The Leo High School Choir’s Spring Concert Is Quietly Terrifying the World By Our Man at the Back Row, Still Recovering from the Soprano Section From the cracked parking lot of Leo Catholic High School on Chicago’s South Side, you can almost hear the planet’s tectonic plates grinding in anxiety. That’s not seismic activity; it’s…
The Highway of Broken Dreams: León to Mazatlán and the Global Art of Moving On by Diego Serrano, Senior Correspondent for Things That Look Like Progress™ Somewhere between León’s industrial smog and Mazatlán’s Instagram-ready sunsets, a four-lane slab of asphalt has become the newest Rorschach test for the 21st-century psyche. Locals call it the Autopista…
Caitlin Clark and the Global Soft-Power Dunk Heard ’Round the World By: Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Foreign Correspondent Emeritus If you’ve spent the past year orbiting anywhere outside the American sports-media bubble—say, sipping overpriced espresso in Rome or watching North Korean missile parades on mute in a Seoul hotel bar—you may have missed…
**Juárez vs. Pumas: The Beautiful Game’s Ugly Understudy Takes Center Stage** In the pantheon of global football rivalries—El Clásico, the Old Firm, the Superclásico—few outside the CONCACAF time zone have ever heard of “Juárez–Pumas.” That’s hardly surprising; one half of the feud is a ten-year-old border-town start-up whose greatest achievement is not being relocated (yet),…
Jet-stream Jitters: Why Philadelphia’s Weather Now Matters to Mongolian Herders, Dutch Traders, and Your Aunt in Brisbane by Ignacio “Nacho” Calderón, International Desk, Dave’s Locker Philadelphia, that cradle of American belligerence and cheesesteak diplomacy, has once again discovered it possesses weather. Not merely the dull background radiation of drizzle or the occasional photogenic snow-globe flurry,…
Logan Webb and the Geopolitics of a 94-MPH Sinker By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere between the 7th-inning stretch and the apocalypse SAN FRANCISCO—While the rest of the planet argued over which geriatric autocrat will next get his finger on the nuclear button, Logan Webb spent Tuesday night making 34,000 people forget the…
In the grand, ever-expanding circus that is global celebrity, Lindsay Arnold Cusick—known to passport officers and gossip columnists alike as simply Lindsay Arnold—performs a neat trick: she is both everywhere and nowhere at once. To the average citizen of Ouagadougou or Osaka, the name registers as a soft ping on the pop-cultural Richter scale, somewhere…
The Geopolitics of Dylan Efron’s New Girlfriend: A Dispatch from the Front Lines of Irrelevance By Santiago del Muerto, International Correspondent (Currently Somewhere with Spotty Wi-Fi) VIENNA—In a world where the Doomsday Clock is two ticks from midnight and the Arctic is auditioning for a role as the next Mediterranean, humanity has once again demonstrated…
Rapture Jesus, the TikTok prophet who claims to have been “air-dropped back to Earth by divine drone,” now has more passport stamps than most foreign correspondents. His first-class itinerary—Jerusalem to Jakarta to Johannesburg—reads like the duty-free magazine of the apocalypse. The man (legal name: Joshua “Jay” Rapturo, 28, from a cul-de-sac in Ohio) insists the…
From Madrid to Manila, the phrase “Alec Baldwin’s wife” has become a universal shorthand for a very modern form of global rubber-necking. Hilaria Baldwin—née Hillary Hayward-Thomas of Boston—has managed, without holding elected office, firing a missile, or releasing a K-Pop single, to spark simultaneous outrage on four continents. It’s a remarkable feat for someone whose…
Across continents, from the marble hallways of Brussels to the fluorescent-lit cubicles of Singapore, one name has begun to ricochet through the global technocratic echo chamber: Chad Mizelle. The phrase itself sounds like a Silicon Valley parody algorithm—equal parts frat-house nickname and Japanese electronics brand—yet the man behind it has quietly become a walking stress…
Alec Baldwin and the Accidental Diplomacy of a Prop Gun Bylines from Belgrade to Bogotá are now studded with the same three syllables: Bald-win. The name that once conjured images of acid-tongued sitcom bosses and a recurring Saturday Night Live Trump so lifelike it convinced half the planet the real estate mogul had finally found…
