PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and a Starbucks that still hasn’t figured out how to spell “Ben,” the planet’s most famous panic-attack-on-legs is being recast as a geopolitical bellwether. Yes, Ben Stiller—once merely the human embodiment of an anxiety dream about airport security—has been upgraded by the United Nations to “Goodwill Ambassador for Refugees,” a title…
Querétaro vs. Monterrey: A Football Fixture That Explains Global Capitalism Better Than an MBA By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from the Guacamole Hangover If you squint at the Liga MX calendar just right, the clash between Querétaro and Monterrey looks like a polite regional derby. Zoom out, however, and it resembles a quarterly earnings call…
Lisa Aguilar and the Quiet Global Coup in Your Pocket By [REDACTED], Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker LISBON—On paper, Lisa Aguilar is a 33-year-old data ethicist from Hermosillo who now lives in a drafty flat overlooking the Tagus. On the ledger books of three sovereign-wealth funds, four intelligence agencies, and an offshore foundation whose name changes…
Tyler Warren and the Quiet Implosion of the American Dream, Viewed from Abroad By Our Man in the Departures Lounge Somewhere between the duty-free Toblerone and the gate where dreams go to die, the name Tyler Warren keeps popping up on departure boards from Dubai to Dublin. Not the man himself—his passport, like most things…
Devonta Smith: The Featherweight Who Punched the NFL’s Global Vanity Scale PARIS—From the Right Bank cafés where philosophers sip €9 espressos and argue whether anything truly matters, to the fluorescent-lit call centers of Mumbai where cricket tragics sneak illicit NFL RedZone tabs between IPL overs, the name Devonta Smith has become a quiet punchline in…
NFL Charlie Kirk and the Curious Case of the Global Gladiator If you type “NFL Charlie Kirk” into a search bar, the algorithm shrugs, coughs up a picture of the conservative podcaster in a suit, and then—because it’s a helpful little idiot—throws in a highlight reel of whichever linebacker happens to share the surname. Somewhere…
Oldbury: The Town That Accidentally Became a Global Metaphor By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large (currently self-medicating with vending-machine coffee) Oldbury—population 25,000, two Greggs, and a suspiciously large number of seagulls who look like they’ve read Nietzsche—sits eight miles west of Birmingham, England, a place the UN once described as “aggressively beige.” To the casual eye it…
Guayaquil, Ecuador – In a city where the air tastes of diesel and ambition, two football clubs whose combined trophy cabinets could prop up the national debt will meet on Sunday night to decide whether Barcelona Sporting Club or Club Sport Emelec get to keep the bragging rights until civilisation collapses or the next derby,…
Jimmy Johnson: How One Man’s Hair Helped the World Pretend the 1990s Never Ended By Our Man in the Hotel Bar, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic If you whisper “Jimmy Johnson” in a Floridian sports bar, the patrons will instinctively look up at the nearest flat-screen, half-expecting a Fox NFL Sunday graphic to explode into view….
PARIS—Somewhere between a Tokyo boardroom where executives now greet each other with “gronk-prime” and a Lagos cyber-café where the word is tattooed in Comic Sans on a bouncer’s neck, humanity has apparently decided that “gronk” is the new Esperanto. It isn’t listed in any dictionary older than last Thursday, yet it has already triggered trade…
Langston University: How a 125-Year-Old HBCU in Oklahoma Quietly Trains the Global South’s Next Overlords Langston, Oklahoma – Population 1,800, or roughly one Beijing subway car on a slow Tuesday. Yet here, amid cattle and dust devils, sits Langston University—an Historically Black College founded in 1897 when the British Empire still thought sunburn was a…
Andy Reid and the Last Empire: How One Overalls-Wearing Kansan Became the NFL’s Global Overlord By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—Somewhere on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, a philosophy student is arguing that the twenty-first century has no emperors. He should ask the barman streaming Chiefs games on his phone at 3 a.m. local time. Because while…
