RANGERS SCORE: WHEN A GLASGOW FOOTBALL RESULT BECOMES A GEOPOLITICAL BAROMETER By the time the final whistle confirmed Rangers’ 3-1 victory over Benfica at Ibrox, the score had already ricocheted through global markets, diplomatic back-channels and at least one hastily convened crisis meeting in an air-conditioned room in Doha. From Wall Street to Warsaw, traders,…
PARIS—Across every time zone, from the frost-laced windows of Helsinki to the sweat-slicked balconies of Bangkok, the same five green and gray squares lit up at the stroke of midnight. The word was “MANGO.” Not “peace,” not “bread,” not even “taxes”—just an innocuous tropical fruit that now stands as today’s Wordle answer, and therefore, by…
Everton vs Aston Villa: A Timeline of Two Cities, Three Continents, and One Very British Neurosis ≈600 words It began, as so many of the modern world’s ills do, with a telegram. On 22 September 1888, a flustered clerk in the Liverpool Post Office tapped out the score—Everton 2–2 Aston Villa—to a bemused colonial administrator…
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…
