Joe Burrow, Quarterback of the Free World? A dispatch from the front lines of American soft power By the time most of Europe is reaching for its second espresso, the American Midwest is already three beers deep into a Bengals Sunday. Somewhere in that amber haze, Joe Burrow—Louisiana lightning in designer sunglasses—drops back to pass,…
**Boise’s Golden Ticket: How Ashton Jeanty Became the World’s Most Overqualified Tourist Attraction** *By our correspondent who still can’t believe American football is called “football”* GENEVA—In a world where nuclear powers trade barbs on social media and central banks treat inflation like a drunk uncle at Christmas, the global economy has found its newest safe-haven…
From the Desk of Dave’s International Bureau, Somewhere Over the Atlantic— While COP29 delegates in Baku argued over commas in a footnote on methane, the real existential drama played out under portable LED masts in the American Midwest. Friday night in Iowa—population three million, hog-to-human ratio negotiable—high-school football scores flickered across the Twittersphere with the…
Tanner Scott and the Global Metronome of Baseball’s Arms Race By Dave’s Locker Correspondent in Exile, somewhere over the Atlantic The first time Tanner Scott’s slider detonated on international radar was not on ESPN’s highlight reel but on a grainy Taiwanese KBO stream that kept buffering like a Cold-War telex. Somewhere in Seoul, a bleary-eyed…
Baltimore, Maryland – Somewhere between the crab-cake stands and the rusted-out steel cranes that once propped up an empire, the Orioles scored six runs last night. Six. A modest tally by the steroid-addled standards of modern baseball, yet in the grand bazaar of global affairs it landed with the discreet thud of a diplomatic cable…
Tim Mayza: The Left-Arm Reliever Quietly Teaching the World That Pain Is Universal By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic TORONTO—While the planet busies itself with grander catastrophes—ballooning sovereign debt, glaciers filing for early retirement, and TikToks of cats lip-syncing to war-crime tribunals—Tim Mayza keeps reporting to work in the same…
From the marble lobbies of Dubai to the sweaty karaoke bars of Manila, the planet’s attention has lately pivoted—ever so briefly—from wars, viruses, and crypto-crash eulogies to a 24-year-old kid from Colleyville, Texas, who smashes baseballs as if personally offended by the laws of physics. Bobby Witt Jr., the Kansas City Royals’ shortstop-turned-overnight-geopolitical-emoji, just wrapped…
The Curious Global Dominion of Becky Lynch: How a Dublin Bartender Became an International Soft-Power Asset In the grand, tragicomic opera of geopolitics—where nuclear codes are entrusted to septuagenarians who confuse TikTok with a breath mint—it turns out one of the more reliable diplomatic pressure valves is a 5-foot-6 redhead from the Liberties who used…
The NFL’s Thirty-Two Flags: How a Provincial Pastime Conquered the Planet and Forgot to Apologize By Correspondent M. A. “Mac” Guffin, filing from a hotel bar in Singapore that still thinks the Super Bowl is a plumbing fixture. When the Kansas City Chiefs lifted their third Lombardi Trophy in February, fireworks crackled over Manila, Lagos,…
From a safe distance of 4,000 miles and several failed revolutions, the world watches America’s latest export of precision anxiety: Justin Tucker, the Baltimore Ravens’ resident field-goal necromancer. While lesser nations measure progress in GDP or UNESCO heritage sites, the United States has calibrated its self-worth to the arc of a leather ellipsoid booted by…
Jason Kelce and the Global Theater of Linemen: How One Bearded American Gladiator Explains Everything There comes a moment—usually around 3 a.m. in a Berlin hostel kitchen—when a French backpacker, two Korean crypto-traders, and a Canadian on a gap year discover they share a single cultural reference point: the bearded, bare-chested, beer-sloshing demigod known as…
Fenway Park, 37,000 seats of brick, beer, and inherited heartbreak, will tonight welcome the Arizona Diamondbacks—a franchise whose entire existence is younger than most of the rust on Lansdowne Street. To the foreign eye this looks like a quaint regional pageant: two American ball clubs meeting for the first time since 2019, when the Red…
