The Ballad of Ken Rosenthal: How a Bow-Tied Oracle in Short Pants Explains a Fractured Planet Somewhere between the seventh-inning stretch and the next geopolitical implosion, Ken Rosenthal keeps polishing his spectacles. To the uninitiated, the 61-year-old MLB Network insider is merely the man in the two-tone bow tie who knows which free-agent outfielder the…
Cricbuzz: The Digital Colosseum Where Eleven Nations Pretend Cricket Still Matters to the Rest of Us by Our Man in the Pavilion Bar, Nursing a Warm G&T and Existential Dread Somewhere between the fall of the British Empire and the rise of TikTok attention spans, cricket convinced itself it was still a global sport. Enter…
Rasmus Højlund to Napoli: A Nordic Tragedy in Three Acts, Starring the Global Transfer Market as Itself The rumour, like a cheap espresso in Naples’ back alleys, is short, bitter, and impossible to ignore: Manchester United’s Viking-in-residence, Rasmus Højlund, is being courted by Napoli. On paper it’s a mere line in the sports pages; in…
Dying Light: The Beast – A Post-Apocalyptic Mirror Held Up to a Planet Already Half-Dead by Dave’s International Affairs Correspondent, still waiting for the vaccine against bad decisions Somewhere between the radioactive puddle that was once Chernobyl and the smog-choked skyline of Lahore, Techland announced “Dying Light: The Beast,” a standalone expansion so grim it…
Aloha, collateral damage: why the University of Hawai‘i football program has become the world’s most ironic geopolitical metaphor By the time the University of Hawai‘i Rainbow Warriors kicked off their 2024 season, the South China Sea had already seen three near-collision incidents between rival coast guards, the Red Sea was a floating insurance write-off, and…
The Manchester Derby: A 90-Minute Metaphor for a World Splitting at the Seams By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic LONDON—In a week when the Arctic Circle recorded its first-ever 29 °C and the global debt clock ticked past $315 trillion, roughly 700 million people still found the emotional bandwidth to…
The word “lakers” once conjured images of placid water, maybe a loon or two, and retirees in sunhats bragging about their cottage’s septic tank. Today, in the global lexicon, it is shorthand for the Los Angeles Lakers—an itinerant circus that has managed to export American angst, sneaker theology, and the concept of competitive nepotism to…
West Nile Virus: A Global Mosquito’s Grand Tour By the time you finish this sentence, roughly 47 new humans will have been bitten by mosquitoes. One or two of them—depending on the neighborhood and the state of local sanitation budgets—might be welcoming West Nile virus (WNV) into their bloodstream. The virus, discovered in Uganda’s West…
Raiders vs Broncos: A Proxy War in Pads and Helmets By Silas Crowe, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker From the vantage point of a press box high above Las Vegas’s neon necropolis, one can almost hear the geopolitics crackling beneath the cleats. The Raiders and Broncos are, on paper, an American football fixture—one of those tidy…
The Jaguar is Dead, Long Live the Jaguar By Correspondent-at-Large, Nairobi-Paris-São Paulo Triangle Somewhere between a Goldman Sachs boardroom and the smouldering edge of the Amazon, the word “jaguar” is being redefined in real time. To Wall Street, it is a brand of luxury electric SUV whose carbon footprint is marketed as “net-zero” (because the…
Primodos: The Little White Pill That Traveled the World—And Left a Trail of Questions By the time the first Primodos tablet dissolved on a British tongue in 1958, the drug had already perfected the art of looking harmless. A modest white disc, no bigger than a shirt button, it was marketed as a pregnancy test…
Gavin Adcock and the Accidental Anthem of a Burning Planet By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic If you blinked somewhere between the wildfire smoke of Athens and the flash-flood warnings in Seoul, you might have missed Gavin Adcock—the former Georgia offensive lineman turned country-rock troubadour—quietly topping iTunes in twelve countries….
