The Las Vegas Aviators—Triple-A farm club of the Oakland Athletics, though that parentage feels increasingly like an unpaid internship—have lately become an unlikely Rorschach test for the global condition. On any given desert night, 10,000 sun-roasted pilgrims cram into the $150 million, air-conditioned hallucination known as Las Vegas Ballpark to watch men in silver-trimmed jerseys…
Vineland: Where America’s Perpetual Midlife Crisis Goes to Die in Peace and Quiet The name itself sounds like a punch line from a forgotten Scandinavian sitcom: Vineland—population 61,000, median age 38.7, median house price $275,000, median existential dread incalculable. Yet this sun-bleached township in southern New Jersey has become an improbable global mirror, reflecting every…
**The War Nobody Wanted: Wyoming vs Colorado and the End of American Innocence** While the rest of the planet grapples with actual problems—climate change, nuclear proliferation, the slow death of democracy—America has gifted the world its most pressing conflict yet: a legal cage match between two rectangular states that most foreigners couldn’t locate on a…
**The International Incident of Hilaria Baldwin, or How America Exported Its Identity Crisis to Spain** In the grand theater of global absurdities, where nuclear powers play chicken over fishing boats and billionaires race to Mars while Earth burns, the saga of Hilaria Baldwin stands as a peculiar testament to our collective identity crisis—a sort of…
College Football Scores: How 18-Year-Olds in Alabama Are Quietly Running the Geopolitical Risk Appetite of the Entire Planet By the time the sun rose over the Strait of Malacca on Sunday, the Texas A&M–Notre Dame score had already ricocheted through currency desks in Singapore, embarrassed hedge-fund interns in Zurich, and triggered a margin call on…
Paris—In the age when a TikTok of a cat sneezing can upend the Dow Jones, the curious case of LaMonica McIver has become the latest proof that geopolitics now behaves like a drunk algorithm. McIver, a city-council president from Newark, New Jersey—population smaller than a Shanghai subway car—has been elevated by the gods of cable…
