The Buffalo Bills Depth Chart: A Geopolitical Roster in a Cold Zip Code By Our Man on the Thruway, filing from somewhere between Reykjavík and Rochester The first thing you notice, squinting at the Bills’ depth chart from a hotel bar in Luxembourg, is how it reads like a NATO seating chart that met an…
The Fastball That Flew Past Borders: How Aroldis Chapman Became the World’s Most Expensive Metaphor By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you ever wanted a single anecdote that explains why late-stage capitalism looks suspiciously like a 105-mph heater aimed directly at the strike zone of human dignity, look no further than Aroldis Chapman. The Cuban…
The Landman Cometh: How a Mild-Mannered Leasing Agent Became the World’s Most Wanted Middleman By Dave’s International Affairs Desk Mention the word “landman” in Houston and you’ll be offered a bourbon and a non-disclosure agreement. Whisper it in the Niger Delta and someone will check for drones. Say it at a Berlin climate summit and…
Isaac Teslaa: The Man Who Turned a Name Into a Global Punchline By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Pacific It began, as most modern absurdities do, on the internet. Isaac Teslaa—an unassuming Maltese accountant with a fondness for Excel macros and late-night doom-scrolling—posted a LinkedIn update last April that read, simply: “Considering a career pivot….
Nate Landman: The Linebacker Who Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Punchline If you squint hard enough from the cheap seats of the global amphitheater, Nate Landman’s story resembles the kind of parable the World Economic Forum would commission after three negronis: a South African-born, Colorado-raised tackling machine who now earns his keep in Atlanta, proving that…
The Ballad of Joey Bosa, or How One Very Large Man in Pads Explains the Modern World’s Collapse By: Our Man in the Press Box, Somewhere Over the Pacific We open on a Wednesday in the Year of Our Overlords 2024, when the news ticker crawls past like a dying tapeworm: “Joey Bosa, Los Angeles…
Tesla: The Car That Conquered the World While Barely Paying Rent on Reality By “World-Weary” Correspondent, filing from the smoking crater formerly known as Common Sense PARIS—When the Eiffel Tower lit up in electric blue last month to celebrate Tesla’s record quarterly deliveries, French environmentalists staged a protest by chaining themselves to croissants. The stunt…
Teslaa Lions: When Detroit Meets the Serengeti in the Age of Electrified Hubris By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk NAIROBI—Just when you thought the global supply-chain circus had run out of fresh acts, a pride of actual lions wandered into Tesla’s new “GigaSavanna” battery-materials depot on the Kenyan side of the Maasai Mara last week, electrocuted…
The Global Racing Order: How NASCAR’s Top-10 Became a Geopolitical Mood Ring By Our Man in the Paddock, nursing a lukewarm Belgian lager and existential dread When the latest NASCAR Cup Series standings dropped this week, the United States treated it like a casual Tuesday at the Waffle House: loud, carb-heavy, and vaguely apocalyptic. Meanwhile,…
The Green Cathedral of the Andes, Now Streaming Worldwide Dave’s Locker – International Desk Medellín—If you crane your neck high enough above the jacaranda trees and concrete scars of Colombia’s second city, you’ll spot the twin spires of Estadio Atanasio Girardot. Locals call it “la Catedral Verde,” which sounds charming until you remember that the…
The Curious Case of the Pearsall 49ers: How a Forgotten Californian Football Team Became an Accidental Global Metaphor By Our Bureau Chief, Nursing a Hangover in Zurich Somewhere between the almond orchards and the federal prison, the town of Pearsall, California (population 7,229 on a good Friday) produced a semi-pro football outfit called the 49ers….
Asheboro, North Carolina—population roughly 26,000, median income politely described as “aspiring,” and home to the North Carolina Zoo, which proudly advertises itself as “the world’s largest natural-habitat zoo,” a phrase that sounds suspiciously like a dating-app bio—has become an improbable litmus test for whether globalization can be bothered to remember the small print on the…
