Villanova University: A Philadelphian Fortress of Higher Learning in a World That’s Already Flunking Philadelphia—If you squint past the Liberty Bell’s selfie-stick gauntlet and the Eagles fans cos-playing as gladiators in body paint, you’ll find Villanova University nestled in the leafy suburbs like a well-fed cat that knows it’s being watched. From an international vantage…
Monaco FC: A Principality’s Glittering Anomaly in the Age of Football’s Imperial Overreach By Dave’s Locker, International Desk The first thing you notice about AS Monaco FC is that it shouldn’t exist. Not in the sense that, say, democracy in 2024 shouldn’t exist—more like finding a Fabergé egg in a food bank: gorgeous, valuable, and…
Gunner Stockton and the Peculiar American Sacrament of Quarterbacking by Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic Somewhere between the war in Ukraine and the latest TikTok dance craze, a 19-year-old from south Georgia named Gunner Stockton has become the object of trans-Atlantic fascination. To the rest of the planet—where “football” still…
Where in the World Is Georgia Tech? A Dispatch from the Capital of “Wait, That’s Not in Europe?” Atlanta, Georgia—If you spin a globe like a drunken roulette wheel and let your finger land where it may, odds are you’ll hit a place that thinks Georgia Tech is either (a) a new EU satellite campus…
North Texas Football: Where Gridiron Dreams Meet Geopolitical Reality By Our Man in the Airport Lounge (Still Waiting for the Non-Existent Dallas–Pyongyang Direct) Denton, Texas—population slightly smaller than Reykjavík, slightly larger than the standing army of Luxembourg—has improbably become the latest laboratory for exporting American anxiety in shoulder-pad form. The North Texas Mean Green just…
So, Delaware football—yes, the very phrase makes hardened geopolitical analysts choke on their espresso. A state you can cross in the time it takes to mispronounce “Kyiv” has decided to play American football, that padded ballet of imperial overreach. Yet here we are, in 2024, watching the Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens peck at destiny while…
Dabo Swinney: The Last American Tribal Chieftain the Rest of the World Never Asked for By Matteo “Mick” Rizzo, Foreign Correspondent-at-Large ATLANTA—From the glass boxes of Davos to the sweaty favelas of Rio, the planet is currently transfixed by only three things: whether TikTok will outlive the dollar, which hemisphere will first burst into literal…
SMU vs Missouri State: How a College Football Exhibition Quietly Became a Geopolitical Weather Vane By: Our Man in the Upper Deck, Somewhere Over the Atlantic DALLAS—On a humid Saturday that felt engineered by a vindictive meteorologist, Southern Methodist University lined up against Missouri State in something the brochures optimistically labeled the “Arctic Wolf Cotton…
The Global Bazaar of Bang, or How to Arm Your Neighbor in Five Easy Steps By Our Man Somewhere Between the Hague and a Hardened Bunker Geneva—Here, in the city that gave the world both the Red Cross and a 1.50-franc espresso, diplomats still pretend that weapons are merely “controlled commodities.” One floor above the…
The Global After-Party Nobody RSVP’d To: Andrade’s Quiet Coup in the Age of Loud Everything While the rest of the world was busy doom-scrolling through a pandemic, a land war, and Elon Musk’s latest hobby, a soft-spoken Brazilian quietly annexed a corner of global culture that most of us didn’t realize was up for grabs….
The Georgia Tech Score Heard ’Round the World By Our Correspondent Who Still Owes Student Loans in Three Currencies ATLANTA—Somewhere between the peach-scented humidity of Georgia and the algorithmic chill of a Bloomberg terminal, a number flickered across millions of screens this week: Georgia Tech 68, Opponent 65. On the surface it’s merely the final…
San Diego vs Montana State: A Microscopic Earthquake in the Global Coliseum By Diego “Apocalypse Adjacent” Morales, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk If you blinked last Saturday, somewhere between the Met Gala’s corpse-bride couture and the latest BRICS summit communiqué, you missed it: San Diego State University (SDSU) edged Montana State University (MSU) 25-23 in a…
