Last Champions of the Third Reich, by Noah Davis. SB Nation.
The story of the 1944 German national soccer championship game.
As Schön prepared to lead his club on to the field, Olympic Stadium -- a massive monolith that seated up to 100,000 screaming fans -- remained an important symbol, the only place left in the crumbling empire that could hold the match and provide a measure of symbolism for the country's leadership, linking it to a time when the future of the Third Reich seemed limitless. Hitler had opened the 1936 Games with a rousing speech in the hulking structure designed for the event by the architect brothers Werner and Walter March. Now, for propaganda purposes, the government needed to have the final played in the same place it had been held since 1936, for even as the iron grasp of the Third Reich loosened around Europe, Nazi ideals still held strong inside the stadium's 40-foot tall limestone walls. The grand setting allowed an alternative narrative to exist, a fantasy, one where things were not as bad as they seemed.
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Think Again: The BRICS, Antoine Van Agtmael. Foreign Policy.
On the financial influence of BRICS-an economic association between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa -- who collectively claim 40 percent of the world's population, and 20 percent of global GDP.
Until the beginning of the 1990s, Russia was still behind the Iron Curtain, China was recovering from the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square unrest, India remained a bureaucratic nightmare, and Brazil experienced bouts of hyperinflation combined with a decade of lost growth. These countries had largely muddled along outside the global market economy; their economic policies had often been nothing short of disastrous; and their stock markets were nonexistent, bureaucratic, or supervolatile. Each needed to experience deep, life-threatening crises that would catapult them onto a different road of development. Once they did, they tapped into their vast economic potential. Their total GDP of close to $14 trillion now nearly equals that of the United States and is even bigger on a purchasing power parity basis.
ROBERTO STUCKERT FILHO/AFP/GettyImages
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