Cricinfo: The Empire That Rebranded Colonial Nostalgia as a 24-Hour Global Soap Opera There are only two kinds of nations left in the world: those that play cricket and those that pretend it doesn’t matter. Cricinfo, now cosmetically renamed ESPNcricinfo after a corporate shotgun wedding, is the digital DMZ where the two tribes meet, argue,…
The World According to Margaret Brennan: How One Irish-American Interrogator Became the Planet’s Unofficial Fact-Checker DUBLIN – If you’ve ever watched the global spin cycle and wondered who still bothers separating colors from whites, meet Margaret Brennan, CBS News’ senior foreign affairs correspondent and moderator of Face the Nation. In an era when most national…
The Crawleys Go Global: How a Yorkshire Country House Became the Planet’s Favorite Fever Dream Picture it: while the Middle East was being carved into protectorates with the precision of a drunk cartographer, and Europe was busy stockpiling munitions like a housewife hoarding canned beans before Y2K, a fictional Earl of Grantham was worrying about…
Sharjah, UAE – On a Tuesday night when most of the planet was doom-scrolling about supply chains or oil futures, 27,000 people wedged themselves into a stadium that looks suspiciously like a giant car-park with delusions of grandeur. They were there to watch Pakistan squeak past Afghanistan by one wicket in the Asia Cup Super…
PARIS – On the surface, the 2024 San Francisco 49ers schedule is a tidy spreadsheet of seventeen autumn Sundays, a few Mondays, one Thanksgiving evening (surely to the delight of tryptophan-dazed uncles coast-to-coast), and the obligatory Saturday cameo in December. Yet in the grander scheme—say, the scheme that keeps the lights on in Singapore sportsbooks,…
The Crawleys Are Back: Global Aristocracy, Streaming Servants, and the Return of Downton Abbey By Our Man in the Gilded Lounge PARIS—It turns out the world’s most reliable hedge against inflation, populist rage, and the slow-motion collapse of liberal order is a well-pressed dinner jacket and a butler who can pronounce “valet” correctly. The new…
The View from Abroad: Watching the UK Government as if it were a Long-Running Sitcom with Nuclear Submarines By Our Man in Geneva, nursing his third espresso and a mild case of Brexit whiplash From the banks of the Rhine to the karaoke bars of Seoul, foreign ministries keep a special filing cabinet marked “UK—Handle…
# The Cricket Match That Wasn’t: How a Ball Game Became a Geopolitical Theater The ICC Cricket World Cup fixture between Pakistan and Afghanistan at Chennai’s M.A. Chidambaram Stadium was meant to be a straightforward group-stage contest—twenty-two athletes, two innings, one winner. Instead it delivered a master-class in how the 21st century manages to weaponize…
The Curious Case of the Texan: A Global Parable Wrapped in a Ten-Gallon Hat By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic From a safe cruising altitude of 37,000 feet, Texas looks like a vast, sun-blistered Rorschach test—equal parts oil patch, launch pad, and open-air theology seminar. Down on the tarmac, however,…
The Saints Game Today: A Global Pilgrimage to the Church of Disposable Drama by our correspondent in the cheap seats, somewhere between the 50-yard line and existential dread So the New Orleans Saints are playing again—kicking off at 8:20 p.m. local time, which translates to 3:20 a.m. in Berlin, 11:20 a.m. in Tokyo, and “who-cares…
Miami Dolphins: How a Faded NFL Dynasty Became the World’s Accidental Morality Play An international dispatch by our man in the cheap seats, still jet-lagged from last week’s existential layover in Doha The first thing you notice in Tokyo sports bars at 4 a.m. is that no one is actually watching the Miami Dolphins. They’re…
From the favelas of Rio to the glass-box penthouses of Dubai, the planet’s collective pulse quickens at the same hour. Somewhere a striker in Lagos is checking his WhatsApp for the same team sheet that a hedge-fund analyst in Singapore just screenshotted to his “lads” chat. Today’s football fixtures are less a schedule than a…
