Super Bowl LIX landed in New Orleans last night like a gaudy asteroid, trailing 200 million television viewers, a month-long security lockdown, and enough corporate cash to refinance a medium-sized republic. From São Paulo flats to Mumbai bars, humans who will never see an American football in person stayed up past decency to watch grown…
Buffalo, New York – The moment Damar Hamlin’s torso hit the turf at Highmark Stadium, the world’s collective attention dropped faster than the Dow on a Federal Reserve tantrum. From Lagos to Lisbon, smartphones pinged with push alerts like a synchronized fire drill, proving once again that nothing unites humanity quite like televised cardiac arrest….
**The World Watches America Wrestle Itself: Super Bowl LIX as Global Spectacle and Warning** While glaciers melt and supply chains crumble, approximately one-third of humanity will pause this Sunday to watch grown millionaires in colored spandex attempt territorial conquest over an oblong leather ball. Super Bowl LIX—America’s annual tribute to excess, consumerism, and ritualized violence—will…
Peyton Manning’s Kids and the Quiet Globalization of the American Quarterback Gene Pool By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between a Munich Beer Hall and the Delhi Duty-Free In the pandemic’s bleary aftermath, the planet’s attention-starved continents have found one low-stakes consensus: staring at other people’s children. Enter Marshall, Mosley, and the inexplicably vowel-deprived “B” (short for…
Matt Prater: The Man Who Kicks Civilization’s Existential Dread Through Uprights By the time most Europeans are debating whether 4 p.m. is too early for a second espresso, Matt Prater has already launched a football—oval, not spherical, the shape of America’s neuroses—far enough to make GPS satellites recalibrate. 64 yards, a record, give or take…
Marshall Manning – the very name sounds like a Pentagon program that was quietly cancelled once the invoices hit eight figures. Yet in the past 72 hours this previously un-Googleable American teenager has become the planet’s most unlikely Rorschach test. From Lagos trading floors to Seoul crypto cafés, everyone is projecting something onto the kid…
The Geopolitics of Glitter: Madison Square Garden as Planet Earth’s Loudest Embassy By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere above Section 412, nursing a US$17 bottle of water From the outside, Madison Square Garden looks like a brick-and-mortar shrug at the skyscraper orgy surrounding it—an unimpressive box that swallowed a city block and never…
Lenny Kravitz Is Still Wearing That Scarf, and the Planet Has Noticed From Montreux to Montevideo, the man once photographed exiting a Parisian hotel in eleven different shades of leather has become a low-grade global barometer—equal parts fashion Rorschach test and sonic nostalgia export. Thirty-five years after “Let Love Rule” tried (and failed) to) topple…
Lady Gaga’s World Tour: A Glitter-Soaked Pilgrimage Through the End Times by Dave’s Locker International Desk Rome, May 2024 – While the Colosseum’s stone arches quietly molder under a heat dome that would make Caligula blush, 65,000 Little Monsters in LED devil horns are screaming the bridge to “Bad Romance” at a pitch that could…
The Ballad of Conan Gray, or How a Texan Teen Became the Planet’s Shared Diary By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent In the same week that the Arctic Council admitted it can no longer find the Arctic and the IMF downgraded global growth to “eh, whatever,” Conan Lee Gray—age twenty-five going on eternal adolescence—released “Found Heaven,”…
Jim Kelly, the Buffalo Bills legend who once quarterbacked four consecutive Super Bowl defeats—surely the most heroic act of sustained disappointment in modern sport—died this week at 63. The world, hunched over its collective smartphone, paused for roughly the time it takes to scroll past a funeral tweet, then resumed doom-scrolling. Yet for those old…
Highmark Stadium: Where the World’s Problems Take a Commercial Break By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent, Nursing a Warm Beer in Orchard Park Somewhere between the rusting hulk of Buffalo’s old steel mills and the maple-lined cul-de-sacs where snowblowers outnumber children, Highmark Stadium rises like a concrete confession: we may not have fixed climate change, but…
