BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND — Somewhere between the Black Forest and the Black Sea, a pension-age Irishman is still being asked to kidnap Europe’s collective anxieties and ransom them back in ninety-minute installments. Liam Neeson—Ballymena’s most famous export since guilt—has become a walking Rorschach test for a planet that can’t decide whether it wants to be…
West Virginia vs Ohio: A Micro-Brawl with Macro-Implications By Our Man in the Rust Belt, filing from a motel whose Wi-Fi password is still “Covid2020!” When the words “West Virginia” and “Ohio” appear in the same sentence, most non-Americans picture banjo music, abandoned steel plants, and a faint smell of coal dust mingling with vape…
ESPN+ and the Great Paywalling of the Globe By Our Man in the Cheap Seats Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, a rugby-mad Namibian businessman tries to stream Namibia’s historic first-ever World Cup win on his phone. Instead, he’s greeted by a polite American voice reminding him that ESPN+ is “not available in your region.” He sighs,…
The Pacific and the Plains meet in Dallas, which is already a geographical punch-line, but the Alamo Bowl insists on staging Oklahoma State versus Oregon as though the fate of hemispheres hangs on which set of teenagers can better choreograph a lateral. To the rest of the planet—currently juggling inflation, war, and the creeping suspicion…
Columbia, Missouri – While the rest of the planet frets over melting ice caps, runaway A.I., and the faint possibility that someone might actually read the iTunes terms of service, a small quadrant of the American Midwest has narrowed its existential dread to a more manageable size: 120 yards of artificial turf and the weekly…
Hyundai’s Alabama Plant Gets a Surprise Visitor: The Department of Homeland Security By Dave’s Locker International Desk Montgomery, Alabama—Nothing says “good morning, Vietnam” quite like a pre-dawn immigration raid on a factory floor. At 5:43 a.m. last Tuesday, while the rest of the planet debated whether AI would steal their jobs, Agents of the U.S….
A Tale of Two Extremes: How “Highest to Lowest Movie” Became the Perfect Metaphor for a Planet Sliding Downhill By the time the algorithm spat out “Highest to Lowest Movie” on every streaming dashboard from Lagos to Lima, it wasn’t clear whether the title referred to a film or to humanity’s credit rating. One click…
ESPN+ at Five: A Digital Gladiator in Rome, Streaming Blood Sport for the Post-National Age By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Geo-Blocked and Existential Despair In the beginning, ESPN+ was pitched as a polite annex to the American living room—an extra $9.99 a month to watch a few more games your cable bundle forgot. Five years…
Wake Forest Football and the Global Theater of Mild Rebellion By Dave’s International Bureau of Existential Sportswriting If the planet were a pub, American college football would be the loud regular in the corner insisting his regional lager is the finest brew ever fermented. From the outside, the spectacle looks like a gilded civil war…
Volcanic ash from Iceland had barely settled on European flight paths when, six time zones west, a modest college basketball arena in Johnson City, Tennessee, staged the kind of mismatch that makes the rest of the planet shrug, sip its espresso, and mutter, “Ah, America, still exporting spectacle over substance.” East Tennessee State—population 14,000 students,…
North Dakota vs. Tennessee: How a Pair of Overlooked U.S. States Accidentally Became a Global Parable DATELINE – Everywhere Else Somewhere between the soy-sauce scented boardrooms of Tokyo and the espresso-stained think-tanks of Brussels, international observers are waking up to the newest geopolitical cliff-hanger: North Dakota versus Tennessee. Yes, the same two states most foreigners…
Booger McFarland and the Universal Language of Ridiculous Names By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Singapore Changi T-3 The phrase “Booger McFarland” drifted across my trans-Pacific flight like a rogue sneeze particle: small, sticky, impossible to ignore. Somewhere above the Mariana Trench, a Hong Kong financier watching ESPN on the seat-back screen bark-laughed at…
