Chicago Bears: A Global Parable of Perpetual Rebuilding By a correspondent who has watched empires rise and fall faster than a Bears third-quarter lead The Chicago Bears are, at first glance, a regional curiosity: 53 men in navy and orange chasing an oblong ball beside a lake so frigid it could double as a Russian…
Harrison Smith and the Curious Global Cult of the American Safety Dateline: Somewhere over the Atlantic, where Wi-Fi costs more than a decent bottle of Moldovan wine and still drops every time the plane hits a cloud. From this altitude, the spectacle of modern fandom looks remarkably uniform: whether you’re in Lagos, Lyon, or Lahore,…
Kirk Cousins Has Entered the Transfer Portal to the Rest of the Planet By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic MINNEAPOLIS—While the planet busies itself with minor trifles—Ukrainian power grids being redecorated by Iranian drones, the Arctic Circle auditioning for a role as the next Mediterranean, and Sri Lanka experimenting with…
Tonight, somewhere between the Arctic Circle and the last functioning Wi-Fi router in Gaza, twenty-two million souls will crane their necks at the same glowing rectangle to ask the same question: “What football game is on tonight?” The query itself is a kind of secular prayer—uttered in seven thousand languages, muttered over instant noodles in…
ZURICH—The first time I heard the phrase “GSH bears” I assumed it was either a typo for “gosh, bears” or some obscure crypto-token named after a ursine deity. In fact, it turns out to be the Global Synthetic Hedge—bears, plural, because nothing this catastrophically leveraged ever travels alone. Picture a flock of algorithmic grizzlies unleashed…
**The Age of Gridiron Diplomacy: How JJ McCarthy’s 21 Years Shook the Geopolitical Chessboard** In a world where nuclear codes rest in the hands of men who can’t operate TikTok, the international community found itself breathlessly consulting Wikipedia today to answer the burning question: exactly how old is University of Michigan quarterback JJ McCarthy? The…
**The Universal Language of Buck: How America’s Most Polarizing Sportscaster Became a Global Mirror** In the pantheon of American sports broadcasting, few names evoke such visceral reactions as Joe Buck—a man whose voice has narrated more championship collapses than a Greek chorus on amphetamines. Yet beyond the baseball diamonds and football fields of the United…
Troy Aikman: How a Helmeted Cowboy Became the World’s Most Unlikely Soft-Power Export By the time Troy Aikman finished carving up NFL secondaries in the mid-90s, the Berlin Wall had already been rubble for half a decade and CNN was beaming grainy footage of American excess into living rooms from Lagos to Novosibirsk. What those…
The strange afterlife of Mel Gibson has become a sort of planetary weather vane: wherever the wind blows hardest—populism, cancel culture, streaming wars, or the latest geopolitical flare-up—you’ll find the Australian-American actor-director hovering like a cigar-chomping ghost at the edge of the frame. From Cannes to Caracas, his name still triggers a Pavlovian response: half…
In the grand, increasingly surreal tapestry of 21st-century geopolitics, where billionaires launch phallic rockets to nowhere and entire nations debate whether water is a human right, the name “Kyle Monangai” has begun to flicker on diplomatic radar screens from Tokyo to Timbuktu. Who, you ask, is this Monangai fellow? A Bond villain with a climate-altering…
In the grand carnival of American football—where helmets are shinier than most national GDPs and the stakes are measured in torn ligaments and television contracts—Christian Darrisaw plays left tackle for the Minnesota Vikings. A position, for the uninitiated, that exists primarily so 320-pound men don’t accidentally sit on quarterbacks who make more per Instagram post…
Michelle Beisner-Buck: The Sideline Reporter Who Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Barometer By the time most of the planet’s 195 nations had finished arguing about the shape of the COP28 negotiating table, Michelle Beisner-Buck was already on a tarmac in Qatar, squinting into a desert sunset and asking an NFL linebacker how he planned to “finish…
