Lindsay Halligan, the Colorado-based attorney who quietly became a household name between sips of espresso in foreign ministries from Canberra to Zagreb, is the kind of American export no trade balance ever accounts for. While Washington was busy arguing about tariffs and TikTok, Halligan slipped through the cracks of global consciousness like a subpoena under…
Louis Varland and the Curious Physics of Second Chances By our Special Correspondent, filed from somewhere with decent Wi-Fi and regrettable coffee Somewhere between the fjords of Norway and the potholes of the American Midwest, a 28-year-old right-hander named Louis Varland is quietly demonstrating that globalization has finally reached the bullpen. Once upon a time,…
**Doc Season 2: The Global Morality Play Where Everyone’s Guilty (But Especially the Viewers)** The second season of “The Vow” spin-off has arrived, and humanity’s collective rubbernecking instinct has never looked more cosmopolitan. From Lagos living rooms to Copenhagen commutes, millions are transfixed by the psychological car crash that is “Doc” — a series so…
**Wings of Empire: How a Failing Hockey Team Became America’s Most Honest Metaphor** The Detroit Red Wings, that storied franchise of broken dreams and frozen knuckles, has achieved something remarkable in our post-truth era: they’ve become the most accurate barometer of American decline that money can buy. While Washington polishes its exceptionalism narrative and Silicon…
**Big Brother Tonight: A Global Fever Dream in Real Time** *By Our Man in the Panopticon* GENEVA—While you were arguing over whose turn it is to refill the ice tray, 1.2 billion people from Lagos to Lima were glued to pixelated livestreams, collectively watching strangers argue over whose turn it is to refill the Brita….
Guardians Game Today: How One Ninth-Inning Pop-Up Can Echo From Caracas to Cairo By the Bureau Chief Who Once Mistook a Cricket Match for a Cult Ritual The “guardians game today” isn’t just nine innings of polite Midwestern masochism; it’s a planetary referendum on human hope. When the Cleveland Guardians (yes, the team that swapped…
Marvin Harrison Jr. and the Great American Export Machine By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over the Mid-Atlantic The planet’s most popular unintentional satire—American football—has coughed up another prodigy, and the rest of us are expected to feign surprise. Marvin Harrison Jr., a 21-year-old wide receiver from Ohio State, is the latest specimen…
LONDON – Somewhere between an espresso and a stiff gin, the news reached Fleet Street: James Comey, the 6-foot-8-inch Boy Scout who once ran the world’s most glamorous police force, has been indicted. The charge sheet, reportedly thicker than the average Brexit impact assessment, alleges he fibbed to Congress, leaked like a post-war British pipe,…
Griff McGarry and the Global Ballet of Broken Dreams By our Special Correspondent in Existential Bullpens PHILADELPHIA—At first glance, Griff McGarry is just another American pitcher whose fastball once flirted with triple digits and whose elbow now flirts with medical bankruptcy. Zoom out, however, and you find a perfectly serviceable metaphor for the twenty-first-century order:…
Russell Wilson Retires, World Pretends to Care By L. Marlowe, Chief Correspondent, Dave’s Locker DENVER—Somewhere above the 39th parallel, a man who owns more Super Bowl rings than most countries have functioning airlines has decided to stop throwing an inflated leather object for money. The news ricocheted from Denver’s thin air to the thin patience…
Seve Ballesteros: The Swashbuckling Spaniard Who Made Golf Global (and Occasionally Globalized the Rough) By the time Seve Ballesteros sauntered onto the first tee at Royal Birkdale in 1976—barely old enough to order sangria legally in his native Spain—golf was still the polite preserve of blazer-clad colonels and American network executives who used the word…
RAMALLAH—Drive an hour east from Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean’s carefree hummus-and-hookup vibe dissolves into something older, heavier, and stubbornly unresolved. Welcome to the West Bank, a 2,200-square-mile slice of hill country that the 21st century keeps trying—and failing—to file under “finished business.” Half museum of colonial cartography, half real-time experiment in asymmetric sociology, the…
