Juventus v Atalanta: A Derby for the Age of Collapse by our man in Turin, still pretending the espresso is drinkable The Allianz Stadium lights flickered on at dusk like the last functioning bulbs in a bankrupt casino, illuminating a clash that was never just about three points. Juventus versus Atalanta has quietly become the…
McIlroy: The World’s Quietest Superpower By our man in the clubhouse bar, nursing a tepid G&T and an existential crisis that looks suspiciously like a scorecard. Somewhere between the 14th green and the 19th hole, Rory McIlroy has become the planet’s most polite geopolitical force. While other superpowers rattle sabres, devalue currencies, or throw perfectly…
Louisville vs Pittsburgh: When Two Rust-Belt Cinderellas Try to Waltz on the Same Cracked Ballroom Floor By Matteo “Still Jet-Lagged” Ricci, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere above the Ohio River, a passenger jet banks left and the in-flight map helpfully labels two glowing dots: Louisville, Kentucky and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. To the average European sipping €9…
CINCINNATI VS KANSAS: A GLOBAL AUDIENCE TRIES TO CARE By Lila Marquez, Senior Foreign Correspondent (and part-time existentialist) The alert pinged from Lagos to Lisbon, from Seoul to São Paulo: “Cincinnati vs Kansas—LIVE.” Somewhere in a Jakarta co-working space, a crypto-trader looked up from his collapsing portfolio, blinked twice, and asked, “Which sport is this,…
South Africa vs Argentina: When the World’s Problem Children Trade Playgrounds By our jaundiced correspondent in the cheap seats of the global amphitheatre If geopolitics were a high-school reunion, South Africa and Argentina would be the two former head prefects now chain-smoking behind the bike shed, swapping stories about how the headmaster still owes them…
The Utah State Aggies, a football program whose greatest victories usually involve convincing 18-year-olds that Logan in February is “quaint,” have improbably become a geopolitical weather vane. From the vantage point of a barstool in Sarajevo—where the local side has been relegated so often it should qualify for EU development funds—the Aggies’ 2023 season offers…
Rutgers vs. Minnesota: A Microscopic Proxy War in the Great American Colosseum Byline: “Roving” Ravi Mehta, tallying existential scores from a safe distance Somewhere between the 41st parallel and the longitudes of self-delusion, two land-grant universities—Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities—will collide on a rectangle of Astroturf…
From the comfort of a rain-lashed café in Lisbon, where locals fret more about the price of sardines than the price of oil, the satellite feed flickers to life. There it is: UCF versus Kansas State, a collision of acronyms and ambitions being beamed to every corner of the planet where people still believe a…
PARIS—At 3:17 p.m., while the rest of humanity pretends to work, a discreet brass plaque on Avenue Foch begins to glow with the quiet satisfaction of a slot machine that just hit triple cherries. Behind the door: Maître Sylvie Arquette, avocate en droit de la famille, billing €950 an hour to untie the Gordian knot…
Arda Güler: The 19-Year-Old Kid Who Just Made Silicon Valley, Bollywood, and Wall Street Care About La Liga By the time you finish this sentence, Arda Güler will have gained another 3,000 Instagram followers, two Premier League scouts will have updated their flight alerts, and a crypto-bro in Singapore will have minted an NFT of…
The Scottish Premiership: A Cold, Damp Mirror Held Up to the World By Our Correspondent, freshly thawed after a Glasgow night bus Somewhere between the North Sea and the North Atlantic lies a league that is routinely mistaken for a weather report. The Scottish Premiership—twelve clubs, four seasons in one afternoon, and the global economy’s…
Meg Jones Is Not a Person—She’s a Mirror the Whole Planet Keeps Checking By the time you read this, the name “Meg Jones” has already ping-ponged through a dozen time zones, been mistranslated in three alphabets, and trended in at least one country whose leader still thinks Wi-Fi is witchcraft. From Lagos laundromats to Siberian…
