Moon Tonight: The World’s Oldest Reality Show Returns for Another Season By Our Man in the Cold Empty Void Dateline: Everywhere and Nowhere—Tonight, the moon will rise above Pyongyang and Paris, above the favelas of Rio and the gated compounds of Davos, above both the last polar bear and the newest refugee camp. Same orb,…
Cardinals vs Mariners: A Proxy War Between Two Empires Nobody Asked For By Our Man in the Upper Deck, Nursing a $14 Beer and Existential Dread Tokyo—If you squint through the smog of a Wednesday morning in Shibuya, the giant outdoor screen above the crossing is looping the same highlight: St. Louis’ Lars Nootbaar—yes, that’s…
Chicago — It began, as most modern apocalypses do, with a push notification: “Bears vs Vikings: 3 p.m. local, 21:00 GMT, 06:00 tomorrow in Seoul.” Somewhere between the algorithmic chirp and the global reflex to refresh the scoreboard, the planet’s attention pivoted to a frozen rectangle of Midwestern sod where 106 padded mercenaries pretended the…
The world’s oldest multinational, founded somewhere between Babylonian ledgers and Instagram DMs, has just posted record profits again. Astrology—once the exclusive domain of emperors who needed a cosmic thumbs-up before invading Gaul—now enjoys 2.3 billion daily active believers, skeptics, and doom-scrollers who pretend they don’t know their rising sign. From Lagos TikTokers timing crypto buys…
Guatemala vs. The Rest of the World: A David-sized Slingshot Aimed at the Goliath of Global Indifference By Our Correspondent, still brushing volcanic ash off his notebook At first glance, “Guatemala vs” looks like an unfinished Twitter feud—half a headline, half a dare. Yet the open-ended preposition is precisely the point. In courtrooms from Washington…
Chicago Bears: A Global Parable of Perpetual Rebuilding By a correspondent who has watched empires rise and fall faster than a Bears third-quarter lead The Chicago Bears are, at first glance, a regional curiosity: 53 men in navy and orange chasing an oblong ball beside a lake so frigid it could double as a Russian…
Harrison Smith and the Curious Global Cult of the American Safety Dateline: Somewhere over the Atlantic, where Wi-Fi costs more than a decent bottle of Moldovan wine and still drops every time the plane hits a cloud. From this altitude, the spectacle of modern fandom looks remarkably uniform: whether you’re in Lagos, Lyon, or Lahore,…
Kirk Cousins Has Entered the Transfer Portal to the Rest of the Planet By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic MINNEAPOLIS—While the planet busies itself with minor trifles—Ukrainian power grids being redecorated by Iranian drones, the Arctic Circle auditioning for a role as the next Mediterranean, and Sri Lanka experimenting with…
Tonight, somewhere between the Arctic Circle and the last functioning Wi-Fi router in Gaza, twenty-two million souls will crane their necks at the same glowing rectangle to ask the same question: “What football game is on tonight?” The query itself is a kind of secular prayer—uttered in seven thousand languages, muttered over instant noodles in…
ZURICH—The first time I heard the phrase “GSH bears” I assumed it was either a typo for “gosh, bears” or some obscure crypto-token named after a ursine deity. In fact, it turns out to be the Global Synthetic Hedge—bears, plural, because nothing this catastrophically leveraged ever travels alone. Picture a flock of algorithmic grizzlies unleashed…
**The Age of Gridiron Diplomacy: How JJ McCarthy’s 21 Years Shook the Geopolitical Chessboard** In a world where nuclear codes rest in the hands of men who can’t operate TikTok, the international community found itself breathlessly consulting Wikipedia today to answer the burning question: exactly how old is University of Michigan quarterback JJ McCarthy? The…
**The Universal Language of Buck: How America’s Most Polarizing Sportscaster Became a Global Mirror** In the pantheon of American sports broadcasting, few names evoke such visceral reactions as Joe Buck—a man whose voice has narrated more championship collapses than a Greek chorus on amphetamines. Yet beyond the baseball diamonds and football fields of the United…
