Rice vs Charlotte: A Clash So Local It Might Actually Matter to the Rest of the Planet Somewhere between the South China Sea’s latest near-collision and the European Central Bank’s newest interest-rate séance, two American college-football programs—Rice University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte—will collide in a contest that, on paper, is about…
Shaquil Barrett and the Quiet Collapse of American Exceptionalism By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere between Reykjavík and regret When Shaquil Barrett announced his retirement from the NFL this week, the news ping-ponged across continents with all the urgency of a slow-motion TikTok. In Lagos, the headline ran under a fuel-price ticker; in…
From the Green Bay Packers’ frozen tundra to the frost-bitten edges of Siberia, the name Tucker Kraft is currently being muttered in accents ranging from Wisconsin dairy-farm flat to Singaporean finance-dialect crisp. How, you ask, did a second-year tight end from South Dakota State become a geopolitical Rorschach test? Simple: in a world where supply-chain…
Green Bay, Wisconsin—population 100,000, annual snowfall 48 inches, and, as of last Sunday, the temporary epicenter of global schadenfreude. Tight end Tucker Kraft, whose last name sounds like a budget German cheese spread, tore his pectoral muscle during what coaches optimistically call “non-contact drills,” a phrase that translates in any language to “nobody touched him,…
Jaylen Waddle and the Glorious Commodification of Human Explosiveness by Dave’s International Desk of Controlled Chaos Miami, USA — Somewhere in a climate-controlled war room that smells faintly of sunscreen and venture capital, Jaylen Waddle is being discussed not as a wide receiver but as a unit of export-grade velocity. The Dolphins’ No. 17 is…
The Last Good Man Is Dead—Again by Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker, 12 June 2024 CAPE TOWN—Every country keeps a folk hero in the attic like a moth-eaten flag, ready to be unfurled whenever the national conscience needs a good dry-cleaning. South Africa’s particular antique is Wolraad Woltemade, a retired dairy employee who, on 1 June 1773,…
Manchester, Tuesday, 04:02 a.m. local—while the rest of England argues about the price of eggs, Marcus Rashford has managed to become a geopolitical Rorschach test. A 25-year-old footballer whose left foot can bend physics now finds himself bending the entire post-Brexit narrative arc, which is quite a workload for someone who still gets ID’d at…
Guardians of the Schedule: How a Cleveland Baseball Calendar Became a Global Omen The moment the Cleveland Guardians released their 2024 regular-season slate, currency traders in Singapore reportedly paused mid-sip, AI models in Zurich re-weighted their “probability of spontaneous human joy,” and a shipping clerk in Lagos printed the 162-game grid, taped it above his…
FDX Stock: When the World’s Packages Become the World’s Problems By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere above the Pacific, a Boeing 757 with a purple tail is hauling 60 tonnes of iPhone cases, chemotherapy drugs, and a single, inexplicable box marked “live tarantulas—fragile.” Down on the ground, that aircraft is also hauling something weightier:…
Tuesday night saw the planet’s most popular recurring panic attack—international football—deliver another batch of scores that simultaneously mattered to billions and, cosmically speaking, meant absolutely nothing. Still, we all agreed to pretend otherwise, because it beats reading quarterly inflation reports. In Doha, Argentina beat Croatia 3-0 in a “friendly” so chummy that at one point…
Clayton Kershaw Throws Curveballs at the End of History by Our Man in the Bleachers, Somewhere Over the Pacific There is, apparently, still a place on Earth where 50,000 people will pay triple-digit sums to watch one man throw a baseball 95 miles per hour with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker suffering from obsessive-compulsive…
José Ramírez and the Weight of Two Continents by our correspondent in the cheap seats, watching the world self-destruct on a 4-inch screen Somewhere between the manicured lawns of Cleveland’s Progressive Field and the dust-caked municipal diamonds of Baní, Dominican Republic, José Ramírez is busy proving that globalisation isn’t just a buzzword consultants toss around…
