PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine’s grey shimmer and the 19th-century façades that still pretend the world makes sense, Nick Wright has become the planet’s most unlikely export: a Kansas City–bred, New York–polished sports yapper whose hot takes now ricochet off satellite feeds from Lagos to Lahore. On five continents, bleary-eyed traders, displaced taxi drivers, and insomniac…
YUNGBLUD: A NEON MESSIAH FOR THE POST-NATIONAL TEENAGER By “Stringer” McAllister, filing from a budget airline seat somewhere between Düsseldorf and existential dread The first thing you notice when YUNGBLUD storms onstage—whether in Mexico City’s Foro Sol or a half-repurposed communist-era cinema in Prague—is that passports appear to have been declared optional extras. The crowd…
Global Dispatch: Justin Jefferson and the Mirage of Modern Stardom By Our Man in the End Zone, Somewhere between Reykjavik and Riyadh In the year when glaciers file for bankruptcy and TikTok diplomats negotiate cease-fires, it takes a 24-year-old wide-receiver from Louisiana to remind the planet that hope still sells—provided it runs a crisp 4.4-second…
Moscow, Washington, and the Art of the Sanctioned Deal —————————————- On Monday, while the rest of the planet was doom-scrolling about the price of eggs, the U.S. Treasury Department quietly unfurled a fresh bouquet of sanctions aimed at the Russian financial nervous system. The timing was delicious: just as Donald Trump’s legal calendar began to…
Derrick Henry’s Fumble: A Tiny Football Stumble, a Monumental Metaphor for Planet Earth By the time the Tennessee Titans’ human freight-train coughed up the ball in the red zone last Sunday, it was already past midnight in Kyiv, lunchtime in Shanghai, and—crucially—beer-thirty in every sports bar from Nashville to Naples. Derrick Henry’s fumble was not…
From the neon back alleys of Seoul to the crumbling terraces of Burnley, the name Trey Palmer is being whispered with the same reverence usually reserved for tax-haven auditors and crypto evangelists who’ve just discovered their private keys still work. The 22-year-old winger—on loan from Chelsea to Sunderland, a club whose transfer policy increasingly resembles…
Tom Phillips, the man who once turned the entire internet into a participatory art installation called “A Humument,” has died at 87, leaving behind a planet-wide game of exquisite corpse that none of us realized we were playing. From Lagos to Lima, Beijing to Bognor Regis, his legacy is less a tombstone than a Post-it…
Garnet Fire: The Global Inferno Nobody Ordered but Everyone’s Paying For By Our Man in Geneva, nursing his third espresso and a mild sense of existential dread GENEVA—At first glance, “garnet fire” sounds like the name of a boutique hot sauce marketed to people who own more than one bidet: artisanal, slightly menacing, and destined…
PARIS—Somewhere between the fifth croissant and the third existential crisis of the morning, the world’s sporting press decided that Pierce Clarkson is the new yardstick for planetary hope. That’s a heavy load for a 17-year-old quarterback whose most pressing daily decision used to be whether to top his Chipotle bowl with guac or mild salsa….
Flowers, Ravens, and the End of the World (or, How We All Agree on the Same Apocalypse) By the time you read this, a raven has already stolen the iris rhizomes from a pensioner’s balcony in Kyoto, while in Reykjavík a single poppy has pushed through the tarmac next to a Bitcoin-mining facility. The two…
Hamilton Ravens: The Feathered Oligarchs Who’ve Turned a Canadian Steel Town into a Global Metaphor By the time the rest of the planet noticed, the Hamilton Ravens had already unionized. Not the football team, mind you—those poor Ti-Cats haven’t won anything since the invention of the iPhone—but the actual corvids who roost above Locke Street…
From the vantage of a Parisian café that still smells faintly of Gauloises despite EU tobacco bans, one can’t help but notice that Reese Witherspoon—once America’s sweetheart in a pink bubblegum wrapper—has quietly become a geopolitical weather vane. Her production company, Hello Sunshine, is now the soft-power equivalent of an aircraft carrier, steaming into markets…
