Tonight, in a windowless studio somewhere between a tax haven and a tax headache, six plastic balls tumbled out of a glorified popcorn machine and rewrote destinies from Lagos to Ljubljana. The numbers—3, 17, 24, 33, 41, with a “bonus” 7 that looked suspiciously like an afterthought—have already been translated into 47 languages, meme-ified in…
Igor Jesus, the 23-year-old Brazilian striker now plying his trade at Sporting CP, is not the messiah of global football—he’s just another very expensive boy with good calves. Yet in a world where a misplaced pass can tank a cryptocurrency and a transfer fee can outstrip the GDP of Tuvalu, Igor’s €10 million price tag…
James Comey: The Man Who Made Bureaucracy a Global Spectator Sport By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Watching the World Burn PARIS—In the grand tradition of international intrigue, few things are as reliably entertaining as watching a tall, earnest American ex-FBI director wander the planet like a remorseful giraffe, signing books and explaining—again—why he…
Ligue 1: The French Farce That Keeps the Planet Spinning By A. Correspondent Who Has Slept in Too Many Airport Lounges PARIS—On any given weekend, while glaciers calve and trade ministers slap new tariffs on each other, twenty French football clubs perform the same ritual: they jog onto perfectly manicured pitches to chase a sphere…
Ryder Cup Opening Ceremony: A Pageant of Flags, Fortune, and Thinly-Veiled National Anxiety by our correspondent in Marco Simone, nursing a Campari in the media tent The Ryder Cup opening ceremony has always been golf’s answer to Eurovision: flags the size of small nations, anthems belted out by choirs that sound like they’ve been told…
The Washington Skyline Gets a New Hole and the World Winces in Recognition By the time the first shaky TikTok reached Buenos Aires, the Potomac had already swallowed whatever remained of American Airlines 5342. Somewhere between Reagan National and the river’s muddy applause, the mid-air pirouette with a Black Hawk helicopter turned the U.S. capital…
Real Sociedad vs Mallorca: A Microscopic War on the Edge of the Known Universe By Our Man in San Sebastián, Still Recovering from Last Night’s Pintxo Moral Hangover In the grand, indifferent sweep of the cosmos, two football clubs from Spain’s northern and Balearic peripheries will collide tonight on a patch of grass so exquisitely…
The view from the Radisson Blu Plaza’s 34th-floor bar is, to be polite, unnervingly tidy: a Lego diorama of fjords, forests and social democracy, all lit by the low-wattage glow of collective guilt about being too comfortable. Oslo—population smaller than a Shanghai rush-hour platform—has managed to turn itself into a global Rorschach test. The rest…
SÃO PAULO—Somewhere between the papaya-colored favela lights and the 24-hour sushi robots, I found myself asking an algorithm for “grocery near me.” The phone, ever the obedient courtier, spat back a map studded with red pins: a Carrefour the size of Liechtenstein, a Korean mom-and-pop that doubles as a cryptocurrency exchange, and, for the romantics,…
The word “brave” used to come with a body count. Leonidas at Thermopylae, Harriet Tubman on the Underground Railroad, the anonymous soul who first looked at a blue-ringed octopus and thought, “I wonder how that tastes.” Today, the term is more likely to describe a middle-manager who posts a selfie from his standing desk captioned…
The Basque Country and the Balearics—two Spanish regions that have spent centuries perfecting the art of polite separatism—met again on the pitch last night, and the world barely blinked. Real Sociedad versus RCD Mallorca: a fixture that sounds like the opening line of a shaggy-dog joke about two autonomous communities walking into a bar. Yet…
PARIS — Let us now praise famous backhands. Serena Williams, the only American export more durable than Boeing jets and twice as likely to leave smoking craters in her wake, has ostensibly exited the arena. The official line is “evolving away from tennis,” a euphemism so Silicon-Valley it practically comes with stock options and a…
