Sir Alexander Chapman Ferguson, Knight Bachelor, Order of the British Empire, and walking proof that Scots can still colonise imaginations long after the empire packed up, has spent the better part of three decades exporting an especially potent strain of controlled fury across the planet. From the drizzle of Manchester he managed to turn a…
London, UK — At first glance, Joy Crookes is just another precocious 25-year-old with a record deal, a South London postcode, and an Instagram account that makes you wonder why you ever bothered with breakfast. Yet the moment her contralto—equal parts cigarette smoke and lullaby—slides across a track like “Feet Don’t Fail Me Now,” you…
Julia Fox: The Accidental Geopolitical Barometer No One Asked For By Our Correspondent in the Department of Late-Stage Everything PARIS—If you had told any foreign-policy analyst in 2019 that the woman best known for peeling off a cling-film dress in Uncut Gems would one day be interpreted as a planetary mood ring, they would have…
NWSL Standings: A Table That Matters More Than Most Governments By Our Correspondent, filing from a hotel bar where the Wi-Fi is better than the Scotch Let us begin with the obvious: the National Women’s Soccer League table is not, technically, a geopolitical map. Yet if you squint at the current standings you can see…
The Sopranos at 25: How a New Jersey Mob Boss Became the Planet’s Favorite Anti-Hero By the time Tony Soprano lumbered onto international airwaves in January 1999, the Berlin Wall had been rubble for a decade, NATO was busy bombing Yugoslavia, and the world’s remaining superpower believed its biggest headache was a Oval Office cigar….
**The Curious Case of Jade McKissic: How One Woman’s Story Became the World’s Favorite Distraction** In the grand theater of global affairs—where nuclear powers play chicken in the Taiwan Strait and climate change politely waits for us to finish arguing about pronouns—Jade McKissic has emerged as our latest international obsession. Who, you ask? Exactly. Yet…
Dodgers Standings: The Blue Empire’s Report Card and Why the Rest of the World Should Pretend to Care By Diego “Cynic-at-Large” Morales, filing from a bar in Bogotá that inexplicably streams MLB in lieu of telenovelas. LOS ANGELES—Somewhere between a freeway pile-up of Teslas and the latest wildfire evacuation, the Los Angeles Dodgers continue to…
The Dodgers’ Magic Number: A Decimal in a World Running Out of Numbers By J. B. Vespers, International Correspondent LOS ANGELES—While the Eastern Hemisphere slept off another round of sovereign-debt nightmares, a spreadsheet cell in Chavez Ravine quietly ticked from “6” to “5.” In baseball shorthand, that single digit is the Dodgers’ “magic number”—the alchemic…
“In Whose Name?”—three polite words that, when strung together, form a question no government, corporation, or streaming algorithm wants to answer honestly. The film, by Syrian-French director Ziad Kalthoum, opens with a slow pan across Beirut’s port, still mangled after the 2020 ammonium-nitrate fireworks show that vaporised half the city. From there it spirals outward…
Anthony Banda and the Borderless Brotherhood of Disposable Left Arms By Marisol Vargas, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk Dateline: Everywhere and Nowhere—Somewhere between the cracked bullpen benches of Phoenix and the fluorescent-lit hotel lobbies of Seoul, Anthony Banda is presently warming up. Again. The itinerant left-hander has been optioned, designated, outrighted, traded, waived, and…
Sun News, Earth Blues By our roving cosmic correspondent, still hung-over from last night’s aurora The Sun has been making headlines again—always a bit of a narcissist, that 4.6-billion-year-old ball of plasma. From Delhi’s smog-choked rooftops to Reykjavík’s geothermal spas, the latest “sun news” is that our star has entered a more exuberant phase of…
Jonathan Groff: The Unlikely Global Export America Never Put on a Tariff List PARIS—While Washington and Beijing slug it out over semiconductors and soybeans, another U.S. product is slipping through every customs checkpoint unmolested: Jonathan Groff. Yes, the man who once asked the world if it wanted to build a snowman has quietly become the…
