Christopher Bell: The Quiet American Export Nobody Ordered—Yet Everyone Is Watching By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva Bureau Geneva, Switzerland – While the planet busies itself with wars, viruses, and whatever Elon is tweeting this hour, a 29-year-old from Norman, Oklahoma has become the United States’ most unlikely soft-power instrument since blue jeans…
Matt Damon, accidental geopolitical barometer and Hollywood’s most over-qualified everyman, has spent the last quarter-century acting as a kind of cinematic Rorschach test for the anxieties of whichever hemisphere happens to be watching. To Americans, he’s the Boston kid who keeps getting left behind on Mars, in Europe, or simply on the wrong side of…
Ireland, that verdant island dangling off Europe’s northwestern fringe like an afterthought God forgot to edit out, has spent the last century turning national neuroses into a surprisingly lucrative export. While the rest of us were busy weaponising nostalgia or monetising trauma, the Irish quietly packaged both, slapped a shamrock on it, and sold it…
**The Global Afterlife of a Home Alone Star: Macaulay Culkin’s Second Act as a Pop-Culture Relic** By the time the Berlin Wall was rubble and the Soviet Union was busy auctioning itself off, a nine-year-old from Manhattan had already conquered the planet armed with nothing sturdier than a VHS tape and a BB gun. *Home…
The Vatican has popes, Brussels has bureaucrats, and South Bend, Indiana—population 103,000, soy-to-human ratio still disputed—has a football coach. When Notre Dame promoted defensive coordinator Marcus Freeman to the throne formerly warmed by Brian Kelly’s hyperactive headset, the global reaction was swift, breathless, and completely disproportionate to any measurable impact on, say, grain futures in…
From Manila to Montevideo, the name “Angel Reese” now pings across group chats like a late-night World Cup goal. The LSU forward—equal parts rebounding savant and master provocateur—has become the latest American export that the rest of the planet never asked for but can’t stop doom-scrolling. We used to ship McDonald’s and drone strikes; now…
Columbia Calling: How South Carolina’s 2024 Football Slate Quietly Mirrors a Fracturing World Order By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk The first thing an overseas observer notices about South Carolina’s freshly released gridiron itinerary is not the games themselves—nobody in Marseille is losing sleep over Furman—but the exquisite way the schedule replicates great-power anxiety. Week…
The Curious Case of Mohammed Alakel: A Portrait in Global Inconvenience By Our Correspondent in Somewhere-With-Wi-Fi Let us begin with the obvious: Mohammed Alakel is not, strictly speaking, famous. His name does not trend on the same algorithmic hamster wheel that recently elevated a raccoon eating cotton candy in a Tokyo subway to the rank…
DraftKings: How a Boston Start-Up Turned the World’s Oldest Vice into a Stock Ticker By our correspondent, still recovering from last night’s “risk-free” bet on Peruvian llama racing BOSTON—MASSACHUSETTS, USA—It began, as most moral panics do, with a PowerPoint deck. Somewhere around 2012, three guys who looked like they still got carded at Applebee’s convinced…
Bryan Woo and the Global High-Fastball Conspiracy By Our Man in the Left-Field Bleachers Somewhere between the panda-sized traffic jams of Jakarta and the espresso-fueled insomnia of Milan, a 24-year-old right-hander from Oakland—population: whatever’s left after the rent—has become the planet’s most unlikely export. Bryan Woo, Seattle Mariners’ sophomore flamethrower, currently owns a WHIP lower…
Shohei Ohtani and the Global Gladiator Circus By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere between Narita and Chavez Ravine The planet’s most profitable form of organized anxiety—Major League Baseball—has finally found its messiah, and wouldn’t you know it, he speaks perfect Japanese, swings like Babe Ruth, and pitches like someone who’s read the collective…
Yaoundé, Cameroon — Somewhere between the Gulf of Guinea and the Sahel’s latest geopolitical migraine lies Cameroon: a nation that has perfected the art of being simultaneously indispensable and invisible. While the rest of the planet argues over whose election is the most rigged or whose inflation is the most “transitory,” Cameroon keeps a low…
