Vox Sentences: Greece and Europe are in debt talks because time is a flat circle

The eternal recurrence of the Greek debt crisis

So many flags. So much Parthenon. So much symbolism. (Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)

• Greece and its European creditors (the European Commission, International Monetary Fund, and European Central Bank) are "a few days or even hours" from a debt deal, according to French president François Hollande.

  [NYT / Liz Alderman]

• The report comes shortly after Greece's leftist prime minister Alexis Tsipras and the creditors each presented their own plans for resolving the standoff.

  [NYT / Liz Alderman]

• Reportedly, the creditors demanded 3 to 4.5 percent of GDP primary surpluses this year and the next, while Greece offered 0.8 percent and 1.5 percent. The creditors responded with an offer of 1 percent and 2 percent.

  [Reuters / Foo Yun Chee and Karolina Tagaris]

• Before negotiations began, Tsipras took a defiant tone, arguing that Europe had to "accede to reality."

  [FT / Peter Spiegel and Kerin Hope]

• A €301.6 million IMF payment is due on Friday, and another €339.3 million IMF payment and a €1.6 billion Treasury bill payment is due the week after.

  [WSJ / Viktoria Dendrinou and Nektaria Stamouli]

• Greece could miss the payments without technically going into default, may be able to make some of them, and could also ask the IMF to push back payments to the end of the month. But missing any would be a bad sign.

  [AP / Elena Becatoros]

• Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: the creditors' austerity policies have failed. It's time for them to suck it up and save Greece.

  [Telegraph / Amrbose Evans-Pritchard]

Blazering saddles

Chuck Blazin' Blazer (Julian Finney/Getty Images; not his real middle name)

• Chuck Blazer, a former FIFA official turned FBI informant, confessed as part of his guilty plea to taking bribes related to the World Cup host selection process.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• The Cups in question are 1998, which France hosted after beating out Morocco, and 2010, where South Africa was selected.

  [ABC News / Ronald Blum]

• The indictment's here. It explicitly states that Blazer was bribed to help South Africa in 2010.

  [Document Cloud]

• Indictments for other officials last week mentioned that a Moroccan bid representative offered a payment in exchange for votes in the 1998 bid, but it's unclear if that's who bribed Blazer.

  [ABC News / Ronald Blum]

• Blazer's financial misdeeds are hard to exaggerate. He didn't pay taxes for a decade and kept a $6,000-a-month apartment for his cats in Trump Tower.

  [NY Daily News / Teri Thompson, Mary Papenfuss, Christian Red, Nathaniel Vinton]

• Blazer's plea is from 2013 but was sealed until the indictments of other soccer officials, which his cooperation helped secure, were announced.

  [Vox / Matthew Yglesias and Joseph Stromberg]

• Need yet more examples of FIFA corruption? Here you go.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

Like philanthropy, but for rich people

Joseph Williams

• Hedge fund billionaire John Paulson gave $400 million to Harvard's engineering school, which will be renamed in his honor.

  [Harvard Gazette]

• It's the biggest gift in the school's history.

  [NYT / Tamar Lewin]

• Paulson is worth $11.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He's giving away a paltry 3.5 percent of that.

  [Bloomberg Billionaires Index]

• This should go without saying, but Harvard overwhelmingly educates affluent, smart kids who don't need the help. It is already the richest university in the world. It doesn't need more money.

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• Neither does its engineering school, which has received large donations from such no-names as Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.

  [Harvard Gazette]

• If you want to give away money, give it to effective charities like the Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly, Deworm the World, and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.

  [GiveWell]

• I used to think that literally burning $400 million was worse than giving it to Harvard, but my friend Robert Wiblin convinced me that it's better, as it doesn't actively distort resource allocation like Harvard giving does.

• Malcolm Gladwell has a pretty righteous rant on this whole situation: "If billionaires don't step up, Harvard will soon be down to its last $30 billion."

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

Misc.

• Transabled people are born able-bodied but want to become disabled, usually by losing a limb. Should doctors try to cure them — or amputate?

  [National Post / Sarah Boesveld]

• This attack on perfectly acceptable email sign-offs is just silly. "Cheers" is not elitist; it is the proper default greeting.

  [Bloomberg / Rebecca Greenfield]

• In France, the government finances "perineal reeducation" for recent mothers, to get their vaginas back into shape. Really.

  [Slate / Claire Lundberg]

• At too many companies, "they're not a good fit" basically means "they're not white and male like the rest of us."

  [NYT / Lauren Rivera]

• The New Statesman asked 31 people what they still think is unsayable in today's society. Slavoj Zizek's response is … very Slavoj Zizek.

  [New Statesman / Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer]

Verbatim

• "Watching [Entourage] is like finding an ancient issue of a second-tier lad mag — not even Maxim, but Loaded or Nuts — in a friend’s guest bathroom. You wonder how it got there. You wonder how you got there."

  [NYT / A. O. Scott]

• "Perhaps the greatest threat from robots comes from the greatest weakness of humans: hatred and conflict between groups."

  [Brown / Bertram Malle]

• "I’d get a note like ‘It’s too wet’ or ‘The first couple chapters are good, but then the rest of the pages were so wet that they were completely illegible’ or ‘Did you dip this in Sprite? This smells like Sprite. Why would you dip your novel in Sprite?’ And instead of pushing back, I’d listen."

  [Clickhole]

• "Meryl Streep and I saved a girl from a large mugger in New York City."

  [Cher via Slate / Ruth Graham]

• "One of our oldest Judeo-Christian religious stories is, like a twisted, unholy version of Entourage, about a bro bond gone wrong."

  [Slate / Eric Thurm]

Song of the Day

• Deerhunter, "Nothing Ever Happened"

  [YouTube]

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