Buffalo, New York – Population: 278,000, Average January temperature: –3 °C, Collective blood-alcohol level on game day: incalculable. Thousands of kilometres away, the good citizens of Baltimore are busy convincing themselves that crab cakes and Old Bay seasoning constitute a personality. Between these two post-industrial monuments to American decline, an oval ball will be hurled…
The Curious Case of the Pearsall 49ers: How a Forgotten Californian Football Team Became an Accidental Global Metaphor By Our Bureau Chief, Nursing a Hangover in Zurich Somewhere between the almond orchards and the federal prison, the town of Pearsall, California (population 7,229 on a good Friday) produced a semi-pro football outfit called the 49ers….
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…
Sacramento State vs Nevada: A Microscopic Tilt Beneath the Shadow of a Dying Empire By Our Correspondent in Exile, Somewhere East of Reason From the vantage point of a damp café in Sarajevo—where the espresso tastes like history and the Wi-Fi still drops every time a NATO convoy rumbles past—last night’s Sacramento State Hornets versus…
Patrick McEnroe and the Quiet Apocalypse of American Soft Power By Diego Serrano, Global Desk PARIS — Somewhere between the disappearance of the last American tennis prodigy and the rise of pickleball as geopolitical metaphor, Patrick McEnroe has become the most useful diplomat Washington never appointed. To the casual observer he is merely the younger,…
Kecoughtan High School: Where American Adolescence Meets the Apocalypse—A Dispatch from the Frontlines of Global Decline By Dave’s International Affairs Desk Hampton, Virginia—If you want to see the future of the planet laid out like a poorly supervised group project, buy a one-way ticket to Kecoughtan High School. From the outside it’s a red-brick rectangle…
