Miami Dolphins: How a Faded NFL Dynasty Became the World’s Accidental Morality Play An international dispatch by our man in the cheap seats, still jet-lagged from last week’s existential layover in Doha The first thing you notice in Tokyo sports bars at 4 a.m. is that no one is actually watching the Miami Dolphins. They’re…
The planet’s most expensive mobile circus has published its 2025 itinerary, and—surprise—everywhere it lands it will find locals protesting, politicians posing, and hoteliers salivating like greyhounds at the starting gate. Twenty-four races, five continents, one global pandemic’s worth of carbon footprint: the Formula 1 calendar is back, and this year it is even more determined…
Johnny Depp: The Last Pirate of Global Celebrity By the time the sun rose over the French Riviera last May, Johnny Depp had already been applauded by European cineastes for seven minutes straight—an ovation longer than most of his recent films’ combined running times in Chinese multiplexes. Cannes was signaling something the rest of the…
If you stand on any international film-festival red carpet long enough, you’ll spot Benny Safdie orbiting the chaos like a benign black hole: quietly warping space-time while the rest of us scramble for canapés. The curly-haired half of the Safdie brothers has spent the past decade dragging American indie cinema—kicking, screaming, and probably high on…
Baylor University, or “The Vatican of the Brazos” as Texans half-jokingly call it, sits in Waco like a limestone-clad monument to American contradictions. From the vantage point of a journalist who has filed dispatches from Jakarta traffic jams and Siberian tundra, Baylor is both comfortingly provincial and unsettlingly influential—a Baptist battlement that exports ideology faster…
ESPN+ at Five: A Digital Gladiator in Rome, Streaming Blood Sport for the Post-National Age By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Geo-Blocked and Existential Despair In the beginning, ESPN+ was pitched as a polite annex to the American living room—an extra $9.99 a month to watch a few more games your cable bundle forgot. Five years…
Baylor vs SMU: A Texas Tussle Watched by a World That’s Given Up on Everything Else By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic DALLAS—While the Eastern Hemisphere sleeps through another night of currency collapse and the Western one rehearses its next apology for existing, roughly ninety thousand Texans will gather Saturday…
When the Detroit Lions finally clawed their way to a playoff win after 32 years, the man they hoisted like a victorious warlord was Dan Campbell—former third-string tight end, Texan carnivore, and living embodiment of the phrase “run through a wall for this guy.” To the rest of the planet, a Midwestern American football coach…
Regina King, the Oscar-winning actress who once told the UN General Assembly that “justice is a global dialect,” has spent the last decade morphing from beloved American sidekick into a one-woman foreign-policy crisis for Hollywood’s ego. While studio executives in Burbank still equate “international appeal” with adding a Londoner villain and a K-pop needle drop,…
Dodgers vs. Orioles: When Two Coastal Elites Remind the World That Baseball Still Exists by Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk LOS ANGELES—Last night, under the same smog-filtered moon that once watched the Soviet Union collapse, the Los Angeles Dodgers politely thrashed the Baltimore Orioles 7-3. From a purely terrestrial standpoint it was an ordinary interleague matchup….
ON A WEDNESDAY NIGHT IN SOUTH YORKSHIRE, the planet’s attention briefly pivoted from proxy wars and supply-chain meltdowns to a more ancient conflict: Sheffield United versus Sunderland, two former industrial citadels now reduced to arguing over second-tier bragging rights like divorced aristocrats squabbling over the good china. From a safe remove—say, a rooftop bar in…
Lesotho vs. South Africa: A David-and-Goliath Match Nobody Asked For By Our Man in Maseru Who’s Learned to Never Order a Steak in Either Country If you squint at the map long enough, Lesotho looks like South Africa’s kidney stone—small, painful, and lodged precisely where Pretoria can’t ignore it. This week, however, the two countries…
