Quinn Ewers, Quarterback, Accidental Geopolitical Pawn By the time the sun rises in Austin, it has already set on some other nation’s patience. In that daily rotation of hope and disappointment, a 20-year-old Texan with a haircut that cost more than the GDP of Tuvalu has become the latest proof that the world’s most powerful…
Terry Pegula: the American shale-billionaire who accidentally became a geopolitical punch-line. To most of the planet—those billions who manage to get through the day without obsessing over the Buffalo Bills—the name “Pegula” sounds like a discontinued Italian scooter. Yet the 72-year-old wild-catting tycoon from Carbondale, Pennsylvania, now sits at the unlikely intersection of American gridiron…
**The Accidental Diplomat: How a Virginia Congresswoman Became the World’s Accidental Weathervane** Abigail Spanberger, the CIA-turned-Congresswoman from Virginia, has become something of an international Rorschach test—everyone sees in her what they desperately want to believe about America’s future. To European diplomats sipping espresso in Brussels cafés, she’s proof that rational Americans still exist somewhere between…
The Buffalo Bills’ middle linebacker Terrel Bernard has, in the span of two seasons, upgraded from “Who?” to “Oh, that guy who makes quarterbacks reconsider their life choices.” While the NFL is hardly a United Nations subcommittee, Bernard’s rapid ascent carries a whiff of something bigger: the quiet globalization of American gladiator cosplay. Somewhere in…
Tyreek Hill’s Wife and the Global Cottage Industry of Watching Other People’s Marriages By the time the French news bulletin cut away from Macron’s pension reforms to show Keeta Vaccaro—now Mrs. Tyreek Hill—posing in a Miami garden that could house a small Balkan village, the message was already ricocheting across five continents: somebody extremely fast…
Raja Jackson, the 27-year-old Ghanaian-British coder who accidentally broke the global carbon-credit market last Tuesday, has become the first person to owe more CO₂ than ExxonMobil—without ever owning a refinery. While regulators on three continents scramble to decide whether to jail him, canonize him, or simply let him pay it off in Bitcoin, the rest…
A’ja Wilson and the Quiet Art of Global Domination From the vantage point of a crumbling press box in Belgrade—where the Wi-Fi wheezes like a chain-smoker and the coffee tastes of geopolitical betrayal—the name A’ja Wilson keeps pinging across continents with the same calm inevitability as death and push-notification taxes. While the rest of us…
WNBA Playoff Schedule: The World Watches as Tall Women Remind Us That Time Zones Still Exist By Li Wei, International Desk The WNBA playoffs have arrived, which means roughly 12 time zones are now engaged in the delicate art of pretending to care about women’s professional basketball at 3 a.m. local time. From Manila sports…
**The Glorious Mundanity of Ordinary People: A Global Tragedy in 7 Billion Acts** Somewhere between the self-congratulatory TED talks and the latest apocalyptic climate report, we’ve forgotten to notice the world’s most reliable performers: ordinary people. You know the ones—those unfortunate souls who can’t trend on Twitter because they’re too busy keeping civilization from collapsing…
**Global Immunity: How the CDC’s Needlework Quietly Holds the Planet Together** The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, headquartered in a glass-and-steel fortress in Atlanta, is the world’s most unlikely superhero—no cape, just a clipboard and a fridge full of chilled vials. While other nations fund aircraft carriers or Olympic stadiums, the United States has…
Tucson Weather: A Sonoran Punchline to the Planet’s Existential Joke By Diego S. Vargas, International Desk, Dave’s Locker TUCSON—Somewhere between a sun-bleached Chuck E. Cheese and a climate-science PowerPoint, Tucson, Arizona, is busy rehearsing tomorrow’s weather forecast: 104°F, zero percent chance of rain, and a UV index that could tan a vampire through three layers…
Firenze, Italy – In a world where a misplaced tweet can trigger a currency crisis and a quarterback’s birthplace can be debated by pundits from Lagos to Lima, the question “Where is Josh Allen from?” lands with the geopolitical heft of a UN Security Council resolution—albeit one sponsored by Buffalo Wild Wings. Allow me, dear…
