the trending topic on Twitter, and it makes you wonder, when it happens in real life, why isn’t it a trending topic every time?” says Turner, who is 21. “This was a fictional character, and I got to walk away from it unscathed … Let’s take that discussion and that dialogue and use it to help people who are going through that in their everyday lives. Stop making it such a taboo, and make it a discussion.”

Benioff and Weiss claim to have seen no other possible outcome for a character stranded in a marriage to a psychopath, in a skewed version of feudal society. “It might not be our world,” says Benioff, “but it’s still the same basic power dynamic between men and women in this medieval world. This is what we believed was going to happen.” Adds Weiss: “We talked about, is there any other way she could possibly avoid this fate that doesn’t seem fake, where she uses her pluck to save herself at the last? There was no version of that that didn’t seem completely horrible.”

Even if Benioff and Weiss don’t always admit it, the show has changed. Scenes in which exposition is delivered in one brothel or another, for example, have been pared back. It’s at moments like these that the success of Thrones seems a precariously struck balance, thriving on a willingness to shock but always risking going too far.

5. the end of the end

Benioff and Weiss claim to have sworn off reading commentary about the show, good or bad. When I visit them in Los Angeles in March, they’re writing the next and final season. I peek into a fridge in a lounge area in their offices, a room dominated by a Thrones-branded pinball machine Weiss proudly points out, to find three cases of beer with Westeros-themed labels, low-calorie ranch dressing and yellow mustard. At this point, they have full outlines of the final six episodes. In fact, they’ve been working on the very last episode, possibly the most anticipated finale since Hawkeye left Korea. “We know what happens in each scene,” says Weiss.

The fact that they know is remarkable considering the show will reach its conclusion long before the books. The last new Thrones novel came out in 2011, the year the show began. The author describes his next installment, the sixth of seven, as “massively late.” “The journey is an adventure,” says Martin, who, at 68, has fought criticism that he won’t finish the books. “There’s always that process of discovery for me.” But with young, and rapidly maturing, actors under contract and a community of artisans awaiting marching orders in Belfast, the show can’t wait.

Benioff and Weiss always knew this would happen. So they met with the novelist in 2013, between Seasons 2 and 3, to sketch out what Martin calls “the ultimate developments” after the books and show diverge. The upshot, they say, is that the two can coexist. “Certain things that we learned from George way back then are going to happen on the show, but certain things won’t,” says Benioff. “And there’s certain things where George didn’t know what was going to happen, so we’re going to find them out for the first time too.”

In preparation for Season 7, Benioff and Weiss have gotten more possessive. That has further fueled fans’ curiosity even as it has created security challenges. In the run-up to Season 6, paparazzi shots of Harington—and his distinctive in-character hairdo—in Belfast tipped the Internet off that Jon Snow wasn’t, in fact, as dead as he’d seemed the season before. “Look at how difficult it is to protect information in this age,” says Benioff. “The CIA can’t do it. The NSA can’t do it. What chance do we have?”

It’s also changed the on-set dynamic. Coster-Waldau says Benioff and Weiss have “become much more protective over the story and script. I think they feel this is truly theirs now, and it’s not to be tampered with. I’ve just sensed this last season that this is their baby: ‘Just say the words as they’re written, and shut up.’”

Then there’s the end of the end, the finale likely to air next year or the year after. Benioff and Weiss are not writing the Thrones spin-off projects HBO revealed this year that could explore other parts of Westerosi history—some, all or none of which may end up on air. In the meantime, they claim not to be worrying about the public’s reaction to their ending. (Benioff says that when it comes to endgame stress, “medication helps.”) Weiss says, “I’m not saying we don’t think about it.” He pauses. “The best way to go about it is to focus on what’s on the desk in front of you, or what sword is being put in front of you, or the fight that is being choreographed in front of you.”

What’s currently before them seems like plenty. When I first met Clarke in Belfast, she was shooting on the back of a dragon. When I leave a week later, she’s still at it. “Thirty seconds of screen time and she’s been here for 16 days,” the episode’s director, Taylor, remarks at one point. Later on, I’d remember this moment of exhaustion when Weiss described seeing the buck for the first time. He went on to add, “It probably feels a bit less amazing to Emilia, who sits on it for eight hours a day, six weeks in a row, getting blasted with water and fake snow and whatever else they decide to chuck at her through the fans.” The table with the espresso machine—just beyond Clarke’s line of sight—is well trafficked.

Clarke doesn’t seem bothered, though, smiling and chatting with the crew from atop the buck. As the state-of-the-art hydraulics move her into position, her posture shifts from millennial slump to ramrod straight. In an instant, she converts herself into the ruler of the fictional space around her. On cue, she looks over her shoulder with a face of marble. She casts into an imagined world some emotion known only to her. She’s gazing into a future that, in the flickering moments that the story remains a secret, only she can see.

Press: Game of Thrones: How They Make the World’s Most Popular Show was originally published on Enchanting Emilia Clarke

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