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…
West Virginia vs Ohio: A Micro-Brawl with Macro-Implications By Our Man in the Rust Belt, filing from a motel whose Wi-Fi password is still “Covid2020!” When the words “West Virginia” and “Ohio” appear in the same sentence, most non-Americans picture banjo music, abandoned steel plants, and a faint smell of coal dust mingling with vape…
ESPN+ and the Great Paywalling of the Globe By Our Man in the Cheap Seats Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, a rugby-mad Namibian businessman tries to stream Namibia’s historic first-ever World Cup win on his phone. Instead, he’s greeted by a polite American voice reminding him that ESPN+ is “not available in your region.” He sighs,…
The Pacific and the Plains meet in Dallas, which is already a geographical punch-line, but the Alamo Bowl insists on staging Oklahoma State versus Oregon as though the fate of hemispheres hangs on which set of teenagers can better choreograph a lateral. To the rest of the planet—currently juggling inflation, war, and the creeping suspicion…
