Riley Green’s “Damn Country Music” Isn’t Just for Alabama Anymore A dispatch from the frontlines of soft-power twang and algorithmic Americana By the time the first banjo lick of Riley Green’s latest single pinged a cell tower in rural Pickens County, it had already ricocheted through a 5G relay in Seoul, been Shazam-ed in a…
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the Quiet Rebellion of Global Cool By the time the Eurozone was debating its eighteenth austerity package and the Pacific was busy swallowing another micronation’s coastline, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was perfecting a step-back jumper so surgically smooth it could probably negotiate better trade terms than most G-7 delegates. The Oklahoma City guard—Canadian passport,…
Dodgers vs. Giants: A 19th-Century Grudge Match the Rest of the World Never Asked For By our man in the cheap seats, wondering why borders matter less than batting averages LOS ANGELES—While the planet frets over grain shortages, proxy wars, and the inexplicable return of low-rise jeans, two American cities are once again preparing to…
Call it what you will—maritime banditry, state-sponsored larceny, or the world’s most depressing sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean—but the latest flare-up in the Red Sea has resurrected the hoary binary of pirates versus nationals. Except this time the eye patches are optional and the flags all claim to be legitimate. From the Gulf of…
Davis Cup 2025: The Last Tennis Colosseum Before We All Drown or Starve By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Two Time Zones TURIN, ITALY — In a cavernous hall that looks like a Bond villain’s private airport, twenty-five nations have gathered to decide who gets the honor of polishing silverware while the planet politely self-immolates. Welcome…
News Nation: The American Cable Outlet That Accidentally Became a Metaphor for the World’s Existential Dread By the time the second coffee grows cold in newsrooms from Lagos to Lima, the overnight Nielsen numbers for News Nation have usually landed, and the ritual head-scratching begins. Launched in 2020 as the great American hope for “unbiased”…
Pre-Order iPhone 17: Because the Apocalypse Might Have Better 5G By Our Correspondent Somewhere between Terminal C and Existential Dread In a world where glaciers file for bankruptcy and election cycles now last longer than most marriages, humanity has once again found its true north: camping outside glass temples to reserve a rectangle that won’t…
Terry McLaurin, Wide Receiver, Washington Commanders, and—if you squint hard enough from across the Atlantic—the last functioning export the United States still manages to ship abroad without a tariff fight. While European newsrooms are busy counting German tanks that can’t start and Chinese microchips that absolutely can, McLaurin keeps running immaculate post routes through the…
MADRID—Somewhere in Silicon Valley, a bean-bag chair the size of Liechtenstein has just exhaled in relief. Facebook—sorry, Meta—has agreed to pay a modest €1.2 billion (roughly what Mark Zuckerberg spends annually on SPF 50) to settle a European privacy case that began when a law student in Vienna asked, in 2018, “Hey, what exactly do…
PARIS, 06:07 a.m. CEST—While polite Europeans were still arguing over whose turn it was to buy the croissants, shares of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) were already sliding in New York like a tourist who’s just discovered the metro ticket machines don’t take cash. The stock, which once promised to fuse Hollywood glamour with Discovery’s unembarrassed…
It is a truth universally acknowledged—by hedge-fund analysts in Singapore, crypto bros in Miami, and the guy who sells knock-off scarves outside the Waldstadion—that when Eintracht Frankfurt hosts Real Madrid, the planet tilts two degrees toward Europe’s financial black hole. On the surface it’s merely the second leg of a Champions League quarter-final, but down…
Sean Avery Is the Bad Boy Who Went Global, and We’re Still Watching the Replays By Dave’s Locker International Desk From the fjords of Finland to the noodle bars of Shanghai, references to “Sean Avery” now serve as shorthand for a very particular flavor of chaos: the kind that sells jerseys, court cases, and—if you…
