The Subcontinent’s Cold War, 50 Overs at a Time By our man with a diplomatic flask in the press box, somewhere between the LoC and the long-on boundary The scorecard, for those who insist on such vulgarities, reads: Pakistan 191 all out (42.5 overs), India 192-3 (30.3 overs). India win by seven wickets, Virat Kohli…
An American Football Program, a Mongolian Coal Mine, and the Fate of the Free World How the Virginia Tech Hokies Became an Unlikely Geopolitical Thermometer Blacksburg, Virginia—population 44,000, elevation 2,080 feet, average emotional altitude somewhere between manic hope and existential dread—is hardly the place you’d look for a barometer of planetary health. Yet every autumn,…
Louisville Weather: How a City on the Ohio River Became a Global Thermometer for Human Folly By the time the smoke from Canada’s record wildfires had drifted 1,500 miles south and parked itself over Louisville this past summer, the usual local complaints—too humid, too many mosquitoes, too much bourbon sweating out of the pores—were replaced…
Riley Keough: The Accidental Empress of Global Grief By Our Correspondent Who Has Also Inherited Nothing But Debt LOS ANGELES–ROME–TBILISI—When Riley Keough was informed last year that her late grandfather’s estate had, in a twist worthy of a telenovela penned by Kafka, elevated her to “sole trustee” of Graceland, the world’s most famous shrine to…
Harry Styles: The Last British Export That Isn’t a Banking Scandal By the time you finish reading this sentence, another nation has just discovered Harry Styles. Maybe he’s touring the neon shrines of Tokyo, maybe he’s strutting through Mexico City’s Zócalo in a sequined jumpsuit that costs more than the average annual wage, or maybe—God…
Infant Remains, d4vd, and the Global Echo Chamber A dispatch from the front line of our collective fascination with tragedy, set to a lo-fi beat. By the time the phrase “infant remains d4vd” began trending from Lagos to Lisbon, most people had already soundtracked their horror with the very track that gave the phrase oxygen:…
**The Land of a Thousand Hills and a Million Narratives: Rwanda’s Global Rebrand** KIGALI—Picture a country that managed to go from genocide to green-washed Davos darling in less than three decades—a sort of national phoenix routine performed without the luxury of a tranquil afterlife. Welcome to Rwanda, the ultimate case study in how to monetize…
From the banks of the Limpopo to the boulevards of Luxembourg, a curious export has been quietly colonizing international group-chat etiquette: Savannah Chrisley, the 26-year-old daughter of U.S. tax-evasion poster parents Todd and Julie, has turned herself into a one-woman diplomatic incident. While her parents serve their respective seven and twelve-year sentences—an American morality play…
Sevilla vs. Barcelona: A Flamenco Funeral Dirge for the Global Game By Diego Serrano, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker When the final whistle blew at the Ramón Sánchez-Pizjuán last Saturday, the 1-1 scoreline felt less like a football result and more like a carefully choreographed piece of performance art commissioned by the European Central Bank. Sevilla’s…
**The Beautiful Game of Nuclear Chicken: How India vs Pakistan Became the World’s Most Watched Family Feud** In the grand theater of international relations, where nuclear powers typically content themselves with the occasional proxy war or trade dispute, India and Pakistan have elevated their seven-decade grudge match into something resembling a particularly aggressive soap opera—one…
Mark Kerr, the Two-Syllable Global Metaphor Nobody Ordered By Our Correspondent, presently hiding in a bar that still accepts cash In the grand, chaotic souk of international affairs, certain names pop up like unsolicited push-notifications from the universe. One week it’s a central banker, the next a fugitive crypto-prophet. This week it is Mark Kerr—three…
R.C.D. Mallorca 0 – 2 Atlético Madrid Son Moix, Palma – Wednesday night In the grand scheme of things—say, the heat death of the universe or the next U.S. debt-ceiling circus—what happened on a humid Balearic island barely registers. Yet for 90-odd minutes, 21,142 humans (and several confused gulls that wandered in looking for paella…
