The view from the Radisson Blu Plaza’s 34th-floor bar is, to be polite, unnervingly tidy: a Lego diorama of fjords, forests and social democracy, all lit by the low-wattage glow of collective guilt about being too comfortable. Oslo—population smaller than a Shanghai rush-hour platform—has managed to turn itself into a global Rorschach test. The rest…
SÃO PAULO—Somewhere between the papaya-colored favela lights and the 24-hour sushi robots, I found myself asking an algorithm for “grocery near me.” The phone, ever the obedient courtier, spat back a map studded with red pins: a Carrefour the size of Liechtenstein, a Korean mom-and-pop that doubles as a cryptocurrency exchange, and, for the romantics,…
The word “brave” used to come with a body count. Leonidas at Thermopylae, Harriet Tubman on the Underground Railroad, the anonymous soul who first looked at a blue-ringed octopus and thought, “I wonder how that tastes.” Today, the term is more likely to describe a middle-manager who posts a selfie from his standing desk captioned…
The Basque Country and the Balearics—two Spanish regions that have spent centuries perfecting the art of polite separatism—met again on the pitch last night, and the world barely blinked. Real Sociedad versus RCD Mallorca: a fixture that sounds like the opening line of a shaggy-dog joke about two autonomous communities walking into a bar. Yet…
PARIS — Let us now praise famous backhands. Serena Williams, the only American export more durable than Boeing jets and twice as likely to leave smoking craters in her wake, has ostensibly exited the arena. The official line is “evolving away from tennis,” a euphemism so Silicon-Valley it practically comes with stock options and a…
Atlético Madrid 1 – 0 Rayo Vallecano: A Tiny Earthquake in the Global Order MADRID, 26 May – Somewhere between the seventh minute and the ninety-third, the entire planet kept turning, stock markets fluctuated, and three different governments quietly changed their minds about a cease-fire. Yet inside the Wanda Metropolitano, the only tremor that mattered…
Dinamo Zagreb vs Fenerbahçe: A Balkan Derby for the Age of Geopolitical Free Shipping By Our Man in the Departure Lounge ZAGREB—On Wednesday evening, Maksimir Stadium will host the latest installment of Europe’s longest-running feud between people who insist they’re nothing alike. Dinamo Zagreb versus Fenerbahçe is nominally a Champions League qualifier, but in the…
The Curious Case of Joanna Page: How a Welsh Actress Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Bellwether To the uninitiated, Joanna Page is merely the cherubic Welsh actress who once spent Christmas with a cartoon bear and, in a moment of festive delirium, convinced an entire nation that Martin Freeman was rom-com material. But step back—say, to…
Paul Toboni: The Accidental Oracle of Global Baseball Economics By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between the rice paddies of Nara and the fluorescent-lit war rooms of Major League Baseball’s Manhattan mothership, Paul Toboni has become the unlikely cartographer of a sport’s global future. Officially he’s the San Francisco Giants’ Director of Pro Scouting, a…
**Two Clubs, One Planet: Real Betis vs Nottingham Forest and the Absurd Theatre of Global Fandom** On Thursday evening, the Estadio Benito Villamarín will witness a collision of two football clubs whose combined histories read like a darkly comic opera about human hope: Real Betis—Seville’s perpetually heartbroken romantics—and Nottingham Forest, who once conquered Europe but…
Betis vs. Nottingham Forest: A Dispatch from the Edge of Civilization Somewhere in the Mediterranean twilight, Real Betis is preparing to host Nottingham Forest in a fixture that, on paper, looks like a quaint Europa League group-stage curiosity. In reality, it is a geopolitical mood ring, flashing crimson every time the global order hiccups. On…
Nolan Smith and the Great American Export: How One Linebacker Became a Global Mood Ring By Our Man in the Departure Lounge Somewhere between the duty-free tequila and the boarding call for Gate C-17, it struck me that Nolan Smith is less a football player than a perfectly timed cultural shipment. The Philadelphia Eagles’ freshly…
