EDWARD GAUVIN

My last two pieces for the venerable Gray Lady:

• Olivier Guez’s meditation on the origins of soccer as a national sport: “The Artful Dodgers of Brazil”

“As time passed, a vanguard of talented mixed-race players began gaining acceptance to some teams; to minimize racist insults and physical abuse from opponents and spectators in 1914, Carlos Alberto of Fluminense is said to have lightened his face by daubing it with rice powder. Others, like the legendary Arthur Friedenreich in the first third of the 20th century, would smooth their hair down with Brilliantine.”

• Sylvain Cypel’s cautionary lament on the rise of the French far right: “The French Resistance Would Weep”

“For decades in France, that Resistance victory — the universalist spirit of progress and the Enlightenment triumphing over the herd-like, xenophobic spirit of Vichy — put everyone who had collaborated with Nazism outside the legitimate political and moral field. And even though the Resistance was far less united than had been imagined during the war, it had been united enough to reach agreement in March 1944 on a farsighted program of national reconstruction as the principal war aim.”