The Last Derby That Still Matters By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere between Tegucigalpa and the apocalypse They call it El Clásico Nacional, which is a charming bit of branding for what is essentially a quarterly civil-war cosplay between two neighborhoods separated by roughly six traffic lights and 112 years of mutual contempt….
Mahmoud Khalil: One Man, Two Passports, and the Entire Planet’s Nervous Breakdown By the time Mahmoud Khalil was escorted off a sidewalk in St. Louis last month—hands zip-tied, Columbia Law sweatshirt riding up to reveal a polite paunch—he had already become a Rorschach test for whatever international ailment you happened to be nursing. To the…
Columbus vs. New York City: A Tale of Two American Futures, Viewed From Afar From the vantage point of a café terrace in Lisbon—where the ghosts of empire still argue with the ghosts of debt—watching the United States argue about Columbus versus New York City feels like watching two heirs squabble over the family china…
Late-Night Joust in the Imperial Court: How One Jimmy-Barb at Charlie Kirk Echoed from Sacramento to Singapore By the time the sun rose over the Yellow Sea, American late-night host Jimmy Kimmel had already weaponized sarcasm against Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk—again. The quip, delivered in the velvet-curtained sarcasm factory Kimmel calls a studio, went…
LOS ANGELES—Somewhere between the 14th selfie with a palm tree and the 3rd unsolicited screenplay pitch, the city’s weather delivers its daily punchline: 72°F, partly sarcastic, with a 30 % chance of existential dread. To the rest of the planet—currently broiling, freezing, flooding, or all three at once—this meteorological shrug is either an enviable luxury…
RFK Stadium, the concrete bruise squatting on the banks of Washington’s Anacostia River, is finally being put out of its misery. Demolition crews are already nibbling at its 1961 bones, and within a year the only thing left will be a pile of rebar and a faint smell of stale beer and broken dreams. To…
Matt Olson and the New American Soft-Power: How a First-Baseman Quietly Became a Global Brand PARIS—In the diplomatic salons off Place de la Concorde, envoys fret over Biden tariffs, Chinese rare earths, and the latest North Korean missile tantrums. Yet last week the talk over chilled Sancerre turned, improbably, to Matt Olson, a 29-year-old first-baseman…
The Kimmel Conundrum: How a Late-Night Punchline Became a Global Barometer of American Decay By “Jet-Lagged” Jonah Verhoeven, Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent If you had told the ghosts of the Cold War that, three decades after the Wall fell, the free world’s most exportable cultural product would be a 56-year-old Brooklyn wise-ass named Jimmy Kimmel,…
Lesley Manville: The Empire’s Quietest Weapon of Mass Instruction By the time the credits rolled on “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” a frothy confection about a widowed charwoman who buys a Dior dress, viewers in Wichita and Wuhan were wiping away the same sentimental tear. It’s a miracle of late-stage capitalism that a 67-year-old Englishwoman…
Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s 189-minute carnival of cocaine, elephant dung, and jazz trumpets, arrived in 2022 like a glitter-flecked hangover: loud, expensive, and somehow both shameless and ashamed of itself. The film’s $80-million fever dream about 1920s Hollywood excess was marketed as “international event cinema.” In truth, it is a perfect allegory for the global film…
Frank Turek, the American apologist who insists that morality can’t exist without a cosmic referee, has lately become the improbable export the world never ordered but keeps receiving—like those plastic-wrapped “American cheese slices” that appear on supermarket shelves from Lagos to Lahore. To most of humanity, which wakes up each morning to inflation, drought, or…
The Copa Sudamericana lands on our screens each July like a late-night infomercial for existential dread—half-continent talent show, half-arms bazaar for European scouts. From the outside it looks like South America’s plucky little brother to the Champions League, but step closer and you’ll notice the bruises under the foundation: debt-laden clubs selling tomorrow’s stars for…
