Athletic Bilbao: The Last Romantic Holdout in Football’s Mad, Mad World By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic In a week when the planet’s attention ricochets between AI-generated popes, crypto-crashes, and whatever fresh insanity the algorithm has served up on TikTok, Athletic Bilbao quietly reminded the world that some institutions still…
PORTLAND—Somewhere between the artisanal kombucha taprooms and the climate-controlled grow-ops that now outnumber Starbucks, Oregon has quietly become the world’s most polite apocalypse. From an international vantage point, the Beaver State is less a geographic oddity and more a pilot program for how the rest of the planet might cope when the bill for two…
The Curious Case of Jalynn Polk, or How a 19-Year-Old Wide Receiver Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Rorschach Test By the time most teenagers have figured out which end of a tax form is up, Jalynn Polk has already been drafted by the New England Patriots, weaponized by Chinese sports-apparel bots, meme-ified by Nigerian football-fan accounts,…
Hull FC vs Warrington Wolves: A Microscopic Fracas in the Macrocosmic Dumpster Fire By Our Man on the Touchline, Nursing a Flat White and Existential Dread The Black and Whites rolled into the Halliwell Jones Stadium last night, a venue whose corporate nomenclature sounds suspiciously like a hedge fund that lost your pension in 2008….
Louisiana v. Missouri: A Lawsuit So American It Could Start a Trade War Over Crawfish and Meth By the time the Supreme Court agreed to hear Louisiana v. Missouri, the rest of the planet had already filed it under “only in the United States,” somewhere between deep-fried butter and presidential Twitter feuds. On paper it…
Bayern Munich: The Bavarian Empire That Outlasted Empires By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Munich, late afternoon. The Marienplatz bells toll exactly once before they remember that punctuality is a Prussian stereotype and decide to stay fashionably Bavarian. In the distance, the Allianz Arena glows like a gigantic discarded Tetris block—an alien mothership that landed on…
West Ham and the Decline of Western Civilisation: A Dispatch from the Olympic Stadium’s Third Tier London, 2024 – Somewhere above the floodlights, in the thin alpine air of the London Stadium’s upper ring, a man in a knock-off Corinthians shirt is explaining to his eight-year-old why bubbles still matter. Below them, West Ham United—once…
It’s March 2025, and Toyota has just issued its largest recall since the company discovered that “just-in-time” also applies to existential dread. Some 8.7 million vehicles across six continents are being summoned back to the loving embrace of a dealership coffee machine that hasn’t been cleaned since 2019. The official reason: a software glitch in…
Atlantic Tempests: How a Caribbean Puddle Party Hijacks the Global Mood By “Storm-Chasing” Santiago Vega, filing from a bar with Wi-Fi somewhere north of the hurricane belt Let us begin with the obvious: the Atlantic Ocean is not merely a large, salty inconvenience wedged between continents. It is Earth’s mood ring—turning from placid teal to…
TALLAHASSEE, Thursday—While COP delegates in Bonn argue over half-degree temperature increments, another climate summit convenes 7,800 km away inside Doak Campbell Stadium: the Florida State Seminoles’ 2024 football schedule, where the only melting ice is in overpriced margaritas. To the untrained eye, it’s a tidy twelve-game slate—Duke, Clemson, Miami, the usual suspects—sprinkled across the calendar…
Brentford vs Chelsea: A Timeline for the Age of Absurdity By Our Correspondent in Self-Imposed Exile, Somewhere Over the Atlantic 1935 – The First Whistle Brentford, then a modest First Division side, beats Chelsea 3-1 at Griffin Park. Newspapers report it soberly, because the world still believed in sentences without emojis. Adolf Hitler is re-arming…
Lainey Wilson and the Great American Brand Export: How a Bell-Bottomed Arkansan Became a Global Stress Ball PARIS — On any given Tuesday, the Café de Flore smells of Gauloises, existential dread, and—since last spring—bourbon. Not because the French have finally noticed Kentucky exists, but because the house playlist has surrendered to a woman in…
