Palmeiras vs River Plate: When Latin America’s Cold War Decides to Play Football By Diego “Still Recovering from Quito Altitude” Serrano, International Correspondent RIO DE JANEIRO—Somewhere between the caipirinha haze of Copacabana and the tear-gas aftertaste of Buenos Aires, two football clubs will meet tonight to remind the planet that the Western Hemisphere still runs…
Oxford, Mississippi – In the grand, tawdry amphitheater of American college football, Lane Kiffin is the ringmaster who never quite drops his smirk. Yet even smirks have curfews, and the man who once trolled the Southeastern Conference with burner-phone bravado is now reliably escorted home by the same person who quietly keeps the circus receipts:…
The 28-kilometer sprint between Medellín and its mountain-shadow suburb Santa Fe de Antioquia used to be a three-hour roulette of potholes, roadside shrines, and the occasional armed checkpoint. Today it is a 30-minute glide along Tunel de la Quiebra—eight kilometers of asphalt that feel positively Swiss until you remember the tunnel was mostly financed by…
Nancy Leonard, the woman who accidentally became the world’s most influential energy broker, is currently sipping a flat Diet Coke in a fluorescent-lit diner on the outskirts of Gary, Indiana, blissfully unaware that her name is being murmured in boardrooms from Riyadh to Reykjavík. Eight months ago she was an assistant comptroller at a regional…
Barack Obama: The Last Man Who Made the World Clap Before Checking Its Wallet By Dave’s Locker, International Desk PARIS—Somewhere between the Champs-Élysées and a Nairobi traffic jam, Barack Hussein Obama still strolls in the collective imagination like a well-tailored ghost of what might have been. Eight years after he left the Oval Office, the…
Bill Clinton, the Man Who Taught the World to Love a Flawed Superpower By Dave’s Locker Global Correspondent PARIS—Somewhere between the foie-gras carts of the Champs-Élysées and the kebab stands of Istanbul, you can still hear the faint echo of a saxophone riff that once sold the American Century as a never-ending cocktail hour. That…
Fire Emblem Shadows: How a 30-Year-Old Video Game Trope Became the Planet’s Favorite Political Metaphor PARIS—Somewhere between the eighth espresso of the morning and the third breaking-news alert about another “shadow war,” I realized that the entire planet has apparently enrolled in a master class taught by Fire Emblem’s level-design department. The concept—literal shadows cast…
White Sox vs. Yankees: The World’s Most Over-Subscribed Proxy War By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Somewhere between the Caspian Sea and the South China Sea, a bleary-eyed grain trader in Singapore yawns at his Bloomberg terminal and sees the White Sox are up 4-2 in the Bronx. He doesn’t cheer—he hedges. In the same instant,…
Max Scherzer, the man with two different colored eyes and a fastball that could perforate a UN resolution, has—through no fault of his own—become a walking metaphor for the twenty-first century: dazzling, expensive, and held together by a patchwork of insurance clauses. While the average citizen of planet Earth worries about the price of diesel,…
Cruz Azul vs. Querétaro: A Tragicomedy of Global Proportions By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Somewhere between the smog of Mexico City and the colonial optimism of Querétaro, two football clubs met last Saturday in a match that was billed as a mere Liga MX fixture but played out like a miniature morality play for our…
Global leaders usually exit the stage to polite golf-clap applause; Margaret Thatcher, however, left the theatre on a pyre of burning effigies and champagne corks. From Buenos Aires to Beijing, her shadow still looms like an overly strict governess who confiscated the world’s allowance and then lectured it on compound interest. Thirty-five years after she…
New York City vs Inter Miami: A Proxy War for the End of Empire Somewhere over the North Atlantic, the pilot of a Brussels-bound Airbus noses his jet south just enough that the passengers can glimpse a flicker of red and green below—two football clubs playing on a patch of grass that used to be…
