Lincoln Riley, the man who swapped Oklahoma’s endless horizon for Los Angeles smog like a pilgrim chasing cheaper botox, has become an unlikely barometer for the planet’s collective neuroses. From Abu Dhabi boardrooms to São Paulo sports bars, his career pivot is less about football and more about the universal human urge to trade integrity…
A Tiny Ripple in a Very Large Pond: The Curious Case of Tayven Jackson and the Global Football-Industrial Complex By D. Lockhart, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker In the grand geopolitical theatre—where grain blockades, chip embargoes, and the occasional crypto-coup du jour monopolise the front pages—news that an American college quarterback named Tayven Jackson has elected…
South Dakota vs. North Dakota: A Cold-War Rehearsal on the Frozen Prairie By Diego “Frostbite” Valdez, Senior Cynic-at-Large From the vantage of Ulaanbaatar—or, frankly, anywhere with functioning central heating—watching South Dakota and North Dakota square off feels like witnessing two identical twins argue over whose freckles are more symmetrical. Yet, in the grand theatre of…
Somewhere between the Pacific’s gently rotting garbage patch and the Arctic’s freshly-melted real estate, California’s voters have quietly passed Proposition 50—a ballot measure so modest in name (“Campaign Finance: Foreign-Linked Contributions”) that it sounds like a yoga pose for lobbyists. Yet from Berlin boardrooms to Lagos living rooms, the reverberations are being felt like the…
Illinois: The Prairie State as Global Metaphor, or How a Flat Rectangle Explains the 21st Century From the vantage point of a café in Istanbul where the lira is having another existential crisis, Illinois looks less like a Midwestern patch of corn and more like a darkly comic case study in late-capitalist resilience. Once the…
Vijay, the Mononym that Ate the World By Our Correspondent, still jet-lagged in three time zones PARIS—In the duty-free labyrinth of Charles-de-Gaulle last week, a Chinese tourist asked me if “Vijay” was a new airline. Ten minutes later, a Senegalese street vendor in Montmarte offered bootleg T-shirts emblazoned with the same single word, right between…
Satellite dishes bloom like metallic mushrooms on rooftops from Lagos to Lima, all pointed skyward in the same devotional posture: seeking tonight’s televised scripture. In an age when glaciers file for divorce from ice shelves and trade wars are started by typo-prone thumbs, humanity still agrees on one planetary ritual—consulting the sacred scrolls known as…
Will Best, or: How the World Decided One Man’s Ambition Was a Perfect Mirror for Its Own Absurdity by Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats GENEVA—Somewhere between a Swiss bank vault and a pop-up NFT gallery, Will Best—British broadcaster, festival impresario, and walking LinkedIn profile—has become the planet’s latest Rorschach test. To Londoners he’s the…
In the grand amphitheater of American college football—an institution that somehow convinces itself it’s amateur while coaches earn more than the GDP of Tonga—Georgia Southern and James Madison prepare to hurl themselves at one another this weekend. To most of the planet, this is a quaint regional quarrel between two schools whose mascots sound like…
Strictly Speaking: How the Planet Learned to Love the Cage It Built for Itself By our man in the departure lounge, passport ink still wet Strictly speaking, the word “strictly” has always had a passport problem. It shows up at customs with its shirt tucked in, visa pre-approved, declaring nothing but certainty. Yet everywhere it…
Ypsilanti, Michigan—While the planet’s attention ricochets between Gaza, the South China Sea, and whatever Elon has tweeted before breakfast, two universities separated by 120 kilometers of potholed interstate are staging their own cold skirmish. Eastern Michigan versus Central Michigan is not, on the face of it, the stuff of United Nations briefings. Yet if you…
Mumbai’s morning commuter trains still smell of cardamom and diesel, but last week they also smelled faintly of fear; every carriage held at least one passenger doom-scrolling on a cracked screen, transfixed by grainy set photos of Benedict Cumberbatch shambling through the rubble of what used to be a Disney back-lot. Somewhere between Seoul’s stock-exchange…
