USC 42, Minnesota 25: A Collateral Scorecard for the Age of Collapse From the Bureau of Global Schadenfreude, Los Angeles LOS ANGELES—As dawn broke over the Pacific, the Southern California sun did its usual impression of a nuclear flashbulb, illuminating a stadium built on tectonic denial and student-loan IOUs. Inside, the USC Trojans treated the…
Karen Carney and the Global Theatre of Outrage: How a 20-Second Clip Became a UN Security Council Briefing By the time the clip reached the Mongolian steppes, it had already been subtitled in Khalkha Cyrillic, autotuned into a K-pop remix in Seoul, and weaponised by a Bolivian cryptocurrency influencer who blamed Carney for the price…
A Dispatch from the Heartland’s Coliseum: How Indiana University’s Football Calendar Has Become the Planet’s Morality Play By Dave’s Far-Flung Correspondent, filing from a press box that smells faintly of popcorn and existential dread. BLOOMINGTON, Indiana—Somewhere between the soy-fields and the vape shops, the 2024 Indiana University football schedule has been unfurled like a medieval…
The Curious Case of Trinidad Chambliss and the Geopolitics of a Name By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic Somewhere between a Port-of-Spain rum shack and a Pentagon sub-basement, the name “Trinidad Chambliss” began popping up on encrypted Slacks, FSB burn-phones, and—most damning of all—LinkedIn trend alerts. To the average doom-scroller, it sounded like a…
Tom Skinner, the Man Who Accidentally United the Planet (and Still Owes €4.50 in International Parking Fines) By the time the sun rose over Reykjavík last Tuesday, Tom Skinner had already been trending in seventeen languages for six hours. Not bad for a 38-year-old civil servant from Norwich whose only previous brush with global fame…
Inter Miami 4 – 0 Toronto FC, the scoreboard at Chase Stadium declared, as if the universe itself had decided that humility was best administered in bulk. From Buenos Aires boardrooms to Lagos betting kiosks, the result scrolled across screens with the quiet inevitability of a tax bill. Messi—now 37, hairline receding faster than his…
The Shortstop Who Shrunk the World: How Bobby Shantz Accidentally Invented Global Soft Power PARIS—In the smoky back room of a brasserie off Rue de Lappe, an aging French sabermetrician once told me that international relations really began the day a 5’6” Philadelphian named Bobby Shantz learned how to throw a curveball that bent like…
By rights, the Buffalo Sabres should be a footnote—an iced-over curiosity from a Rust Belt city whose best days, like its steel mills, froze sometime around 1980. Yet here we are, in a year when glaciers sulk at their own funerals and half of Europe nurses a gas-price ulcer, still talking about a hockey club…
NASHVILLE—Somewhere between the third replay of a helmet-to-helmet collision and the slow-motion montage of a marching band spelling “VOLS” with the precision of a NATO formation, it occurred to me that a football game between the University of Tennessee and Mississippi State is less a regional pastime and more a planetary temperature check. While half…
From the Caspian Sea to the Carpathians, geopoliticians still argue over pipelines and pacts, but on the far side of a flickering smartphone in Ulan Bator, a 19-year-old scrolls past grainy clips of Vicky Pattison hurling a prosecco flute in a Newcastle taxi and whispers, “icon.” Somewhere in that absurd transaction lies the true balance…
George Clark Strictly and the Global Choreography of Ambition By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic LONDON—When the BBC announced that George Clark—yes, that George Clark, the man whose Wikipedia page is still fighting off an edit war over whether he’s a “visionary dance auteur” or “the bloke who once dropped…
Jazz Chisholm, the Bahamian-born infielder now doing his best impersonation of a human highlight reel for the New York Yankees, has quietly become the Caribbean’s most effective cultural export since rum and existential dread. While diplomats argue over tariffs and TikTok dances, Chisholm has smuggled a slice of Nassau into every living room from Tokyo…
