Ike Hilliard: The Quiet American Who Taught the World to Catch—and Then to Coach—Before We All Dropped the Ball PARIS—Somewhere between the Champs-Élysées and the 7th arrondissement’s latest pop-up absinthe bar, it’s easy to forget that the fate of American football occasionally hinges on a man named after a U.S. president and a smallish European…
Build-A-Bear Stock: When Stuffed Animals Become a Global Economic Barometer By Our Man in the Duty-Free Abyss ZURICH—On a rainy Tuesday that smelled faintly of melted Toblerone and banking anxiety, the Financial Times flashed a headline that made seasoned traders choke on their oat-milk cortados: Build-A-Bear Workshop Inc. (NYSE: BBW) had beaten quarterly expectations—again. Shares…
Gabriel Jesus and the Portable Messiah Complex By Our Man in São Paulo, still waiting for the Second Coming (or at least a decent corner kick) RIO DE JANEIRO — On a continent where the word “jesus” is more often seen on cathedral façades than football shirts, Gabriel Jesus has spent the better part of…
Illinois Fighting Illini Football: America’s Midwestern Morality Play Performed on Astroturf by Diego S. Krampus, Global Sportswatcher, Dave’s Locker Foreign Bureau CHAMPAIGN, Illinois – Somewhere between the soy-silos and the endless corn, 60,000 souls gather every autumn Saturday to watch 19-year-olds in orange helmets ritualize failure with the solemnity of a papal conclave. The Illinois…
The Nationals vs. Braves Tilt as Seen from the Cheap Seats of the World By Our Man in the Upper Deck, Somewhere Over the Atlantic PARIS—If you squint hard enough from the Pont Neuf on a humid August evening, you can almost convince yourself the Seine is really the Potomac, swollen with lobbyist runoff instead…
Mark Andrews: The Tight End Who Became a Geopolitical Weather Vane By Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk MUNICH—Somewhere between the Bavarian pretzel carts and the steins of overpriced lager, the name “Mark Andrews” keeps bubbling up in conversations that have absolutely nothing to do with American football. Last autumn, when the Ravens’ tight end collapsed…
Trying, According to the Planet By Our Man in the Departures Lounge Trying, the verb the whole world has agreed to conjugate badly, has become the last universal currency. From Ulan Bator to Uberlândia, humans are currently exhausting themselves in the noble art of giving it “the old college try,” despite the old college having…
New God of War: How the Pentagon’s Latest AI Drone Swarm Earned a Mythic Title in 23 Languages By the time the first grainy cellphone clip reached Telegram—grey pixels jerking across the Libyan night sky like angry fireflies—military attachés in nineteen capitals already knew what they were looking at. They just didn’t know what to…
Turkey, the Bird, the Nation, the Punch-Line—A Dispatch from the Edge of Civilization by Our Correspondent Who Has Eaten Both ISTANBUL—It is 3 a.m. local time, and the muezzin’s call to prayer collides with the bass line of a rooftop techno club, while a street cat—fat, entitled, and visibly bored—gnaws on a leftover döner kebab…
Vladimir Putin’s Russia: A Global Game of Musical Chairs Where the Music Never Stops By Our Correspondent in a Non-Extradition Country Somewhere between the Arctic permafrost and the subtropical beaches of Sochi, the world’s largest country keeps reinventing itself with the grace of a drunken ballerina on stilts. Twenty-four years after a soft-spoken KGB lieutenant-colonel…
RFK Jr.’s Voice Isn’t Just Raspy—It’s the New Global Soundtrack to Distrust By Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Atlantic, Wondering If the Cabin Air Is Also a Conspiracy The first time you hear Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speak, you think your headphones have slipped into a lo-fi ASMR remix of a 1930s tuberculosis ward. That…
Monchi: The Data Whisperer Who Turned Sevilla into a Global Talent Laundromat By “Lucky” Lucía Ortega, International Desk, Dave’s Locker If you’ve never heard of Ramón Rodríguez Verdejo—known to the footballing underworld simply as “Monchi”—congratulations on your blissful ignorance. The rest of us mortals, scattered from Dakar to Dortmund, now live in the economy he…
