Istanbul – Somewhere between the kebab smoke and the sangria haze, Turkey and Spain have decided to flirt again. The rendezvous is billed as a “strategic partnership summit,” which in diplomatic French means “let’s see how much we can irritate everyone else while pretending we’re just talking trade.” The rest of the world, of course,…
Kenneth Gainwell, the Memphis-born running back whose surname sounds like a self-help seminar for hedge-fund managers, is currently the most geopolitically intriguing 5-foot-9, 200-pound American in cleats. While the planet debates tariffs, tundra melt, and whether this year’s Eurovision will be decided by tactical drone strikes, Gainwell quietly embodies the late-capitalist paradox: a man whose…
Coaches Poll Top 25: How a List of American College Teams Quietly Became the World’s Most Watched Unofficial Geopolitical Barometer By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, somewhere between Gate 42 and Existential Dread PARIS—While delegates at the COP summit were busy arguing over whether the planet should be saved by Tuesday or by Thursday,…
Cricket scores—those innocuous strings of digits that flicker on scoreboard LEDs and smartphone screens—have quietly become the planet’s most reliable geopolitical tea-leaf reader. From Dhaka to Durban, when the runs tick upward or wickets clatter like cheap cutlery, entire national moods swing faster than a Boris Johnson resignation. Consider last Saturday in Lahore: Pakistan posted…
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…
