The Times’ coverage of the World Cup is full of too many notable passages to list, but here’s a typical excellent from Rory Smith, regarding Portugal’s often underwhelming play: “For many years the country has had enough individual talent to rival any team in the world and yet under the auspices of Fernando Santos it has been diligent, unashamed and in many ways successfully stern, as if a group of the best artists in the world had been brought together and asked to wallpaper a bedroom.” (Thanks to John Harris of Flat Rock, NC, and Jana Moore of Philadelphia, among others, for their nominations.)
Andrew Das, who also covered the World Cup for The Times, described a match in which Brazil grew frustrated and “turned to some of football’s darker arts: diving and flopping, shirt pulling and shoving, and appealing to the referee for justice.” None of it worked. Croatia had brought a vise to a gunfight and on Friday for more than two long hours it calmly and methodically squeezed the life and joy out of Brazil. (Bob Howells, Culver City, California, and Rebecca Bosiljevac, Tacoma, Washington, among others)
Continuing with The Times, AO Scott had priceless nuggets in three recent movie reviews.
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From a main character “White Noise,” he wrote, “In the campus lunchroom, he sits at bull sessions with colleagues and breathes in fits of competitive explanation.” (Phillip Hinrichs, Dayton, Ohio)
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Visitors to the house of the obese hermit at the center of “The Whale” include “a bird that occasionally pops up outside Charlie’s window. I am not an ornithologist, but my guide identifies it as a common Western metaphor.” (Elise Marton, Princeton, NJ, and Ruth Botwinik, Manhattan, among many others)
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And the message of “Empire of Light” is “tousled and soft, like a Milk Dud at the bottom of the box, and the movie chews on it for a while.” (Jameson Riser, Anacortes, Wash., and Zanthe Taylor, Brooklyn, NY, among others)
And Bret Stephens has set the course of our country: “Pretty depressing how American culture has descended from ‘My Dinner With Andre’ to that dinner with Kanye.” (Keith Bernard, Charlotte, NC and Maura Kealey, San Francisco, among others)
A unsigned article in The Economist claimed: “Trying to learn about sex from Hollywood is like looking to James Bond for tips on a career as a British civil servant.” (Ebba Akerman, Stockholm)
In New York magazine, Justin Davidson investigated the “dense white clump of the Greek Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas,” designed by famed architect Santiago Calatrava and located adjacent to One World Trade at the site of the September 11 terrorist attack in lower Manhattan: “Here, in a place named for commerce, destroyed by violence, rebuilt in memory and surrounded by new monsters of capitalism, this small, flickering candle of a building has an outsized moral role.(Chris Kers, Pittsburgh)
In The New York Review of Books, Stacy Schiff wrote: “The novelist rings the doorbell and encourages you; the essayist invites himself.” (Shoshana Halle, Walnut Creek, California)
Finally, while I usually don’t window shop quotes in articles, contrary to the author of the article’s own words, I’m making an exception this week because so many of you nominated Republican adviser Dan McLagan’s description of Herschel Walker’s beleaguered candidacy for the Senate, as quoted by Greg Bluestein in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “Herschel was like a plane crash into a train wreck that rolled into a dumpster on fire. And an orphanage. Then an animal shelter. You had to kind of see it peering through one eye between your fingers. (Pam Peniston, San Francisco, and Dawn Moss, Lawrenceville, Georgia, among many others)