Cal Football, or How a Struggling Pac-12 Side Became a Metaphor for Late-Stage Empire By “Special Correspondent in Mild Exile,” Berkeley-adjacent BERKELEY—While COP28 delegates argued over commas in Dubai and the European Central Bank quietly asked Italy for its next fiscal miracle, 50,000 souls filed into Memorial Stadium last Saturday to watch California Golden Bears…
What Time Is the Powerball Drawing? A Global Synchronization of Irrational Hope By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats Every Wednesday and Saturday at 10:59 p.m. Eastern—exactly when decent people in most latitudes are either asleep, drunk, or both—a set of numbered balls is sucked through a Lucite tube in Tallahassee and the planet briefly…
West Point cadets, Kansas wheat farmers, and a global audience of insomniacs tuning in at 3 a.m. from Singapore to São Paulo—welcome to the latest episode of “America’s Collegiate Gladiator Hour,” where a football game between Army and Kansas State is sold as a clash of civilizations rather than what it really is: two groups…
UNC vs Charlotte: A Microscopic Proxy War in a World Already Burning By Our Correspondent in the All-Too-Cozy End Times Raleigh—If aliens ever bothered to tune in to earthling “sports,” they’d probably mistake last night’s North Carolina vs UNC-Charlotte tussle for a particularly well-choreographed food riot. Two bands of unpaid laborers—sorry, “student-athletes”—chasing an inflated sphere…
The Palmetto Putsch: How One Tiny U.S. College Rivalry Quietly Explains the End of the World As We Know It By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Global Desk Columbia, South Carolina—population 136,632, humidity 200 percent, general bewilderment immeasurable—was briefly mistaken for a geopolitical flashpoint last Saturday when South Carolina State and the University of South Carolina met…
PARIS—Somewhere between the genteel pop of champagne corks on the Champs-Élysées and the less-genteel pop of another dislocated knee on the hard courts of Melbourne, Chris Evert keeps resurfacing like a polite ghost at the banquet of modern sport. The woman once known as the “Ice Maiden” still skates through global conversations—usually right when some…
Good morning, planet Earth—please adjust your screens for regional bias and residual sleep. Somewhere between the 5 a.m. call sheet in Burbank and the 8 p.m. rerun streaming in Jakarta, “The Morning Show” has become the planet’s most over-qualified alarm clock. Apple TV+’s glossy dismantling of breakfast television is no longer just a prestige drama;…
The United States Open—once a quaint tennis tournament where polite applause and strawberries-and-cream nostalgia collided—has metamorphosed into a hard-court casino where the house always wins and the chips are denominated in human cartilage. This year, the purse swelled to a record-smashing $65 million, a figure that, if converted to Sri Lankan rupees, could probably bail…
Nevada Football: The Desert’s Last Honest Rebellion Against Global Sanity By Ramón del Plata, International Correspondent at Large Las Vegas—If you stand on the cracked tarmac of Allegiant Stadium long enough, the jet-wash from the next London-bound 787 will sandblast your notebook into origami. That’s fitting: Nevada football is essentially the same exercise—folding something stubbornly…
Stanley Tucci, International Man of Culinary Mystery By “Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk” PARIS — Somewhere between a Negroni tutorial and the precise pronunciation of “pancetta,” Stanley Tucci became the planet’s most unlikely soft-power asset. While the United Nations argues over commas in climate communiqués, the 62-year-old actor-turned-gastronomic envoy is quietly colonising taste buds from Lagos…
Son Heung-min: The Smiling Assassin Who Keeps the World’s Billionaires Awake at Night By Dave’s Far-East Correspondent, nursing a soju hangover in a Seoul hotel that still smells faintly of 1988 Somewhere in Riyadh, a sovereign-wealth-fund accountant just spilled his espresso over a spreadsheet. The line item reads: “Acquisition Target – S. Heung-min, ₤200 million…
PARIS—Somewhere between the first croissant and the third existential crisis, Andy Roddick’s name still flits across café screens like a stubborn pop-up ad from 2003. It shouldn’t make sense: here we are, two decades deep into the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic infinity loop, and yet the Nebraskan with the howitzer serve is trending again—this time because a TikTok…
