Temple University: A Rust Belt Campus Where the World Comes to Watch America Argue With Itself By Dave’s International Affairs Desk, with a reporter who’s slept in every major airport from Changi to Schiphol and still prefers 30th Street Station’s broken coffee machines. If you stand on the North Philadelphia corner of Broad and Montgomery…
San José, California—If you want to see American exceptionalism reduced to its purest, most comically earnest form, forget the aircraft carriers or the moon landes; come to CEFCU Stadium on a Saturday when San José State University (SJSU) is playing football. To the outside world, the Spartans are a curiosity: a mid-tier program in a…
Casualty, n. – a word the world keeps in its back pocket like a crumpled receipt for something it never meant to buy. From Kyiv’s shell-pocked maternity wards to California’s smouldering subdivisions, the term is waved about by generals, insurers, and TikTok livestreamers alike, each polishing the same grim syllables until they shine with bespoke…
UIW vs Northern AZ: How a Thursday Night Football Game in Texas Quietly Explains the Collapse of Civilization San Antonio, Texas — While the rest of the planet argued over whose navy gets to sink whose fishing boats this week, the Incarnate Word Cardinals and the Northern Arizona Lumberjacks did something revolutionary: they played a…
Botafogo vs. Atlético Mineiro: When Brazil’s Footballing Family Feud Becomes a Global Soap Opera By the time the first whistle blows at Estádio Nilton Santos, the usual suspects—London, Madrid, Abu Dhabi—will be pretending to ignore the match. Their analysts, trained on Champions League spreadsheets and Gulf-state balance sheets, will sip flat lattes and mutter that…
West Virginia vs. Kansas: A Territorial Tempest the World Pretends Not to Notice By Our Man in the Middle of Nowhere, Dave’s Locker International Desk Morgantown, Friday, 03:14 UTC—While the rest of the planet busies itself with minor trifles like the collapse of global supply chains and the small matter of who gets to keep…
Bill Parcells and the Global Gospel of Winning Ugly By Our Man in the Cheap Seats Somewhere over the North Atlantic, between the lukewarm coffee of JFK and the existential dread of Heathrow, it occurred to me that Bill Parcells has quietly become America’s most successful cultural export since the KFC Double Down. The Tuna—part…
In the grand global theater of human endeavor, where Ukrainian wheat fields burn, Argentine inflation pirouettes past three digits, and Tokyo salarymen still pretend karaoke is therapy, a 22-year-old wide-receiver-in-waiting named Jaxon Smith-Njigba has improbably become a kind of Rorschach test for our collective anxieties. The Ohio State alumnus, freshly drafted by the Seattle Seahawks,…
PARIS—In the grand amphitheatre of Roland-Garros, where the clay is the color of dried blood and the Parisian sky looks perpetually disappointed in you, Alexander Zverev appears to be auditioning for a role he never asked to play: the last sane man in tennis. At 6’6″, with the gait of someone who has read too…
Justice Haynes: The Running Back Who Could Outrun Geopolitics (For About Four Seconds) By the time Justice Haynes, Georgia’s latest five-star running back, hits his third stride Saturday, he will have covered more ground than the average U.N. peacekeeping convoy manages in an afternoon. That, dear reader, is the only reliable metric left in our…
Tom Homan, the human handcuff who once served as Donald Trump’s deportation czar, is back in the headlines like a recurring rash. To much of the planet, the name conjures the same shiver you get when an airline pilot cheerfully announces “a brief holding pattern.” From the favelas of Rio to the refugee camps outside…
Bill Belichick, the NFL’s hoodie-clad Machiavelli, has finally vacated the New England Patriots’ throne room after twenty-four seasons, six rings, and enough surveillance footage to make the NSA blush. To the average Boston barfly, this is sports-page melodrama. To the rest of the planet, it is a miniature of how empires collapse: first the satellites…
