ESPN+ at Five: A Digital Gladiator in Rome, Streaming Blood Sport for the Post-National Age By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Geo-Blocked and Existential Despair In the beginning, ESPN+ was pitched as a polite annex to the American living room—an extra $9.99 a month to watch a few more games your cable bundle forgot. Five years…
Wake Forest Football and the Global Theater of Mild Rebellion By Dave’s International Bureau of Existential Sportswriting If the planet were a pub, American college football would be the loud regular in the corner insisting his regional lager is the finest brew ever fermented. From the outside, the spectacle looks like a gilded civil war…
Volcanic ash from Iceland had barely settled on European flight paths when, six time zones west, a modest college basketball arena in Johnson City, Tennessee, staged the kind of mismatch that makes the rest of the planet shrug, sip its espresso, and mutter, “Ah, America, still exporting spectacle over substance.” East Tennessee State—population 14,000 students,…
North Dakota vs. Tennessee: How a Pair of Overlooked U.S. States Accidentally Became a Global Parable DATELINE – Everywhere Else Somewhere between the soy-sauce scented boardrooms of Tokyo and the espresso-stained think-tanks of Brussels, international observers are waking up to the newest geopolitical cliff-hanger: North Dakota versus Tennessee. Yes, the same two states most foreigners…
Booger McFarland and the Universal Language of Ridiculous Names By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Singapore Changi T-3 The phrase “Booger McFarland” drifted across my trans-Pacific flight like a rogue sneeze particle: small, sticky, impossible to ignore. Somewhere above the Mariana Trench, a Hong Kong financier watching ESPN on the seat-back screen bark-laughed at…
Jess Glynne and the Universal Art of Not Giving a Damn By Our Correspondent Somewhere between Terminal 3 and Existential Crisis In the grand casino of global pop, where chips are counted in Spotify streams and the house always wins unless your name rhymes with “Lizzo,” Jess Glynne has quietly become the house wine: reliably…
Rugby World Cup 2025: When the World Decides to Beat Each Other Up Politely By Our Correspondent, Nursing a Concussion of the Soul England, 7 September 2025 – While the planet smolders gently under record July temperatures and central banks play “who can spook the markets faster,” twenty nations have agreed to settle their differences…
Natalie Portman: The Accidental Geopolitical Weapon By the time most passports have collected three sad visa stamps, Natalie Portman has already rewritten the foreign-policy syllabus. Born in Jerusalem, passport-stamped in Washington, educated at Harvard, Oscar-polished in Los Angeles, and now—because the world insists on tidy narratives—drafted into the culture wars of half a dozen capitals….
The Ballad of JJ McCarthy, or How a Kid from La Grange Park Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Prop Somewhere between the Danube and the Mekong, foreign-policy wonks are quietly updating their risk matrices because a 21-year-old quarterback with a Roman-numeral nickname just got drafted by the Minnesota Vikings. The name is JJ McCarthy—two initials so…
Somewhere between the lapping of Lake Michigan and the ghost of Al Capone’s violin case lies Chicago, a city that still insists on wearing its 1893 World’s Fair monocle while everyone else has moved on to augmented-reality headsets. To the foreign visitor, the place feels like a museum where the exhibits occasionally jump the velvet…
Austin Peay vs. Georgia: When the World’s Problems Pause for 40 Minutes of Manufactured Hope by Diego Morales, International Correspondent-at-Large The University of Georgia Bulldogs—an outfit valued somewhere between a Baltic nation’s GDP and Jeff Bezos’ weekend yacht budget—took the floor Saturday against Austin Peay State University, whose annual athletics subsidy is roughly what the…
Morgan Rogers and the Grand Illusion of Modern Football By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent (Still Jet-Lagged in Dubai Duty-Free) There is a moment—usually around the 73rd minute, when the floodlights hum like tired cicadas and the stadium Wi-Fi finally buckles under 60,000 TikTok uploads—when a player like Morgan Rogers reminds the planet why it collectively agreed…
