Ohio State Football: America’s Gladiatorial Cult Reaches Out to the World By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Buenos Aires The first thing to understand is that in most countries, the word “football” conjures images of Lionel Messi gliding past defenders or a rain-soaked Champions League night in Manchester. In Ohio, however, it summons 102,780…
Minsk, Belarus – The only European capital where arriving diplomats still keep their luggage on the seat beside them, just in case the plane has to turn around mid-tarmac. That small, paranoid courtesy tells you everything about how Belarus—population smaller than greater Los Angeles, GDP smaller than Delaware’s rainy-day fund—manages to punch so far above…
Courteney Cox and the Global Architecture of Nostalgia By Santiago V. Alarcón, International Desk It is a truth universally acknowledged—if only because the internet keeps repeating it—that a single actress in possession of a hair-straightener and a Netflix deal must be in want of a reboot. Thus Courteney Cox, the Alabama-born woman once tasked with…
I’m not sure who Sabalenka’s boyfriend is, and searching the global rumor mill has so far produced nothing more reliable than a blurry Instagram story and a couple of tennis-forum prophets who also swore the moon landing was faked in a Belgrade film studio. Yet the absence of confirmed facts has never stopped the international…
Immigration Appeals Court: Where Hope Goes to Get a Number and Wait in Line Forever By the Global Affairs Correspondent who has watched passports change hands more often than a €500 note in a Bulgarian nightclub. Walk into any immigration appeals court on the planet and you’ll find the same décor: fluorescent lighting that flatters…
Jackson State vs Southern Miss: When a Mississippi Football Game Becomes a Geopolitical Rorschach Test Dave’s Locker, International Desk — Somewhere between the humidity-soaked stands of M.M. Roberts Stadium and the algorithmic churn of a thousand WhatsApp rumor mills, Jackson State and Southern Miss prepared to do battle last Saturday. To the naked eye it…
SEOUL—Somewhere between the DMZ and an overpriced craft-coffee bar in Gangnam, the United States and South Korea are still trying to convince the rest of the planet that their 70-year entanglement is merely “strategic,” not “codependent with nuclear accessories.” The alliance, born in the ashes of 1950 and held together ever since by a mixture…
The Long Walk: A Global Death March in Sneakers By Our Man in Everywhere (Currently Somewhere Between Bangkok and Bogotá) If you’ve ever sat in a budget airline seat so narrow it qualifies as torture under the Geneva Conventions, you already grasp the basic premise of “The Long Walk.” Stephen King’s 1979 novel—written under the…
Wimbledon 2025: A Green-and-Purple Refuge While the World Burns By our man in the press box with a Pimm’s and a grimace London, June 2025 – The All England Club has once again rolled out its immaculately striped lawn like a giant picnic blanket for the planet’s remaining optimists. Outside the gates, Britain’s fourth government…
Zach Calzada, Quarterback Without Portfolio, Drifts into the Geopolitical Void ————————————————————————– If you squint at a world map hard enough, you can almost see the faint contrails of Zach Calzada’s career arcing above the usual fly-over states like a rogue weather balloon—visible, vaguely ominous, and ultimately nobody’s responsibility. Once a celebrated three-star from Georgia via…
MADRID—At 08:37 local time, while Spain’s commuter trains were packed with people pretending to scroll their phones instead of making eye contact, a photograph of Julia Roberts sipping iced coffee appeared on the front page of El País. The headline, translated loosely, read “America’s Smile Lands in Ibiza.” Somewhere in Lagos a WhatsApp group lit…
Baylor University, or “The Vatican of the Brazos” as Texans half-jokingly call it, sits in Waco like a limestone-clad monument to American contradictions. From the vantage point of a journalist who has filed dispatches from Jakarta traffic jams and Siberian tundra, Baylor is both comfortingly provincial and unsettlingly influential—a Baptist battlement that exports ideology faster…
