**Gridiron Prophecies: How NFL Picks Became the World’s Favorite Guessing Game** While the rest of the planet grapples with climate summits, currency fluctuations, and the occasional coup d’état, a peculiar American ritual has infected the global consciousness like a particularly virulent strain of cultural influenza. NFL picks—those weekly predictions about helmeted gladiators chasing an oblong…
Jacob Murphy and the Quiet Art of Being a Global Nobody By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the North Sea There is a moment, somewhere around the 78th minute of a Thursday-night Europa Conference League tie, when Jacob Murphy collects the ball on the touchline and 32,000 Geordies exhale as one. In…
James Beattie: The Scottish Philosopher Who Accidentally Invented Global Burnout Culture By Our Correspondent in a Café That Still Charges for Wi-Fi (Edinburgh, GMT+1) It is 4:07 p.m. local time, and the Edinburgh drizzle is performing its usual impression of a world-weary accountant: constant, grey, and impossible to fire. Inside the café, a barista misspells…
Washington, D.C.—On a humid Sunday that felt imported straight from the Mekong Delta, 20,000 pairs of overpriced carbon-plated sneakers slapped the asphalt from the Capitol to Hains Point and back. The DC Half Marathon, an event whose very name is a polite fiction (the advertised 13.1 miles somehow always measures closer to 13.4—clearly the same…
Southampton vs Portsmouth: A Tiny English Rivalry That Explains Why the World Keeps Shooting Itself in the Foot The M27 Derby, as locals sniffily call it, is a 19-mile grudge match between two port cities whose combined population could fit—standing room only—into a Shanghai metro carriage. Yet when Southampton and Portsmouth square off this Saturday,…
**The Global Circus of World Athletics: Where National Pride Meets Pharmaceutical Innovation** The World Athletics Championships have concluded in Budapest, leaving behind the usual debris of shattered records, broken dreams, and the faint whiff of performance-enhancing substances that somehow always manages to permeate these international gatherings of humanity’s most chemically-enhanced specimens. This year’s spectacle featured…
**When a Forgotten English City and a Self-Proclaimed European Royalty Remind the Planet Why Football is Still the World’s Most Expensive Soap Opera** By the time the final whistle blew on Leicester City 3, Liverpool 1, the global audience had already metabolised the result three different ways: British pubs spilled disbelief into kebabs; Lagos viewing…
Aston Villa vs Chelsea: A Tale of Two Oligarchs, One Mid-Table Morality Play, and the Global Glitterati Who Watch Anyway By our man in the cheap seats, still waiting for the apocalypse to be televised VILLA PARK, England—Somewhere between the 72nd minute and the existential dread that sets in when both teams remember they’re not…
Saturday in the American South: a region where the air is 70 % humidity, 20 % bourbon fumes, and 10 % lingering regret. While most of the planet busied itself with minor concerns such as climate tipping points and intercontinental missile tests, roughly 100,000 bipeds crammed into Bryant-Denny Stadium to watch Alabama euthanize Vanderbilt 55-3….
Old Empires, New Glitches An international dispatch on the latest episode of London City vs Manchester United, the soap opera that doubles as a football match. By the time the final whistle blew somewhere between Peckham and Piccadilly, diplomats in twenty-one time zones had already updated their risk assessments. In Singapore, a hedge-fund algorithm that…
World Championships 2025: The Planet’s Most Expensive Group Therapy Session By the time the opening cannon fired in Singapore’s newly reclaimed Marina East District this morning, the 2025 World Championships had already outspent three small island nations and generated enough carbon to make a coal lobbyist blush. Delegations from 193 countries—plus the ever-optimistic “Observer State…
**The Glorious Decline of Manchester United: A Global Tragedy in 4-4-2 Formation** From the bustling streets of Mumbai to the smoky cafés of Buenos Aires, from Lagos to Laos, the world watches with morbid fascination as one of football’s crown jewels transforms into an exquisite corpse. Manchester United—once the empire on which the football sun…
