In the fluorescent cathedrals of Las Vegas, where slot-machine hymns drown out bad decisions at 3 a.m., Alex Pereira stands as a living monument to the global economy of violence. The Brazilian—whose surname translates, deliciously, to “pilgrim”—has become every fight promoter’s favorite export: a soft-spoken destroyer who can sell pay-per-views in 172 countries while looking…
Dalton Rushing: How One Man’s Name Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Going Sideways Paris—If you had told a bewildered French bureaucrat last spring that “Dalton Rushing” would soon be trending in seventeen languages, he would have assumed you were pitching a new cologne for hedge-fund cowboys. Fast-forward six months and the phrase has mutated…
PORTLAND, Oregon — In a world where the price of eggs is being negotiated by hedge-fund algorithms and children learn geography from drone-strike footage, the University of Oregon has gone ahead and appointed a new head football coach. Yes, while glaciers calve like cheap wedding cakes and the South China Morning Post runs sidebars on…
Gridiron Gladiators and the Global Coliseum: How NCAA Football Became the World’s Most American Export Somewhere in the Siberian tundra, a Yakutsk teenager named Dmitri is live-streaming a grainy pirated feed of Alabama vs. Auburn with the devotion of a medieval monk copying scripture. He doesn’t know what a “tight end” actually does, but he…
Hunger Games: The Global Edition—Where the Arena Keeps Expanding By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent The phrase “hunger games” once belonged strictly to the fiction aisle, somewhere between teenage angst and flaming couture. But in 2024, the franchise has escaped the multiplex and gone on a world tour—no passport required, just the willingness to watch entire…
North Carolina: The World’s Favorite Overachieving Backwater By Pascal “Pax” Delacorte, International Correspondent at Large RALEIGH—If the planet were a high-school reunion, North Carolina would be the once-overlooked kid who now shows up in a rented Tesla, quoting Latin and smelling faintly of both artisanal bourbon and litigation. From the outside, this oblong patch of…
If you wanted to invent a one-man case study in global soft-power projection, you could do worse than Jared Leto: a Louisiana-born Oscar winner who moonlights as the frontman of an arena band, dresses like a Tokyo street preacher, and is currently on a world tour that’s less about music than about proving the elasticity…
Andrew Heaney and the Curious Geopolitics of a Left-Arm Curveball By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between the Dugout and the Abyss PARIS—In a world where bond yields, drone swarms, and microchip sanctions are the usual lingua franca of global headlines, an American left-hander named Andrew Heaney has improbably become a talking point from Tokyo trading floors…
There are, by the most recent United Nations count, roughly 8.1 billion humans on this planet, and at least 7.9 billion of them are absolutely convinced they could have done a better job protecting Patrick Mahomes than Jake Matthews did last February in Las Vegas. The other 200 million were busy arguing about VAR calls…
Colorado: The World’s Most Expensive Petting Zoo for Tech Burnouts and Powder Addicts By Marcello van der Waals, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker DENVER—Somewhere between the 12-dollar oat-milk cortado and the boutique axe-throwing bar, it hits you: Colorado is less a U.S. state than a multinational experiment in what happens when hedge-fund refugees discover altitude sickness….
Southport, North Carolina—population 3,700 on a generous day—has just been handed the geopolitical spotlight by Netflix’s “Outer Banks,” which apparently needed a place that still smells like sunscreen and existential dread. The streaming behemoth’s algorithm, trained on the viewing habits of teenagers who have never filed taxes, decided this former Confederate supply port was the…
Owen Wilson, the man whose tousled blond hair and conspiratorial “wow” have echoed from Malibu to Mumbai, turns 55 this year—an age when most mortals begin Googling “best ergonomic lumbar pillow” instead of “best surf break.” Yet across the planet, Wilson remains the unlikely lingua franca of late-capitalist ennui: a sun-bleached Candide for the streaming…
