Bananas in the Anthropocene: A Fruit That Thinks It’s a Baseball Team For a planet currently busy stockpiling canned beans and iodine tablets, it is oddly reassuring to watch 7,000 Georgians—actual Georgians, not the Eurasian variety—lose their collective minds over a yellow-clad circus that calls itself the Savannah Bananas. From the outside, the spectacle resembles…
Edu Gaspar: The Diplomat in Cleats Quietly Reordering Global Football’s Furniture By “Dave’s Locker” International Correspondent Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Geneva—pick your clichéd dateline—doesn’t matter. Wherever you stand, Edu Gaspar is already there, smiling politely while shifting the tectonic plates under world football like a maître d’ who’s just noticed the VIP table needs…
Ethan Nwaneri, the 17-year-old Arsenal prodigy who already looks like he’s collecting passports for sport, has become the Rorschach test of late-capitalist football: each continent sees in him whatever it needs to feel better about itself. To the Premier League’s marketing wizards—those caffeinated alchemists who could monetize a sneeze if it trended on TikTok—he is…
The Curious Case of Brilyn Hollyhand: How a 17-Year-Old Alabama Kid Accidentally Became the World’s Most Reluctant Soft-Power Asset By D. Locke, International Correspondent PARIS—Somewhere between the seventh arrondissement and a nondescript brasserie where the espresso tastes like regret, I found myself staring at a phone screen displaying Brilyn Hollyhand’s Instagram grid. The kid—yes, kid,…
When Aaron Ramsey announced his latest move to Nice in the summer of 2023, the planet paused for roughly the length of a TikTok clip. In Syria, cease-fires flickered; in São Paulo, commuters glanced up from their phones just long enough to mutter “Nice, huh?” and return to doom-scrolling. Somewhere in the sprawl of global…
The Slow, Glorious Death of Hope: A Global Timeline of Crystal Palace vs Sunderland By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, somewhere above the Atlantic 1905 – Birth of a Rivalry, Birth of the Modern Age Crystal Palace and Sunderland first meet when Britannia still ruled waves and the planet’s thermostat was mostly intact. The…
Real Sociedad 0 – Real Madrid 2 Anoeta, Sunday night, and the rain that drifts in from the Cantabrian Sea is the sort that makes diplomats cancel flights and poets cancel themselves. Inside the stadium, 33,000 mortals huddle beneath sponsored ponchos while 22 millionaires in wet laundry jog about, pretending the result matters more than…
From the Basque Hills to the Boardrooms of Beijing: A Brief, Cynical History of Real Sociedad vs Real Madrid By Our Man in Madrid, who has seen smaller clubs swallowed whole and richer ones vomit up managers like bad paella. 1909 – Birth of a David Real Sociedad pops into existence in San Sebastián, a…
Cameron Crowe’s Existential Crisis—and Ours A dispatch from the planet-wide screening room where the house lights never quite come up By the time the news pinged across continents—Cameron Crowe, 66, was “stepping back to reassess narrative priorities,” a phrase that sounded suspiciously like Hollywood code for “my last film financed a small nation and still…
Getafe 0 – Real Oviedo 0 A Scoreline That Managed to Mean Everything and Nothing in the Same Breath By the time the final whistle blew on an overcast Tuesday night in the southern Madrid dormitory town, the global news cycle had already sprinted three laps around the planet. Somewhere in the Pacific, a nuclear…
Fulham vs Leeds: A Timeline of Mutual Self-Destruction, Now Broadcasting Worldwide By Our Man in the Departure Lounge London, 14:03 GMT – Somewhere above the Atlantic, a Singaporean hedge-fund analyst toggles between two tabs: one tracking the Nikkei’s latest swan dive, the other a grainy stream of Fulham vs Leeds from 2003. He isn’t nostalgic;…
Sitting in a café that claims to be “Parisian” but smells exclusively of burnt sugar and desperation, I watch the replay of Newcastle United versus Wolverhampton Wanderers on a screen whose pixels long ago surrendered. Around me, Japanese tourists photograph croissants, a Russian oligarch haggles over the price of bottled water, and an American podcaster…
