Sir Alex Ferguson: The Last Emperor of an Empire That Wasn’t Even His By our man in the cheap seats, watching from a safe diplomatic distance There is a moment—usually just after the third glass of something brown and Scottish—when foreign correspondents admit that the most durable empire of the late 20th century was not…
Every month, like a grim bingo caller in a fluorescent-lit purgatory, the U.S. Department of State releases the Visa Bulletin—an Excel sheet that quietly decides whether your cousin in Manila will see her fiancé this decade or whether that software engineer in Bengaluru can finally stop pretending he enjoys “team-building” Zoom calls. Across time zones,…
Dream vs Fever: How the World’s Nightmare of Reality Keeps Canceling the Morning After By Our Correspondent in a Sleepless Timezone (GMT – “God, Make it Tomorrow”) Somewhere between the 1% REM sleep enjoyed by the average Tokyo salaryman and the full-blown hallucinations gripping Lagos after three days without power, humanity is running a planetary…
The Mouse That Streamed the World By a Correspondent who has seen too many “Skip Intro” buttons die of neglect Disney+ launched in November 2019 with the fanfare of a small nation-state acquiring nuclear weapons. Three years later, the service has colonized more territories than the East India Company—minus the opium, plus the Baby Yoda…
Lake Tahoe: How a Single Alpine Puddle Became the Planet’s Guilt-Free Vanity Mirror By Matteo “Still Jet-Lagged” Rossi, International Correspondent GENEVA—In the great geopolitical circus of 2024, where every headline screams of melting ice caps, proxy wars, and AI-generated pop stars, Lake Tahoe sits like a smug Swiss banker at happy hour: impossibly blue, clinically…
Champagne on the Titanic: Why Inter Miami vs. Seattle Sounders is the 90-Minute Metaphor the Planet Desperately Needed By the time the referee’s whistle shrilled last night, signaling Inter Miami’s 3-2 victory over the Seattle Sounders in a glorified mid-season kick-about, the world had already moved on to fresher disasters. Still, for the 21,550 present…
Minneapolis, that charming mid-Western city once famous for lakes, lutefisk, and the polite passive-aggression of its inhabitants, has once again elbowed its way onto the world stage with a shooting that left the hometown crowd sighing “not again” and the rest of the planet sighing “still?” Details remain as murky as the Mississippi in springtime,…
The Curious Case of the MLB The Show 21 Patch, or How a Line of Code in San Diego Briefly United a Fractured Planet By Our Man in the Cheap Seats When Sony San Diego quietly pushed Title Update 1.09 to MLB The Show 21 last week—fixing, among other things, a rogue slider that made…
TOKYO—In a cramped conference room high above Shibuya Crossing, where pedestrian herds jay-walk in perfect, pixelated choreography, Nintendo’s stock ticker flashed emerald green. The occasion? The 40th anniversary of a short, mustachioed Italian plumber who has never actually fixed a pipe. Instead, Mario Mario—yes, that redundant baptism is canon—has spent four decades hopping over geopolitical…
Mariners vs Royals: When a Wednesday Night in Kansas City Becomes a Geopolitical Chess Piece By A Correspondent Who’s Covered Actual Revolutions but Still Gets Assigned Baseball KANSAS CITY—Imagine, if you will, the serene absurdity: 30,000 mildly sunburned Midwesterners arguing about a sacrifice bunt while, 7,000 miles east, grain ships tiptoe through Black Sea minefields…
Angels vs. Brewers: A Cosmic Reminder That Even Baseball Is Stuck in Geopolitical Quicksand By Luka Varga, Dave’s Locker Senior Correspondent (currently exiled in a Zagreb café that doubles as a crypto-launderette) MILWAUKEE—While the rest of the planet debates whose navy gets to ram whom in the South China Sea, a smaller, more existential clash…
Seattle Sounders vs Inter Miami: A Cold War in Short Pants By Our Man in the Departure Lounge The chartered Gulfstreams began stacking above Sea-Tac early Thursday—Brazilian pilots, Qatari catering, and enough carbon credits to make a small Nordic country blush. Below, two soccer teams prepared to re-enact the great ideological battles of the 20th…
