Alejandro Kirk may call the pitches, but it is Alek Manoah—6’6″, 260 pounds of Guelph-grown thunder—who has become Canada’s most reliable export of controlled violence since the invention of the ice-hockey body-check. From a distance, the story looks heart-warmingly simple: local kid makes good, dominates on the mound, waves the maple leaf, cue polite applause…
The Curious Case of Pete Crow-Armstrong, or How a 22-Year-Old From Manhattan Became a Global Rorschach Test By the time Pete Crow-Armstrong’s latest highlight reel had ricocheted from Seoul’s baseball cafés to São Paulo’s WhatsApp groups, the planet had already decided what he meant. In Tokyo he was the polite American who still bows to…
The Curious Case of Sinclair: How a Three-Syllable Name Became a Global Rorschach Test By L. Marlowe, International Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic PARIS—To the average European sipping an €8 espresso, “Sinclair” sounds like the brand of an in-flight magazine you pretend to read while calculating carbon offsets. To a North American, it evokes either…
Tiger Woods’ Ryder Cup ledger reads like a passport stamped by an overworked customs officer: nine appearances, 44 matches, 13-21-10, and zero victories as a player in the biennial Europe-versus-America death-match. In any other walk of life those numbers would trigger an HR review and a discreet LinkedIn update, yet in the realm of global…
Guyana, the pint-sized South American republic wedged between Venezuela and Suriname, has spent most of its 57 independent years as the answer to a trivia question nobody asked. Lately, however, the world’s energy giants have started treating it like the last unopened bottle at closing time. ExxonMobil, Chevron, and a chorus of smaller desperados have…
Nico Hoerner and the Quiet Art of Global Subversion By “Marcello del Viento,” roving correspondent, currently somewhere between Reykjavík and a dimly lit airport lounge Somewhere in the Sea of Japan, a salaryman streaming a grainy Cubs feed on his phone pauses his bento. In Lagos, a bus conductor toggles between Afrobeats and a pirated…
Electronic Arts: The Global Circus That Fits in Your Pocket By “Roaming” Rodrigo Valdez, filing from a hotel whose Wi-Fi is less reliable than a Russian peace treaty There’s a moment—usually around 3:14 a.m. local time—when the entire planet pauses to watch a South Korean teenager destroy a Swede in a game neither of them…
Electronic Arts, the Redwood City outfit whose logo once resembled a blade of grass trying to look intimidating, has spent the last year convincing global investors that loot boxes are not, in fact, a form of taxable gambling. The campaign has worked modestly well: EA’s share price is up roughly 40 % since January, a…
The world’s newsrooms barely had time to update their “Mass Shooting in America” templates before the Utah story elbowed its way onto the wire: a 15-year-old at a junior high in the town of Bountiful allegedly turned a handgun on himself in full view of classmates, then, in the sort of plot twist that would…
An American Child Bride Walks into a Global Bar: The Courtney Stodden Story as Universal Warning Shot By Our Foreign Correspondent Currently Hiding in a Reykjavik Co-Working Space With Questionable Wi-Fi PARIS—Somewhere between the first croissant of the day and the last cigarette of the night, an editor in France asked me why a 16-year-old…
LISBON—Tonight, high above the Tagus, the floodlights at Estádio da Luz will do what they’ve done since 1954: pretend the rest of the planet isn’t quietly combusting. Somewhere between the 38th parallel and the 401(k) plunge, 60,000 souls will watch Benfica versus Gil Vicente, a fixture that sounds like the title of a minor Graham…
GIRONA, Spain – In a corner of Europe that still believes lunch is a three-act tragedy and dinner begins when the New York stock exchange is already asleep, two football clubs met on Sunday whose rivalry is best measured not in blood feud but in mutual existential dread. Girona FC versus RCD Espanyol is, on…
