From the banks of the Mississippi to the smog-kissed skyline of Los Angeles, a modest MLS fixture has quietly become a geopolitical mood ring. LAFC versus St. Louis City SC is not, on paper, the stuff of UN Security Council briefings. Yet when two expansion-era clubs—one the shiny toy of Hollywood financiers, the other the…
The Washington Nationals: Baseball’s Diplomatic Curveball in a World That Doesn’t Believe in Innings By the time you read this, the Washington Nationals have probably lost another reliever to a pulled oblique, a strained conscience, or a sudden urge to finish that PhD in comparative literature—because nothing says “late-stage empire” like a bullpen that collapses…
Tampa Bay Lightning: The World Watches a Sun-Drenched Hockey Dynasty and Pretends to Care By “Global” Gerry Van der Zalm, filing from the last functioning airport bar with Wi-Fi The Tampa Bay Lightning have now won so many Stanley Cups that the trophy’s handlers keep a spare crate of sunscreen in the cargo hold—an oddly…
Noah Eagle, the 24-year-old American play-by-play prodigy who sounds like he was grown in a secret ESPN lab, has been dispatched to Paris to call Olympic basketball for Peacock—NBC’s streaming platform that most viewers still locate somewhere between “settings menu” and “why is my credit card bleeding?” His assignment appears straightforward: describe grown millionaires in…
PORTLAND, Oregon—Somewhere between the ninth replay of a 19-year-old wide receiver hurdling a safety and the inevitable cutaway to Nike founder Phil Knight checking his pulse, the planet tilts ever so slightly on its axis. Oregon football, that neon-green fever dream spun out of a Eugene apparel empire, has become a rare American export that…
Mo Bamba: The Global Earworm that Dunked on Diplomacy By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the collapse of the Doha trade talks and the slow-motion implosion of the COP climate accords, humanity found a higher calling: chanting “Mo Bamba” in falsetto at complete strangers. The 2017 SoundCloud single by Sheck Wes—named, incidentally, after a 6’11”…
When the world’s attention is fixed on Gaza’s rubble, Kyiv’s blackouts, and whatever fresh horror the algorithm coughs up next, an American football game between San José State and Stanford somehow elbows its way into the international feed. Not because the planet has developed a sudden fetish for West-Coast gridiron—CNN International didn’t cut away from…
Andrew Coltart, the man who once described himself as “the best golfer you’ve never heard of unless you’ve heard of me,” has spent the last three decades proving that modest celebrity is the most cosmopolitan currency on Earth. Born in Dumfries, Scotland—a town whose chief export is drizzle and whose airport runway doubles as a…
Boston College Football: America’s Gladiator Academy and the Global Export of Controlled Chaos By Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the North Atlantic The first thing foreign observers notice about Boston College football is that it is neither in Boston nor—depending on the season—particularly collegiate. The Eagles play in Chestnut Hill, a leafy enclave whose gothic spires…
Kentucky vs South Carolina: A Microscopic Lens on Humanity’s Macro Meltdown By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk, somewhere between a whisky hangover and a diplomatic visa queue From the outside looking in, the annual collision of Kentucky and South Carolina on a rectangle of manicured grass in the southeastern United States is, strictly speaking, a college…
Nine Nameless Refrigerators and One Shared Hangover A Global Dispatch From the Morgue in Tijuana, Population: Everyone TIJUANA, Mexico – If you’ve ever wondered what the end of globalisation looks like, it’s probably a stainless-steel drawer marked “John or Jane Doe #7” in a border-town morgue with a busted air-conditioner and a BBC crew poking…
The Ryder Cup MC: When a Golf Tournament Becomes a Metaphor for Civilizational Collapse By Our Man in the Rough, filing from Marco Simone Golf & Country Club, Rome ROME—In the shadow of a 16th-century aqueduct and the ghost of Berlusconi’s bunga-bunga era, the Ryder Cup’s master of ceremonies took the first tee box microphone…
