La Tech vs UTEP: Two Rust-Belt Campuses Duke It Out While the Planet Burns By Dmitri Volkov, Senior Correspondent (currently self-medicating with airport espresso) Ruston, Louisiana – A place whose name already sounds like the past tense of “rust.” The Bulldogs of Louisiana Tech—mascot: a perpetually worried canine—hosted the UTEP Miners here last Saturday, an…
Zachariah Branch, a 19-year-old wide receiver from Las Vegas, has spent the last year sprinting across American football fields so quickly that satellites briefly lose him. To most of the planet—where “first down” is still mistaken for a military order—the name registers about as strongly as a local bus timetable in Ulan Bator. Yet the…
DAKORIEN MOORE: THE AMERICAN TEENAGER WHO BECAME A GLOBAL CONVERSATION PIECE ABOUT VIOLENCE, VIRALITY, AND THE BANALITY OF EVERYTHING By the time Dakorien Moore’s name was being autocorrected in three alphabets and mispronounced by a French news anchor live on air, the 17-year-old from Baton Rouge had already achieved the only true international currency left:…
When Justin Bieber finally lands in a city—any city, really—governments issue the sort of travel advisories normally reserved for coup attempts or cholera outbreaks. Jakarta’s traffic police pre-print contraflow maps; Buenos Aires hotels jack up the price of bottled water like it’s liquid palladium; Lagos radio hosts debate whether the ensuing stampede counts toward daily…
The Curious Case of Doug Hutchison: How One American Actor Became an Unwilling Global Cautionary Tale By Dave’s International Desk (with an extra shot of espresso and a dash of schadenfreude) PARIS—In the grand, centuries-old tradition of exporting questionable cultural products, the United States has given the world jazz, blue jeans, and now—thanks to actor…
Dante Moore: The Quarterback Who Became a Global Parable of Hope, Hype, and the Human Condition By: Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Detroit and Dubai Somewhere over the Atlantic, a 19-year-old kid from Detroit—whose arm allegedly contains more torque than a European Central Bank interest-rate hike—has become the newest unit of international currency. Dante Moore, UCLA’s…
By the time the final whistle blew on Estadio BBVA last night, the only thing louder than the 50,000-odd fans was the collective groan from global sports-betting syndicates. Monterrey 2–1 Santos Laguna: an ordinary Liga MX scoreline that nonetheless managed to send seismic tremors through three continents, two shadow economies, and at least one hedge…
The 1,000-kilometre ribbon of asphalt officially known as Mexican Federal Highway 15D has, for decades, served as the world’s most polite smuggling corridor—an autobahn where avocados, fentanyl, and TikTok influencers share lanes like awkward cousins at a family barbecue. Linking the industrial lung of Toluca, Estado de México, to the sun-bleached narcobeach of Mazatlán, Sinaloa,…
The Ryder Cup, that biennial ritual in which Europe and the United States politely agree to bludgeon one another with graphite shafts instead of artillery, is once again upon us. Bookmakers from Mayfair to Macau have unfurled their digital scrolls to reveal the odds, and the numbers—like most things in 2024—carry the faint whiff of…
Wayward Pines: The Last American Town the Rest of the World Forgot to Notice By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Geneva and Regret It began, as most American fiascos do, with a very expensive marketing slogan: “A Town That Takes You Back.” The brochures never specified how far back—say, 2,000 years and change, give or take…
The Guinness Show: A Planet-Wide Parade of the Preposterous By R. J. Sable, Dave’s Locker Senior Foreign Correspondent Somewhere between a Siberian tundra and a Lagos traffic jam, a man named Igor is attempting to balance seventeen cats on his mustache in pursuit of a Guinness World Record. Meanwhile, in a fluorescent-lit office in London,…
Dan Lanning: How a 37-Year-Old Football Coach Became the Planet’s Most Reluctant Diplomat In the grand tradition of humans assigning cosmic importance to men who scream about blocking schemes, Dan Lanning has been elevated from mere American football coach to a walking foreign-relations metaphor. The University of Oregon’s head coach—who still looks like he should…
