Atlético Mineiro vs Santos: A Dystopian Ballet in Black and White, Sponsored by Crypto RIO DE JANEIRO—As the planet queues politely for the next cataclysm—be it heat domes, supply-chain famines, or a new season of “The Crown”—Brazil has decided the most pressing matter is still twenty-two millionaires hoofing a ball under LED suns. Atlético Mineiro…
Elic Ayomanor: Stanford’s One-Man IMF Program and the Global Trade in Miracles When Elic Ayomanor, a 6-foot-2 Canadian wide receiver who sounds like the love child of a Silicon Valley IPO and a Scandinavian crime-novel protagonist, torched Colorado for 294 receiving yards last autumn, the earth did not actually stop spinning. It merely wobbled, the…
Nick Folk, the aging American placekicker now plying his trade for the Tennessee Titans, has become an unlikely geopolitical weather vane. While most of the planet fixates on missile trajectories in the Taiwan Strait and wheat futures in Odessa, Folk is quietly proving that global influence can still be exerted by a 39-year-old man whose…
Milan vs Bologna: A Derby of Desperation in the Age of Global Collateral Damage By Our Man in the Mezzogiorno, still coughing up neoliberal dust MILAN—At first glance, tonight’s Serie A fixture between Milan and Bologna is merely the 156th official meeting of two clubs whose combined trophy cabinets could house a modest oligarch’s ego….
Astros vs. Braves: A Cosmic Farce Played Out in Left Field By Diego Valdés, International Sports Desk Somewhere between the asteroid belt and the Beltway, the Houston Astros and the Atlanta Braves have managed to turn a provincial baseball quarrel into a planetary Rorschach test—one that reveals less about curveballs than it does about humanity’s…
Eddy Piñeiro: The Cuban-Born Foot Who Reminds the World That Nations Still Argue Over 100 Yards of Grass By the time the American football season mercifully ends and the rest of the planet returns to grown-up sports, Eddy Piñeiro’s right boot will have ping-ponged between glory and infamy more often than a diplomat at a…
In the grand tradition of global crises that aren’t actually global crises, the planet briefly paused this week to fret over the throwing elbow of one Joshua Patrick Allen, quarterback of the Buffalo Bills and, apparently, the linchpin holding Western civilization together. From the moment a grainy sideline clip showed him grimacing like a man…
From Baton Rouge to Bangkok, the name Kayshon Boutte is now being whispered in the same breath as “regret” and “rookie contract clause.” Once the Louisiana State wunderkind who could turn a screen pass into Mardi Gras, Boutte finds himself today as a cautionary export—shipped north to New England like over-seasoned crawfish—whose global footprint now…
Stefon Diggs and the 21st-Century Gladiator Exchange Program By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over Greenland Somewhere between the sushi bar at Narita and the duty-free Marlboros in Dubai, Stefon Diggs—wide-receiver, occasional philosopher, and full-time mood ring—was traded from Buffalo to Houston like a collectible NFT nobody asked for. The transaction pinged across…
MIAMI—Somewhere over the Atlantic, in the metallic belly of a chartered Boeing 787 that smells faintly of Tiger Balm and regret, Jalen Ramsey is probably still talking. The Dolphins’ newly acquired cornerback—equal parts shutdown savant and walking podcast—has just completed his fourth intercontinental goodwill tour in three seasons, a junket that took him from a…
In the grand, slow-motion car crash we politely call “civilization,” few things travel farther, faster, and with less apparent logic than an aging American quarterback looking for one last spin of the roulette wheel. So when Joseph Vincent Flacco—age 38, Super Bowl MVP from the era when Facebook was still considered cool—was air-freighted from his…
Rome, Italy – At 3 a.m. local time, while the Eternal City’s pigeons slept off another day of aggressive carb-loading, a small band of insomniac Europeans huddled around laptops tuned to a grainy stream of the Arizona Cardinals versus the Seattle Seahawks. The broadcast was in English, the commercials were for pickup trucks unavailable on…
