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Euro 2024 hosts Germany, freed from weight of expectation, are ready to fly

Euro 2024 hosts Germany have not won a knockout game in eight years. But wins over France and Netherlands show they are ready to enjoy the ride.

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FRANKFURT, Germany -- The odd thing about watching Germany less than three months from the 2024 European Championship, their first major event on home soil since the 2006 World Cup, is the blasé vibe you get from fans, players and coach Julian Nagelsmann.

The 45,000 fans in attendance for Tuesday's 2-1 friendly win against Netherlands certainly made a racket, but in a corporate crowd/stadium DJ/pass-the-beer sort of way. They didn't despair when Joey Veerman put the visitors ahead after just four minutes, nor did they lose their minds when Maxi Mittelstadt -- whose errant backpass led to Germany going a goal down -- wiped the slate clean with a surgical strike into the top corner a few minutes later.

In fact, their reaction was in line with the music they play after each German goal, chosen as the result of a recent fan-led campaign: a catchy version of Peter Schilling's "Major Tom" which itself was picked up from this Adidas ad. (Me? I prefer this one from "Breaking Bad.")

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The tune, of course, is about an astronaut whose spaceship loses contact with ground control back on Earth and he drifts off into space. While everyone back home mourns, he's actually content ("floating weightless, coming home") as he loosens the Earthly shackles and drifts away into the darkness (or maybe the light; we don't get to find out.)

Were this a ninth-grade English paper, the metaphor with Nagelsmann's German national team adventure would be almost too obvious. Germany -- with their four World Cups and three European crowns and Gary Lineker's famous declaration that "football is a simple game; 22 players chase a ball for 90 minutes and in the end Germans always win" -- may be the ultimate aristocrats of the European game. But in June, it will be eight years since they last won a knockout game in a major tournament. They're under no illusions about their prospects; confidence is at a low ebb. So why not stop worrying, keep it simple and enjoy the ride for as long as it lasts?

That seemed to be Nagelsmann's thinking heading into this international break. Unlike the last two outings -- defeats at home to Turkey and away to Austria -- there were no fancy schemes or out-of-the-box brain waves like Kai Havertz at left-back. Instead, he kept things as simple and straightforward as he could with a tidy 4-2-3-1 system that generally fielded most players in the roles they fill with their clubs. And he let them play, come what may.

With hindsight, it makes sense. Nagelsmann, 36, is the former boy wonder of German football, a guy who got his first senior Bundesliga gig at the age of 28 and went on to coach both RB Leipzig and Bayern Munich. The latter signed him at great expense and fired him a year ago at even greater expense amid grumbling that, for all his brilliance, he was arrogant and immature. That may or may not be true, but the perception of it is true and Nagelsmann knows this.

He took the Germany job in September as a de facto caretaker until after the Euros. Whatever ambitions he had of making his mark on the side via tactics, patterns of play and philosophy appeared to go out the window with those defeats back in November, possibly because he realized what he likely already suspected: that a national-team coach simply doesn't have the time to effect meaningful change. Not when he only gets a couple training sessions with his squad every couple months.

It's not just the off-the-shelf 4-2-3-1 that's a testament to this. It's also his decision to recall 34-year-old Toni Kroos, three years after his international retirement. The Real Madrid midfielder lined up just behind captain Ilkay Gündogan, 33, giving Germany a central axis long on experience and technical ability but inevitably short on legs and intensity. Which is why, to complete his midfield trio, he turned to a guy like Robert Andrich, who looks like (and often plays like) the sort of bouncer you might see at a warehouse rave. Andrich, 29, made his debut in Saturday's 2-0 away win over France, and he does the blue-collar grunt work on behalf of Gündogan and Kroos.

It's a very un-Nagelsmann setup and you can't imagine him doing this at club level by choice. But that's the thing about international football: choice is limited. And in the international game being the dogmatic, pig-headed "vision guy" is often the wrong decision. Better to be the pragmatic man-manager, especially when everyone knows you won't be around for long.

This doesn't mean that Nagelsmann wasn't assertive. He cast a pretty wide net with his first squad (which lost to Austria and Turkey) and then jettisoned 11 of those 27 for the more recent group, who beat France and the Dutch. Nor did he have any qualms about playing the same XI in both games, which is rather unusual since most national team coaches -- especially when they've had only two games in charge and there's a major tournament coming up -- like to rotate so they can get a good look at their resources and avoid annoying clubs who want to keep their guys fresh for the stretch run.

It's especially notable when you consider the lineup included debutants like Andrich and Mittelstadt. Nagelsmann's critics accuse him of being entitled and spoiled (and, to be fair, he spent his career at clubs with plenty of resources) but this felt like a willingness to look beyond the big names and plumb the depths of the plebs (so to speak.) Andrich's Bayer Leverkusen may be running away with the Bundesliga, but he is far from an automatic choice this season, having started 16 of their 26 league games on the bench. It's a similar story with the 27-year-old Mittelstadt. Stuttgart are flying high in third place, but he too cracked the starting lineup in fewer than two-thirds of their games and was relegated last year at Hertha Berlin.

But it's a pragmatic, go-with-the-flow assertiveness. The tactics are textbook. You play possession -- rather than some complicated, sophisticated press -- because you have Kroos, Gündogan and Joshua Kimmich when he steps into midfield. You tuck your wingers -- Florian Wirtz and Jamal Musiala -- inside because they're dribblers, that's their natural tendency and they excel at slipping through balls for your forward.

Don't let the designed play that led to Wirtz's goal inside of seven seconds against France fool you, either. Yes, it was planned, and Nagelsmann gave the credit to his assistant Mads Buttgereit, saying it was "excellent prepared." But let's not kid ourselves; a "designed play" that ends with a shot from 30 yards out isn't really a game plan. It's a scratch card and nothing more -- two bucks to win a million.

Nagelsmann, you assume, isn't going to get carried away by a couple of friendlies. France were thoroughly outplayed, especially in the second half, but it's not the first time we've seen it happen with a Didier Deschamps side. Against a far more technically limited Dutch team that sat deep and clogged space, Germany bossed possession and deserved the win, albeit without dominating and with more than a couple serious defensive lapses. Still, it's two credible wins in five days and that hasn't happened since before the pandemic.

Germany may be stuck with a suboptimal blend of young (Wirtz, Musiala) old (Kroos, Gündogan, Manuel Neuer when he returns, and he always does,) and unsung (Andrich, Mittelstadt), but they're ready to enjoy the ride. And if they stay as blasé as they have been -- and treat a Euro run as gravy -- they may just get their wish and float weightlessly deep into the competition and, eventually, come home to their rightful place in the game's pecking order.
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Connections, the most fun (and sometimes frustrating) game on the internet

Why the NYT’s Connections, a really great word game makes you feel smart and also stupid.

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What do the words “loo,” “condo,” “haw,” “hero” have in common? Unless you’re extremely into ornithology, it’s impressive if you were able to pick out the fact that if you added another letter to each of them, you’d spell the name of a bird. But if you’re a regular player of the New York Times game Connections, these four words have another significance: They make up one of the puzzle’s most notoriously tricky categories of all time.

Connections — an often frustrating but integral addition to a morning routine that might also include the Times’s daily crossword, Wordle, and Spelling Bee, or offshoots like the geography quiz Worldle and the GDP guesser Tradle — debuted last summer. Over the past nine months, it’s become the second-most played game at the Times, after Wordle, but it’s captured social media in a way that a simple five-letter word-of-the-day puzzle never could.

Connections is played like so: There is a four-by-four grid, and each box has a word in it. Your job is to group them into sets of four that make sense on levels that go from easy (say, synonyms or simply defined categories) to difficult (the bird one). When submitted, the easiest group will show up in yellow, the second-easiest in green, the second-hardest in blue, and the hardest in purple.

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You can see how this might make people feel angry or, as one woman posted on TikTok, like she’s “immediately ready to fight” the game’s editor. That’s because Connections, even more so than crosswords, whose difficulty ratings are usually made clear from the outset, or Wordle, which relies heavily on luck, has the unique ability to make people feel either really, really smart or really, really stupid.

In a post titled “Why NYT’s Connections makes you feel bad,” game designer Raph Koster suggests Connections is “fundamentally elitist” because it requires players to have a broad education to find possible categories, and then punishes them for making guesses (players have only four tries before they fail the game). Some puzzles may be easier for certain folks — in order to know that “emerald,” “radiant,” “princess,” and “baguette” go together, you’ve got to have some knowledge of jewelry — and be extra difficult for those frustrated by potential overlap.

One recent puzzle included five answers that could work for the yellow (easiest) category, “seen at a sports stadium”: “astroturf,” “jumbotron,” “scoreboard,” “skybox,” and “kisscam.” Only the last one works for the purple (hardest) one, which was “starting with rock bands.” But there’s no way to tell whether a puzzle will be easy or hard until you’re playing it — thereby leading to the kind of near-conspiratorial thinking and Connections shaming on Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok. Complaining on Twitter about how hard that day’s Connections was is a risk in itself, and it more often than not ends with other people smugly commenting how “maybe word games aren’t for you” and posting memes that tell the poster to “take your sensitive ass back to Wordle!” They do have a point, however: The point of doing puzzles is to feel puzzled.

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According to Everdeen Mason, the editorial director of the Times’s Games section, these theories about Connections suddenly “getting harder” based on social media discourse are both hilarious and wrong — mostly. “We see everything, and we think pretty much all of it is funny,” she says of the people livestreaming their games and teasing each other over their results. “Connections in particular has felt really special, in part because of TikTok. I don’t know that any of our other games have really taken off in the same way. The game itself is pretty witty, and people can feel that and want to riff on it. It just makes it really memeable.”

The idea that the Connections editor, Wyna Liu, changes the difficulty in response to social chatter is untrue — games are programmed about a month in advance — with the exception of one period last October, before the Connections team started using official testers. Testers, who are paid and selected by Games staff, are used for all Times games to help look out for potentially incorrect or offensive puzzles, or grids where there could be multiple correct solves. “There were a couple of weeks where the solve rates were really low, and we were like, ‘We need to do something about this.’”

“It’s pretty much always the purple category that people are crankiest about,” Mason says. She points to the bird category and another purple set in February made of words beginning with instruments (“bassinet,” “cellophane,” “harpoon,” “organism”) as particularly frustrating for solvers. Of course, the frustration is part of the fun, and it’s why Connections was an immediate hit from its 90-day beta release last summer. Its full release, however, caused a small controversy because of its similarities to the British quiz show Only Connect, which also asks contestants to group a grid of 16 words into four sets of four. The game’s host, Victoria Coren, responded to the launch of Connections on Twitter, asking, “Do you know this has been a TV show in the UK since 2008?! It’s so similar I guess you must do?” The Times has denied copying the format.

Connections is also, crucially, much easier to solve than Only Connect’s grids, and audiences got obsessed quickly. It’s a similar story to Wordle, which debuted in 2021 and went viral in 2022, its characteristic colored block emojis making for the perfect shareable signature. More than that, Wordle avoids a common problem with games — playing too much too quickly and burning out — by only releasing a single game per day, which is also the model Connections and Spelling Bee use. None of these games has the power to take over your whole life in the way that, say, a super engrossing new video game might. And even though you’re technically only in competition with yourself, they’re fundamentally social games: Grids and scores are easily shareable online and make for solid conversation starters with pretty much anyone.

Liu has responded to the conversations on TikTok by posting her tips on how to play. Most importantly, she says, don’t guess unless you’re pretty sure you have a category. Second, look for words that don’t belong anywhere else. Last, think flexibly — “my job here is to trick you,” she says.

Games have been a hugely successful bet for the Times. The company told Axios that its puzzles, which were played more than 8 billion times in 2023 (including 2.3 billion Connections successes), have contributed to subscriber growth in a tough media market. Up next: a word search called Strands that’s currently in beta mode. Judging from the discourse it’s already sparked online, it seems to be yet another puzzle for solvers to argue about in comments sections and Reddit threads. In other words, a hit.

Though the New York Times debuted and then shuttered the math game Digits last year, something about word games seems to stick. “It’s our main medium of communication,” Mason says. “They make people feel engaged and intelligent, but they’re also accessible. You can take something away: a new vocab word, a new perspective, new connections between things.” Personally, I’ll never look at the word “kisscam” in the same way again.

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Baltimore’s bridge collapse is global shipping’s smallest problem

From drought in the Panama Canal to the Houthis in the Suez to pirates off Somalia, we’re all paying the price.

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Baltimore woke up yesterday to horrific images of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsing into the harbor after the cargo ship Dali lost power and collided with a support column.

It’s a horrible tragedy — six construction workers who were on the bridge at the time are missing and presumed dead — and one that will likely take at least several billion dollars to repair.

In a small bright spot, the macroeconomic impact will likely be limited. (While Baltimore is the US’s 17th largest port and there will be some costs and delays, particularly around automobiles and coal, other ports will quickly handle rerouted container ships.)

There is a reason, however, that economic concerns immediately spiked: The global shipping industry is having a bit of a rough time right now.

International shipping traffic is being choked at two separate, vital points — the Panama Canal in the Western hemisphere and the Suez Canal in the Eastern — which combined account for more than half of the container shipping that links Asia and North America.

And as awful as this Baltimore incident was, it was, by all accounts, a rogue accident. The root causes of these other disruptions, though? They’re not quite as easily fixed.

Oh, plus pirates are back.

Global shipping’s current problems, briefly explained

The Baltimore incident encapsulates one thing really well: just how globalized the shipping industry is. The Dali was a Singapore-flagged ship, with an all Indian-nationality crew, operated by the Danish company Maersk and on its way to Sri Lanka. (Thankfully, there were no injuries reported among the crew of the ship.)

This degree of interconnectedness — and how fragile it all is — probably feels familiar by now. Remember the wide swath of consumer goods that were subjected to back orders and shortages in 2021 as the global supply chain fell victim to a series of interconnected problems, including (but definitely not limited to) issues with container ships and ports?

Or, more hilariously, remember the delays (and memes) the ship Ever Given spawned when it got stuck in the Suez Canal?

This year is shaping up to be another difficult one for global shipping.

Low water levels in Panama — the result of a prolonged drought that began in early 2023 — forced canal officials late last year to cut the number of ships that pass through each day from the normal 38 to just 24. That’s left some ships stranded for more than two weeks, and others taking costly roundabout routes; major shipping companies are even switching some freight to railroad “land bridges” across parts of the country.

And in the Red Sea, the Houthis, a Yemen-based rebel group that controls much of the country’s north, have been waging an increasingly serious campaign of attacks against shipping, purportedly in protest of Israel’s war in Gaza. Ships are rerouting here, too, this time around the Horn of Africa, or facing the risk at added cost. At the start of this month, the Houthis sank a ship. And while the group is reportedly allowing safe passage to some ships — those affiliated with Russia and China — that’s not necessarily a foolproof guarantee.

Between the two, prices for freight containers from Asia to the US have doubled over the last six months.

Low water levels outside the Miraflores locks of the Panama Canal near Panama City, Panama, last November.
Walter Hurtado/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Can’t we fix this?

It would be tempting to look at both of these issues and think, “Things will get better soon.”

And in some ways, they will. “The industry is going to find medium- to short-term solutions against these particular obstacles,” Nikos Nomikos, a professor of shipping finance and risk management at Bayes Business School in London, told me.

Take the Panama Canal problem: The cuts are, canal officials repeatedly say, a responsible adaptation to a particularly bad year. Droughts have happened before, and the weather phenomenon El Niño is exacerbating droughts throughout the Americas, with devastating consequences.

But this isn’t just a bad year. There are systemic issues at play with no quick answers. Climate change is worsening extreme weather events around the world, including droughts.

And that’s running up against another competing need. As Dulcidio De La Guardia, a director at the Morgan & Morgan Group in Panama, told the Latin American Advisor in February, “The lakes that provide water to the Canal are the same ones used to supply drinking water to the major cities of the country.”

“And water consumption has increased more rapidly than forecasted due to population growth, and poor management, waste, inefficiencies and corruption at the state-owned water company,” he said. There are potential solutions, but no easy or immediate ones.

And then in the Red Sea: While the Houthis might temporarily halt or reduce their attacks if a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas comes through, there’s no guarantee that they’ll stop altogether.

That’s because, as one Yemeni analyst told my colleague Josh Keating, the attacks serve a lot of the group’s other aims, allowing them to “disrupt economic activity, extract political concessions, and bolster their standing.” Having achieved that, they show no signs of backing down, even in the face of Western military strikes.

Moreover, this is part of a broader trend of increased geopolitical instability, all of which can impact — and increasingly is impacting — global shipping. See also: Russia blocking Ukrainian grain from transiting the Black Sea at times during that war, fears about how a war over Taiwan will affect the global economy, and more.

What’s happening in the Red Sea, in other words, is symptomatic of something fundamental.

The “principle of freedom of navigation is being challenged here,” Rahul Kapoor, the head of shipping analytics and research at S&P Global Commodity Insights, told Bloomberg in December about the Houthis’ attacks.

I’m not trying to be alarmist. Global shipping is a “resilient industry,” Nomikos told me.

But countries’ militaries and international shipping companies alike are thinking and planning for more maritime disruptions.

Customers, unfortunately, should too.

Any disruption’s net result “will be an increase in the freight cost, either because you have more fuel consumption and longer transit times, or because you require a premium to compensate you for the risks that you face,” Nomikos said.

This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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