Chargers vs Chiefs: A Micro-Melodrama for a Planet That’s Already on Fire By Diego “No Refunds” Morales, International Desk The game will be played in Kansas City on Sunday, but the real action is everywhere else. From a windowless bar in Manila where the feed lags exactly six seconds behind Lagos—just long enough for a…
Regina King, the Oscar-winning actress who once told the UN General Assembly that “justice is a global dialect,” has spent the last decade morphing from beloved American sidekick into a one-woman foreign-policy crisis for Hollywood’s ego. While studio executives in Burbank still equate “international appeal” with adding a Londoner villain and a K-pop needle drop,…
Tron: Ares and the Global Gladiator Complex By “Peregrine” Wu, filing from a windowless hotel in Incheon with a minibar that still charges in Deutsche Marks When Disney finally wheeled Tron: Ares onto the D23 stage last August, the applause sounded less like fan-boy ecstasy and more like the relieved sigh of an empire discovering…
YouTube TV: A Very American Export That Thinks It’s the World By our correspondent who has watched the same three commercials in three languages and still doesn’t know what a “cord-cutter” is PARIS—From a sidewalk café where the espresso costs less than the data roaming, I clicked into YouTube TV this week and was greeted…
Sky vs Fever: The Planet’s Newest Past-Time, Sponsored by Everyone’s Panic By Our Man in the Departures Lounge The match-up began quietly enough—one of those slow-motion grudge fights that only epidemiologists and airline CEOs bother to track. On one side: the literal sky, 510 million square kilometres of once-pristine nothing now hosting 45,000 commercial flights…
Giants vs. Cardinals: A Global Proxy War Fought Nine Innings at a Time By L. Marchetti, International Correspondent, somewhere between the duty-free and existential dread of JFK Terminal 4 The latest installment of Giants versus Cardinals unfolded at Oracle Park under the usual San Francisco fog—perfect meteorological cover for what was, in truth, another low-intensity…
Patrick McEnroe and the Quiet Apocalypse of American Soft Power By Diego Serrano, Global Desk PARIS — Somewhere between the disappearance of the last American tennis prodigy and the rise of pickleball as geopolitical metaphor, Patrick McEnroe has become the most useful diplomat Washington never appointed. To the casual observer he is merely the younger,…
Haití and Honduras: A Tale of Two Hemispheres United by the Art of Being Forgotten By the International Desk, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the breakfast tables of Geneva and the barstools of Brooklyn, the names Haiti and Honduras are politely excused from conversation like relatives who drank too much at last year’s wedding. Yet, on…
Houston, We Have a Border Problem: How a Lone-Star Dust-Up Became the World’s Most Expensive Therapy Session By Our Man in the Cheap Seats The Astros and the Rangers—two baseball teams whose names sound like rival oil cartels—are busy trying to murder each other with fastballs and walk-off home runs in a little American regional…
Cam Newton and the End of the American Colossus By L. Marchetti, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk From a rooftop bar in Lagos, where the Naira performs daily acrobatics against the dollar, the highlight reel looks different. Cam Newton—once the NFL’s grinning, Versace-clad demigod—appears in pixelated bursts on a cracked Samsung screen, stiff-arming ghosts….
The Universal Terror of “Unknown Number” A dispatch from the global frontline of unsolicited anxiety By the time you finish this sentence, roughly 47,000 smartphones will vibrate with the same three-word epitaph: “Unknown Number.” From Lagos to Lisbon, the reaction is synchronized: a micro-flinch, an audible sigh, a thumb hovering like a reluctant executioner. The…
Montreal, Wednesday—Somewhere between the racket-smashing melodrama of the Balkans and the polite Scandinavian welfare-state forehands, Felix Auger-Aliassime has emerged as the polite Canadian compromise: a tennis prodigy who apologizes after aces and thanks the net post for cooperation. In a world that can’t decide whether to blow itself up or binge another season on Netflix,…
