Notes on the World Cup and the Atomic Bomb

What I'm reading

I avoided the World Cup, which was not easy given that the tournament seemed to grab hold of even this soccer-averse nation. I won’t pretend I was doing so solely on principle. The Qatari human rights record certainly was a central element, but so was my general ignorance of soccer. In any case, there is a good column in The Guardian by Pete Pattison on the Qatari record, its attempt to recast criticism as racism (taking a page from Israel, and “the real scandal,” which was “not that the criticism of Qatar is racially motivated, but that the men who built this tournament have been subjected to a labour system based largely on racial discrimination.”