Tyler Glasnow, 6’8″ of angular American anxiety, just cashed in on a five-year, $136.5 million ticket to Los Angeles, a city that already treats apocalypse as seasonal décor. The transaction ricocheted from the Dodgers’ front office to betting apps in Seoul, from sabermetric Slack channels in London to taverns in Caracas where fans track U.S….
From the banks of the Tiber to the neon canyons of Tokyo, political dynasties have always been the world’s longest-running soap opera—equal parts Shakespeare and telenovela, with product placement by defense contractors. Enter Lara Trump, née Yunaska, who has improbably upgraded from North Carolina wedding caterer to potential U.S. Senate candidate and co-chair of the…
Jacobo Morales, the Puerto Rican filmmaker who has spent half a century reminding the world that small islands can still have big existential crises, turns 92 this year—an age at which most auteurs are content to let their Oscars gather dust while younger generations misquote them on TikTok. Yet Morales persists, a Caribbean Beckett in…
**The War Nobody Wanted: Wyoming vs Colorado and the End of American Innocence** While the rest of the planet grapples with actual problems—climate change, nuclear proliferation, the slow death of democracy—America has gifted the world its most pressing conflict yet: a legal cage match between two rectangular states that most foreigners couldn’t locate on a…
The Astros Score and the Collapse of Civilization: A Dispatch from the End of Days By the time you read this, the Houston Astros will have either won or lost another baseball game, and the numerical residue of that contest—what the sports desk clinically labels “the Astros score”—will ripple outward across the planet like a…
For forty-nine seasons, Saturday Night Live—that rickety American sketch-comedy jalopy—has been careening down the global information superhighway with its tailpipe on fire, belching punchlines into the lungs of anyone with a Wi-Fi signal and a morbid curiosity about the United States. From Lagos to Ljubljana, insomniac teenagers and exhausted shift nurses have discovered that SNL…
The Curious Case of Seth Rollins: How a Man in Tights Became a Geopolitical Rorschach Test By the time the Tokyo Dome lights dimmed last month, Seth Rollins had already been declared everything from “the last true American hero” by a breathless Fox Sports Asia pundit to “an avatar of late-capitalist nihilism” by a semi-sober…
Chicago White Sox: The World’s Most Reluctant International Ambassador By Dave’s Locker Global Correspondent It is a truth universally acknowledged—at least from Seoul to São Paulo—that if you want to teach a child about the random cruelty of existence, you could do worse than point them to the Chicago White Sox. While the rest of…
Rhea Ripley, the Australian-born harbinger of controlled chaos currently squatting in the WWE’s “Raw” division like a goth tarantula on a wedding cake, has become the rare piece of sports entertainment that actually exports something other than merch and disappointment. From the neon back-alleys of Tokyo’s Korakuen Hall to the fluorescent aisles of a São…
Amazon Video: The Streaming Colonizer Quietly Redrawing the Planet’s Cultural Borders By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between a Co-Working Couch and Existential Despair PARIS—Somewhere on the 17th arrospécial of a Haussmannian walk-up, a Senegalese-French data-scientist is binge-watching “The Boys” instead of finishing the code that might keep Mali’s largest hospital online. In São Paulo’s 3 a.m….
Fernando Mendoza, the name that’s currently ricocheting around encrypted group chats from Singapore to São Paulo, is neither a head of state nor a freshly sanctioned oligarch. He is, rather inconveniently, a 38-year-old Paraguayan agronomist who accidentally broke the global rice futures market last Tuesday—an achievement previously thought to require at least one Swiss bank…
Blue Jays: Feathered Diplomats in an Age of Collapsing Alliances By Our Correspondent, somewhere between Toronto and Tehran The blue jay—cyanocitta cristata to the taxonomically inclined, “that loud bastard on my balcony” to everyone else—has quietly become the most cosmopolitan bird never to clear customs. Native only to North America, it now serves as an…
