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…
ESPN.com: The Imperial Colosseum in Pixel Form By The (Jaded) Foreign Correspondent Who Once Watched a Mongolian Yak Polo Stream at 3 a.m. PARIS—If you have ever tried to explain to a French existentialist why grown men in Milwaukee cry over a last-second fadeaway, or why a Senegalese taxi driver in Dubai keeps refreshing a…
When Sling TV launched in 2015, the world was still innocent enough to believe that “cord-cutting” was a liberation movement rather than a rebranding of the same old leash. Nine years later, the Atlanta-based service has quietly become the little Trojan horse that keeps U.S. media inside everyone else’s living room, proving that imperialism now…
From the vantage point of anyone who’s ever tried cramming their knees into an economy seat between Dubai and São Paulo, Gwendoline Christie’s 6-foot-3 silhouette already feels like a diplomatic incident. Airlines designed for the average Homo sapiens (average height generously rounded down by marketing departments) simply aren’t built for her; nations, however, are slowly…
South Florida vs. Florida: A Micro-Civil War the World Is Quietly Rooting For By Matteo Vargas, International Affairs Correspondent MIAMI—In the grand theatre of geopolitical schadenfreude, few spectacles delight foreign capitals quite like an American region threatening to secede from itself. From Berlin think tanks to Tokyo trading desks, analysts have begun tracking “SoFloExit” the…
iPhone 17: The Global Ritual of Queuing for Tomorrow While Today Burns By the time you finish reading this sentence, at least three tech blogs will have published “exclusive” renders of the iPhone 17, complete with a hitherto-unimaginable shade of midnight-eclipse-mauve and a camera bump that could double as a helipad for very small drones….
ATLANTA — Somewhere between the peach-scented humidity and the sudden, theatrical thunder that makes European tourists think the rapture has arrived, Atlanta’s weather has quietly become a geopolitical barometer no one asked for but everyone now consults. If you want to know how the planet is feeling on any given Tuesday, skip the IPCC report…
Middle Tennessee vs Wisconsin: A Microscopic Proxy War for a Planet That Can’t Even By the time the final whistle blows in Murfreesboro this Saturday, roughly 97 % of humanity will be blissfully unaware that Middle Tennessee and Wisconsin just re-enacted the global balance of power in 60 tidy minutes of American football. That’s fine;…
BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND — Somewhere between the Black Forest and the Black Sea, a pension-age Irishman is still being asked to kidnap Europe’s collective anxieties and ransom them back in ninety-minute installments. Liam Neeson—Ballymena’s most famous export since guilt—has become a walking Rorschach test for a planet that can’t decide whether it wants to be…
