College GameDay Week 6: The World Watches America Argue Over a Leather Oblate Spheroid By Matteo “Malbec” Moreau, Buenos Aires Bureau Chief Somewhere in the ionized haze above the Atlantic, trans-Atlantic flights are detouring so passengers can catch the final three minutes of Tennessee vs. Texas A&M on seat-back screens. Down below, container ships stacked…
The Accidental Geopolitics of a Thursday Night in Blacksburg By R. M. Delgado, International Affairs Desk Somewhere between the Blue Ridge and the broad Atlantic, two modest land-grant universities will collide Thursday night in what the American sports-industrial complex bills, with endearing provincial grandiosity, as “Virginia Tech vs. NC State.” The rest of the planet,…
It was, in the end, a very American sort of dénouement: the Federal Bureau of Investigation—an outfit that once chased bank-robbing folk heroes through the Dust Bowl—announced it had finally arrested one of its own for allegedly tipping off the Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd. Special Agent McKinley, a man whose career arc…
Oklahoma Schedule: A Provincial Time-Table Reverberates Through the World’s Nervous System By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—While the rest of humanity frets over drone-dropped missiles, crypto crashes, and the inexplicable return of low-rise jeans, a modest PDF labeled “Oklahoma Schedule” has quietly detonated across global supply chains, TikTok algorithms, and at least three European parliaments….
Bruce Arians, the septuagenarian pirate who once coached Tom Brady like a rented yacht, has been spotted in a new port of call: the NFL’s front office. Last week the league announced that Arians will serve as a “special advisor on diversity, equity, and inclusion”—a phrase that, in lesser hands, sounds like a mandatory HR…
Illinois Fighting Illini Football: America’s Midwestern Morality Play Performed on Astroturf by Diego S. Krampus, Global Sportswatcher, Dave’s Locker Foreign Bureau CHAMPAIGN, Illinois – Somewhere between the soy-silos and the endless corn, 60,000 souls gather every autumn Saturday to watch 19-year-olds in orange helmets ritualize failure with the solemnity of a papal conclave. The Illinois…
Lindsey Halligan, Esq.—the flame-haired Florida insurance lawyer who now flies commercial with classified folders—has become the latest proof that globalization mainly globalizes American messes. When a relatively obscure property-litigation attorney is suddenly on front pages from São Paulo to Seoul, you know the planetary news cycle has again been hijacked by the world’s most reliable…
South Carolina vs Missouri: A Diplomatic Incident Disguised as a Football Game By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva Bureau Chief GENEVA—The Treaty of Westphalia, the Congress of Vienna, and now, apparently, Williams-Brice Stadium on a humid Saturday night. While the world’s chancelleries were busy drafting stern communiqués about supply chains and semiconductor embargos,…
Arkansas State versus Kennesaw State: A Microscopic Civil War, Televised for the World’s Schadenfreude by Dave’s Locker Global Desk Somewhere between the Ozark foothills and the outer ring-roads of Atlanta—those asphalt moats we once called suburbs before they metastasized—two modest American universities are preparing to bludgeon one another with shoulder pads this weekend. To most…
RALEIGH, N.C. — While the rest of the planet frets over recessionary tea leaves and the faint possibility that the Doomsday Clock might finally stop bluffing, a modest wedge of the United States has decided the truly urgent question is whether 19-year-olds in matching pajamas can throw an orange sphere through a metal ring more…
WMU vs Illinois: A Microscopic Midwestern Skirmish the World Pretends to Ignore by Special Correspondent M. LeClair, filing from a windowless bar in Kinshasa where the satellite feed keeps cutting out For the uninitiated, Western Michigan University (WMU) and the University of Illinois are not nuclear powers—at least not officially—so the 27-21 upset in Champaign,…
Louisiana v. Missouri: A Lawsuit So American It Could Start a Trade War Over Crawfish and Meth By the time the Supreme Court agreed to hear Louisiana v. Missouri, the rest of the planet had already filed it under “only in the United States,” somewhere between deep-fried butter and presidential Twitter feuds. On paper it…
