Dijonai Carrington and the Geopolitics of a Three-Pointer By Our Correspondent, still recovering from a press-box hot dog in Belgrade PRAGUE—While the planet’s attention was fixed on more traditional forms of brinkmanship—tank exercises in the Taiwan Strait, central bankers playing Russian roulette with inflation, or Elon Musk rebranding another social-media platform into oblivion—an unassuming 5-foot-11…
Antifa: A Four-Letter Word the Whole World Loves to Mispronounce By Dave’s Locker | Global Affairs Desk PARIS—If history has taught us anything, it’s that nothing travels quite as badly as a local street fight. And yet, the brand-name “antifa”—a portmanteau so efficient it could have been cooked up by a German tax accountant—has managed…
Jesus Luzardo and the Global Theater of Overpaid Arms By Our Man in the Dugout, somewhere between the mound and the International Date Line If you blinked somewhere between Caracas and Seoul last week, you probably missed Jesus Luzardo’s 96-mph fastball—an object that traveled faster than most passports and carried roughly the same economic weight…
ATHLETICS: THE PLANET’S MOST EXPENSIVE MASS COPING MECHANISM By the time the sun rises over the Maracanã, it has already set on a makeshift track in Svalbard where three Norwegian scientists jog in minus-20°C darkness, trying to outrun existential dread. Athletics, in its noble guise as the pursuit of human excellence, is really just the…
**The Curious Case of Veronica Burton: How One Woman’s Basketball Career Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Wrong (and Right) with Modern Sport** If you’ve been anywhere near a sports bar in Ulaanbaatar lately—and honestly, who hasn’t—you’ve probably overheard heated debates about Veronica Burton’s defensive rating. The WNBA guard’s journey from Northwestern University standout to…
The Valkyries Are Back, and They’ve Got Global Entry By Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic NORWAY—On paper, the valkyries were always a Nordic HR department for the afterlife: winged middle-managers who skimmed battlefields, filed the résumés of the freshly dead, and escorted top talent to Valhalla’s open-bar networking lounge. In practice, of course, they…
BOSTON – From the banks of the Charles River, the Red Sox continue to do what every global superpower secretly envies: export a mythology so potent that even people who have never seen a baseball can hum “Sweet Caroline” after three beers in a Dublin pub. The team’s 2024 season may look, to the untrained…
From the upper deck of Target Center—an arena whose corporate naming rights have been traded more times than a crypto-punk’s profile picture—one can see the Minnesota Lynx doing something subversive: winning with consistency in a country that treats women’s sport the way a dieter eyes cheesecake—publicly virtuous, privately indifferent. On any given game night, the…
**Shane Bowen: The Unlikely Diplomat of American Football’s Global Expansion** In the grand theater of international relations, where nations grapple with climate catastrophes and trade wars, an unexpected player has emerged from the sidelines: Shane Bowen, the newly appointed defensive coordinator for the Tennessee Titans. While his name might not ring bells in Brussels or…
Ella al-Shamahi: The Paleopathologist Who Makes Extinction Look Like a Career Move By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk London, Rome, Nairobi, TikTok—wherever you are, the algorithm has probably served you a clip of Ella al-Shamahi: wry grin, hijab tucked under a hard hat, rappelling into a Yemeni sinkhole while explaining that the bones below may rewrite…
Trevor Story, the Shortstop Who Outran the American Dream By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Between Boston and the End of Civilisation If you want to understand the 2024 global order, ignore Davos communiqués and instead watch a 31-year-old Coloradan with a titanium wrist swing at a 95-mph fastball. Trevor Story, erstwhile Rockies…
Guardians of What, Exactly? A world tour of the people, algorithms, and heavily armed toddlers who claim they’re keeping us safe. From the marble colonnades of Washington to the fluorescent bunkers beneath Seoul, the word “guardian” is having a moment. It appears in press releases like a polite burglar—never announced, always already inside. The American…
