The planet is 71 % water, but this week the other 29 % is busy arguing about a 1.82-metre Portuguese scarecrow named João Palhinha. From the glass towers of Singapore to the corrugated favelas of Rio, the same phrase is trending: “Palhinha’s finally gone.” Fulham supporters are sobbing into their overpriced craft beer, Bayern Munich…
Brian Kelly and the Global Gospel of Hype By Our Man in the Departures Lounge Somewhere above the North Atlantic, Brian Kelly—known to his 1.3 million Instagram disciples as “The Points Guy”—is probably sipping a complimentary Krug in seat 2A, serenely oblivious to the fact that he has become the patron saint of post-pandemic wanderlust,…
Gary Danielson: How One Man’s Microphone Became a Global Geopolitical Barometer KABUL—While the Taliban were busy redecorating their new Ministry of Virtue with seized American gym equipment, a 71-year-old from Detroit was quietly causing more trans-Atlantic agitation than a misplaced aircraft carrier. Gary Danielson, CBS Sports’ resident college-football analyst, has spent four decades describing 18-to-22-year-olds…
Flamingo Park, Miami – The Mets and Marlins are at it again, a late-summer chess match played with sunflower seeds and shoulder fatigue. To the uninitiated it’s just baseball: nine innings, two dugouts, one slightly hungover organist. But zoom out a little and you’ll notice the game is actually a geopolitical micro-drama, complete with sanctions…
Cubs Game Today: A Pocket-Sized Apocalypse in Nine Innings Chicago, Illinois – While the rest of the planet busies itself with lesser inconveniences—Ukraine’s blackouts, Gaza’s cease-fires that aren’t, and the Bank of Japan’s valiant attempt to make the yen feel wanted—ninety-seven countries are nevertheless watching a patch of grass on Lake Michigan where grown men…
Blue Jays Standings as Global Thermometer: Why a Fourth-Place AL East Club Matters to the Fate of Nations By “Red-Eye” Ramírez, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk TORONTO—While diplomats in Geneva trade synonyms over carbon emissions and grain corridors, a quieter indicator of planetary equilibrium sits 4,000 miles away under a retractable roof. The Toronto Blue Jays,…
Volleyball Is Nebraska’s Only Working Export Program, and It May Just Save the World LINCOLN, Nebraska—While global supply chains wheeze like asthmatic accordion players and diplomats argue over whose sanctions hurt more, the University of Nebraska’s volleyball program is quietly running the most efficient export operation the United States has managed since Boeing mislaid its…
Carlos Gu and the Glorious Farce of Global Tech Ambition By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between a WeWork in Shenzhen and a Palo Alto juice bar that charges extra for “hope,” the name Carlos Gu began circulating last month with the quiet inevitability of a tax hike. To most of the planet—i.e., anyone outside…
USC 42, Minnesota 25: A Collateral Scorecard for the Age of Collapse From the Bureau of Global Schadenfreude, Los Angeles LOS ANGELES—As dawn broke over the Pacific, the Southern California sun did its usual impression of a nuclear flashbulb, illuminating a stadium built on tectonic denial and student-loan IOUs. Inside, the USC Trojans treated the…
Karen Carney and the Global Theatre of Outrage: How a 20-Second Clip Became a UN Security Council Briefing By the time the clip reached the Mongolian steppes, it had already been subtitled in Khalkha Cyrillic, autotuned into a K-pop remix in Seoul, and weaponised by a Bolivian cryptocurrency influencer who blamed Carney for the price…
A Dispatch from the Heartland’s Coliseum: How Indiana University’s Football Calendar Has Become the Planet’s Morality Play By Dave’s Far-Flung Correspondent, filing from a press box that smells faintly of popcorn and existential dread. BLOOMINGTON, Indiana—Somewhere between the soy-fields and the vape shops, the 2024 Indiana University football schedule has been unfurled like a medieval…
The Curious Case of Trinidad Chambliss and the Geopolitics of a Name By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic Somewhere between a Port-of-Spain rum shack and a Pentagon sub-basement, the name “Trinidad Chambliss” began popping up on encrypted Slacks, FSB burn-phones, and—most damning of all—LinkedIn trend alerts. To the average doom-scroller, it sounded like a…
