In the pantheon of American secular religions, few cults are as fervent as Nebraska Cornhuskers football, a spectacle so devout that pilgrims from the steppes of Sarpy County to the soy-lattes of Shanghai tune in to watch unpaid laborers in crimson helmets plow into each other for the greater glory of… well, mostly cable ratings…
The Man Who Forgot to Leave the Table A Global Postcard on Gürsel Tekin and the Art of Permanent Opposition ISTANBUL—Somewhere between the baklava and the bitter coffee, Gürsel Tekin has been sitting at Turkey’s political banquet for so long that the waiters have started calling him “furniture.” Forty-odd years in the opposition CHP, and…
Premier League Hall of Fame: A Velvet-Rope Mausoleum for the Planet’s Most Lucrative Circus By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic Let’s get one thing straight before the brass band starts: the Premier League is not a football competition, it’s a planetary mood-stabiliser. Every weekend from Lagos to Lapland, 3.2 billion…
Ben Simmons, the 6’10” Australian who once looked like the NBA’s future, has become a walking Rorschach test for the globalised age: to some he is wasted genius, to others a cautionary tale of pampered potential, and to a growing slice of the planet he is simply that guy who owes everyone money—psychological, cultural, and…
Nina Warhurst and the Curious Case of the Globalized Breakfast Table By Our Man in the Departure Lounge From the frost-bitten outskirts of Manchester to the humid breakfast bars of Singapore, Nina Warhurst has become the unlikely barometer for a planet that can’t decide whether to eat granola or grieve. As BBC Breakfast’s business correspondent,…
The World According to Martin Short: How One Canadian Dwarfed the Globe PARIS—In the grand tradition of small men making outsized noise, Martin Short has managed to become the planet’s unofficial court jester without ever holding elected office or firing a single drone. While diplomats in Geneva trade sternly worded communiqués about carbon emissions and…
LUSAKA—Somewhere between the copper mines that still glint like the dreams of a 1970s commodities trader and the Casablanca skyline that Instagram insists is “just like Spain, but cheaper,” Zambia and Morocco have wandered into the same geopolitical boxing ring. Their fight card isn’t a World Cup qualifier—though God knows both nations could use the…
The Global Pastime Nobody Asked For By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Pacific Baseball, that pastoral hallucination of America’s 19th-century leisure class, has spent the last century smuggling itself across borders like a bored customs officer with a side hustle. What began as an excuse for Union soldiers to avoid Civil…
The FTSE 100: Britain’s Glittering Relic in a World That Moved On By Our Correspondent in London, Where the Rain Never Stops and the Past Never Dies Stand at Canary Wharf on a Tuesday morning and you can almost hear the clink of champagne flutes echoing from 1987—back when shoulder pads were wide, hair was…
**The Quiet Danish Exit: How Kasper Hjulmand’s Resignation Became a Global Parable About Failure, Redemption, and the Existential Horror of International Football** COPENHAGEN – In the grand theater of international football, where millionaires chase inflated leather spheres while entire nations perform collective emotional breakdowns in real-time, Kasper Hjulmand’s recent resignation as Denmark’s manager serves as…
Tom Hanks, West Point, and the Global Theater of Soft Power By Our Bureau Chief for Existential Irony, Geneva It is a truth universally acknowledged that when a beloved American actor dons a cadet-grey uniform, the world leans in—partly out of curiosity, mostly out of the same rubber-necking instinct that makes us watch multi-car pile-ups…
Laura Whitmore and the Global Cottage Industry of Micro-Celebrity By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, somewhere above the Irish Sea Somewhere in the algorithmic ether between Dublin and Dubai, Laura Whitmore has become a case study in how fame now travels lighter than hand luggage and lands heavier than sanctions. To most passport-holding adults,…
