Free for ALL Friday!
It's Free for All Friday!
It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
Has Colombia’s World Cup Jersey Become a Right-Wing Symbol?
A presidential candidate endorsed by President Trump has been accused by some Colombians of co-opting their beloved national team’s yellow soccer jersey
Just days before the World Cup, thousands of Colombians across the country emerged wearing the national team’s soccer jersey, turning the streets into a sea of bright yellow. But Colombians were not out en masse to cheer the country’s beloved soccer team. They were voting on Sunday for Abelardo De La Espriella, a right-wing presidential candidate who had urged supporters to wear the jersey during the final days of his campaign. They wore the shirts to enormous closing campaign rallies and to voting booths, in a show of force that also amounted to a stunt, bypassing laws prohibiting the use of campaign clothing at polling sites. Mr. De La Espriella, who was endorsed by President Trump on Tuesday, has turned Colombia’s emblematic uniform — typically a symbol of unity in the soccer-crazed country — into his campaign’s official attire.
In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, the former far-right president, encouraged his supporters to wear the nation’s yellow-and-green jersey to the polls in 2018 and 2022. That shirt — perhaps the most recognizable in international soccer — lost its status as a politically neutral symbol in Brazil after many liberal fans refused to wear it out of fear of being mistaken for Bolsonaro supporters. Daniel Alarcón, a Peruvian-American journalist and co-host of a World Cup podcast, lamented the politicization of the soccer jersey. “When you put on the national team jersey, I feel like everybody is celebrating their own private vision of what they wish the country were,” he said. “Once a national symbol like that gets associated with one political party or another, I do think something is lost.”
Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters)
New Jersey to World Cup Fans: Come on Over
As New York City tamps down on short-term rentals, some New Jersey municipalities are encouraging residents to take advantage of the windfall World Cup travelers could bring
More than a million soccer fans are expected to visit the tristate area during the FIFA World Cup. Eight matches, including the final, will be held at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., which will be known as New York New Jersey Stadium during the soccer tournament. But while New York City leaders have refused to ease restrictions on short-term rentals in anticipation of the event, New Jersey has doubled down on efforts to make the Garden State a hotbed for short-term stays. On April 7, New Jersey’s Division of Local Government Services distributed a Local Finance Notice to municipal and county officials to “remind them of their authority to allow New Jersey residents to participate in the short-term rental market, helping them generate income while keeping tourism dollars within their communities.”
Jamie Lane, the chief economist and senior vice president for analytics at AirDNA, a company that collects and analyzes short-term-rental data, said that the 2026 World Cup “is the biggest short-term rental event that’s ever happened.” Airbnb is expected to generate $1.2 billion in spending across North America, and hosts could earn $212 million during the tournament, according to a Deloitte study commissioned by Airbnb, which has been a FIFA partner since 2025. In the tristate area, Airbnb hosts are expected to welcome approximately 25,000 guests and are projected to earn an average of $5,700 during the World Cup, the most of any host region, according to the study.
Link: New York Times (Multiple reporters)
‘It Was Poignant, Knowing That These Were the Last Images She Did’: The Intimate Final Photos of Marilyn Monroe
On the 100th anniversary of her birth, images from the Hollywood icon’s final photoshoot reveal a carefree joyfulness that’s far removed from the shocking tragedy of her death
July, 1962. A woman poses on Santa Monica beach, her unmistakeable “blonde bombshell” features somehow softened, hair ruffled by the sea breeze. She appears radiant and playful, draping her body in a green towel or cosy knitwear. In the final photo of the shoot, she is snuggled on the sand, hands clasped, seeming to blow an affectionate kiss towards the camera. These photographs, taken by George Barris, were the last portraits of legendary actress and model Marilyn Monroe in her lifetime. A few weeks later, in the early hours of 5 August, Monroe would be found dead at her LA home, aged 36.
By 1962, Monroe was a global superstar facing personal and professional fall-outs; her third marriage (to playwright Arthur Miller) had ended; her body image was endlessly scrutinised (her famous curves were now considerably less following gall bladder surgery); her reputation for being “difficult” on set plagued her (though failing to show up or forgetting lines was arguably linked to her ill health, chronic insomnia, and addiction to prescription medication). In June that year, Monroe was fired from the production Something’s Got to Give following repeated absences for sickness, and sued for damages by 20th Century Fox. In response to the detractors and malicious rumour-mongers, Monroe undertook her own publicity campaign, including smart, stylish glossy magazine interviews in Vogue and Life.
Link: BBC (Multiple reporters)
The Quest to Get Perfect Grass Into 16 World Cup Stadiums
For the grass they’ll play on, it all started years earlier in North Carolina. Or Colorado. Or Canada. Or whichever sod farm had been assigned to grow a particular, essential piece of the tournament
The World Cup’s first whistle will sound June 11 at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, kicking off a summer-long spectacle that will stretch across three countries and draw a global audience. Across North America, FIFA’s pitch experts have spent years trying to make 16 new fields in three countries feel like one playing surface — indoors and out, in heat and shade, at sea level and altitude, inside stadiums that were not always built with grass in mind. Along the way, the playing surfaces that will serve as the stage of this summer’s tournament have made an unlikely journey: from research plots to sod farms, from refrigerated trucks to stadium floors, from a living crop to soccer’s biggest show.
For World Cup organizers and their team of grass experts, each venue presented unique challenges. Several host venues normally use artificial turf, and eight stadiums required a temporary natural-grass field to be installed over, or in place of, an existing artificial surface. Five are domed or covered. Mexico City brings altitude. Vancouver, Seattle and Boston bring cooler, cloudier conditions. Miami and Monterrey bring heat. Houston brings … a rodeo to town, which presents its own surface challenges. But for players, the ball should roll the same, a plant foot should hold the same and a pass should bounce the same.
Link: Washington Post (Rick Maese)
How America’s Buy-Now Economy Is Transforming Its Heartland
When Americans tap the buy-now button online, a complex logistical operation begins that can deliver goods faster than ever
On certain evenings in Will County, Illinois, from the raised overpasses that cross its highways, a contrast becomes apparent. Freight trains inch past long-grass prairie in long, metallic lines. Semitrucks stream through newly widened intersections and closed-loop designated routes. And beyond them, bison brought back to the region a decade ago graze quietly on protected land – land that once produced explosives for three American wars. Old U.S. Route 66, too, passes right through it. CenterPoint Intermodal Center sits at the center of this logistics system in a corridor just southwest of Chicago. It receives imported goods from West Coast ports and then delivers them into the American heartland. In just 20 years, CenterPoint has become the central node of the American retail economy. More than 3 million shipping containers pass through the facility every year, carrying an estimated $100 billion in goods before being fanned out, in every direction, to storefronts and family front doors across the Midwest and beyond.
On a sunny Friday afternoon in May, John Kieken and his brother-in-law, Ron Adamski, are driving down a historic stretch of Route 66, now Illinois Route 53, pointing out the new NorthPoint warehouses that line parts of the road. Both men have been fighting the developer’s planned expansion, which, according to current proposals, would impinge upon their homes in Manhattan, Illinois, less than 10 miles away. “A quiet community, great people. They take care of each other, always willing to help out,” says Mr. Adamski, a Gulf War veteran who served on the aircraft carrier USS America and a retired air traffic controller. “It’s that type of community – and we’re getting swallowed up by outside forces.” NorthPoint is seeking to acquire some 4,000 acres, or about 6 square miles of farmland and other residential areas, and expand the existing landscape of warehouses and truck routes into parts of their small, rural town.
Link: Christian Science Monitor (Harry Bruinius)
Granted Clemency by Trump, Scores of Jan. 6 Rioters Have Been Accused of New Crimes
At least 97 of those who were charged in connection with the Capitol riot have reoffended in the years since the attack
One was arrested after allegedly threatening a person with a gun in a church parking lot. Another was convicted of felony charges of grand larceny and burglary. Still another was convicted of child molestation. At least 97 of the nearly 1,600 people who were charged in connection with the Capitol riot have been accused of new crimes since Jan. 6, 2021, according to a study released on Thursday from Lawfare, the nonprofit legal issues publication. The figure, which is larger than previously known, includes 19 cases that happened after Mr. Trump granted clemency to Jan. 6 defendants on the first day of his second term, according to the study’s author.
In one of his first official acts of his second term, Mr. Trump issued a sweeping grant of clemency to nearly all of the people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol, issuing pardons to most of the defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militias, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy. The president has repeatedly tried to revise the history of the deadly attack by a pro-Trump mob, who defaced the halls of Congress and attacked and injured more than 150 officers. But the study found that dozens of those involved in the riot have been less than model citizens since the mob violence.
Link: New York Times (Luke Broadwater)
U.S. Cities Dust Off Statues They Hid Away in 2020
A monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee is back up in Charleston, S.C., and a giant Columbus awaits a return in Ohio’s namesake capital
Traditionalists are suing and lobbying local governments to resurrect memorials to Confederate generals, Founding Fathers and European explorers. Many of the statues disappeared from town squares and other public places during the pandemic-era protests against police violence and racism following George Floyd’s murder in 2020. “We will no longer live in the shadow of our ugly past,” Mayor Andrew Ginther, a Democrat, said at the time. Columbus’s detractors tie the Italian explorer to the brutal subjugation of native civilizations in the Americas. His supporters say Columbus should be lauded for his discoveries, not blamed for what followed. The city’s Columbus statue for now lies on its back inside a fenced storage facility, monitored by security cameras and adorned from head to toe with a strand of yellow caution tape. In April, a coalition of Italian-American groups filed a federal lawsuit claiming the statue’s removal was illegal and demanding its return.
The Trump administration is helping lead the charge ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary next month. In March, the administration erected a Columbus statue near the White House, a replica of one that protesters sank in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in 2020. The replica was donated by the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian-American Organizations. “It’s the name of their city,” said Basil Russo, the group’s president, a former Democratic politician from Cleveland, about Columbus, Ohio. “What sense does that make?” In December, a stone highway marker honoring Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, suddenly appeared in Marion Square in Charleston, S.C., planted alongside a major thoroughfare in a hub of picnics, farmers markets and celebrations.