Jackson Holliday and the Global Glut of Prodigies By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, International Desk The name Jackson Holliday currently ricochets around sports bars from Baltimore to Brisbane like a wayward Wiffle ball, and for once the hype is not about another crypto-currency or a TikTok sea-shanty. Holliday, the 20-year-old shortstop who still…
Yamamoto: The Name That Travels Faster Than a Diplomatic Passport By Our Correspondent with a Luggage Tag Full of Regret There are only two things you can’t escape in this world: taxes and the surname Yamamoto. From the neon canyons of Tokyo to the fluorescent purgatory of a Frankfurt business lounge, the name keeps popping…
Stanford vs BYU: When Silicon-Valley Nihilism Meets Mormon Moral Fibre on a Football Field and the World Watches, Bewildered From the vantage point of a Paris café where the espresso is bitter and the Wi-Fi is worse, the annual collision between Stanford University and Brigham Young University looks less like a collegiate football game and…
The San Francisco Giants, as any seasoned traveler will tell you, are not merely a baseball team. They are a portable piece of American mythology—equal parts Horatio Alger and late-stage capitalism—exported nightly by satellite to insomniacs in Jakarta sports bars, insolvency lawyers in Frankfurt, and hedge-fund analysts in Singapore who’ve never smelled garlic fries but…
High Potential: A Global Talent Arms Race Where Everyone Loses—Except the Consultants The phrase “high potential” once carried a certain romantic mystique, like “exotic dancer” or “limited-edition NFT.” Now it’s slapped on LinkedIn profiles the way “artisanal” is slapped on supermarket hummus. From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, Lagos to Lausanne, corporations and governments are locked…
México-Japón: A Pas de Deux on the Global Fault Line Mexico City, 3 a.m.—the hour when mariachi ghosts and salaryman zombies share the same sidewalk taco stand. A businessman from Tokyo is negotiating an extra squirt of salsa verde while his Uber waits, meter running like a metronome for two nations that have quietly started…
Huskers: How a Corn-Fed College Nickname Took Over the Planet By the time the sun sets over the Shanghai skyline, a 19-year-old in a knock-off scarlet hoodie is live-tweeting Nebraska’s spring practice in Mandarin. Meanwhile, in Lagos, a betting syndicate is crunching play-action tendencies from grainy YouTube clips of the 1995 “Scoring Explosion” squad. Somewhere…
**The Curious Case of Austin Mack: How a Forgotten NFL Wide Receiver Became an Accidental Metaphor for American Decline** By the time most of the world heard Austin Mack’s name—which, let’s be honest, was approximately never—the 26-year-old wide receiver had already been waived by three NFL teams and was presumably perfecting his LinkedIn profile somewhere…
**From Dublin to Dystopia: Domhnall Gleeson and the Global Art of Looking Uncomfortable** While the world burns, melts, or simply descends into whatever fresh hell the algorithm serves up today, there’s something perversely comforting about watching Domhnall Gleeson master the universal language of existential dread. The Irish actor has become our global ambassador for looking…
**The Last Movie Star: Denzel Washington and the Global Art of Not Giving a Damn** In a world where TikTok dancers become geopolitical pundits and reality TV hosts morph into nuclear-armed leaders, Denzel Washington remains stubbornly, gloriously analog. While the planet burns through its fifteenth minute of fame, this 69-year-old actor from Mount Vernon, New…
When the University of Tennessee at Martin and the University of Texas at El Paso tip off in a basketball game that precisely zero European insomniacs will stay awake for, the world does not exactly hold its breath. Yet, if you squint past the flickering neon of a 10 p.m. EST tip-off and the existential…
The Devil Visits Netflix: How ‘El Conjuro 4’ Became a Global Diplomatic Incident By the time Warner Bros. confirmed that *El Conjuro 4* (or, as the Anglos insist, *The Conjuring 4: Last Rites*) will exorcise theaters next year, the franchise had already racked up a body count in every major currency. More than two billion…
