HOUSTON—While the planet’s traditional power centers bicker over whose missiles are bigger and whose central bank can print money faster, a soft-spoken 18-year-old from the same city that gave us Travis Scott is quietly colonizing the world’s earbuds without asking anyone’s permission. Meet d4vd, the Texan teenager who proves you no longer need a passport,…
Palmeiras vs Fortaleza: The Beautiful Game’s Ugly Mirror to a Splintering World By our man in São Paulo, nursing a caipirinha and an existential crisis The fixture itself sounds almost quaint—Palmeiras versus Fortaleza, two football clubs separated by 2,700 kilometers of Brazilian asphalt, rainforest, and political shouting matches. Yet last night’s 1-1 draw at Allianz…
The Pacific, that vast blue shrug between continents, rarely bothers to register a college football game. Yet tonight, somewhere above the tectonic shrug that passes for the Ring of Fire, Fresno State and Hawaii will collide like two tourist t-shirts in a hotel gift shop—garish, cheap, and oddly essential to the local economy. From Brussels…
Kevin Costner, the laconic Midwesterner who once built a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield, has become an unlikely barometer for the American century’s slow-motion implosion. From the Berlin Wall’s fall (he was busy dancing with wolves) to the current age of streaming wars (where his Yellowstone ranch is the closest thing the US has…
**The Global Aftershocks of a Diva’s Retirement: How One Woman in Spandex Briefly United the Planet** *By our correspondent who still can’t believe wrestling diplomacy isn’t in the UN charter* GENEVA—In the grand theater of geopolitics, where nuclear codes are traded like Pokémon cards and trade wars flare up over dairy subsidies, the 2015 retirement…
PARIS—On a grey Tuesday morning, the French Open’s outer courts smelled of damp clay, disinfectant, and the particular brand of existential dread that hovers over any 20-year-old hailed as the next sovereign of men’s tennis. Holger Rune, Denmark’s resident mood-ring with a forehand, was busy reminding the planet that Nordic melancholy and baseline fury are…
The Global Ballet of Brake Lights: Why the Pedestrian-Accident Lawyer Is Now a Borderless Brand By the time you finish reading this sentence, another human being somewhere between Lagos and Ljubljana will have been introduced to the hood ornament of a moving vehicle. Statistics, those charming little liars, inform us that 1.35 million of these…
Apple TV: A Black-Mirror Snow Globe for the Jet-Lagged Soul by Our Correspondent, presently somewhere over the Sea of Okhotsk with spotty Wi-Fi and a stale stroopwafel The device itself is no larger than a coaster you guiltily pocketed from a Copenhagen hotel bar, yet it carries more cultural baggage than a UN diplomat on…
Bucaramanga vs. Tolima: A Football Derby the World Pretends Not to Care About (But Secretly Does) If you spin a globe fast enough, the tiny patch where Colombia’s Santander highlands crash into the Magdalena Valley becomes a brownish smudge—roughly the size of the coffee stain on your desk. Yet every time Atlético Bucaramanga and Deportes…
The Departure Lounge of Civilization By Our Man with the Barf Bag, Somewhere Over the Atlantic The term “migrant deported” usually lands with the grace of a dropped tray in economy class—loud, messy, and guaranteed to wake the neighbors. Yet last Tuesday, when 127 souls were handcuffed onto a chartered Boeing 737 in Frankfurt bound…
Ben Hamer: The Accidental Oracle of Our Age By our international desk, somewhere between the duty-free and the departure gate LONDON—While the planet’s 8-billion-person ensemble cast scrambles for starring roles, a 36-year-old Welsh goalkeeper named Ben Hamer has slipped into the part nobody auditioned for: global metaphor. Hamer, currently third-choice at Watford and therefore about…
The planet tilts eastward each dawn so that a million screens in Jakarta, Lagos, and São Paulo can light up with the same question: “Is SOFI still a buy?” The query itself is a form of late-capitalist prayer—half hope, half hedge, muttered in seventeen currencies and one universal dialect of desperation. In a world where…
