Eastern Kentucky vs Marshall: Appalachian Grudge Match as Proxy Theater for the World’s Slow-Motion Collapse Dave’s Locker – International Desk HUNTINGTON, West Virginia – While COP28 delegates in Dubai were congratulating themselves on a lukewarm promise to maybe, possibly, think about phasing down fossil fuels “when convenient,” roughly 22,000 people wedged themselves into two decaying…
Oregon vs Northwestern: A Gridiron Rorschach Test for the Apocalypse By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, Somewhere Over the Pacific If you squint hard enough from thirty-five thousand feet, Saturday’s Oregon-Northwestern skirmish looks less like a football game and more like a polite, padded referendum on which flavor of decline the planet prefers. Out…
Indiana State Football, or How a 2-9 Season Quietly Explains the Collapse of Western Civilization By “Roving” Roisin MacAllister, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk PARIS—On a drizzly November afternoon along the Seine, the bistros are abuzz with talk of pension strikes, Ukrainian grain corridors, and whether the Sycamores can finally break their 39-game road…
Washington Metro: The World Watches While America’s Subway Becomes a Global Cautionary Tale by Ignacio “Nacho” Valdez, International Correspondent-at-Large Rome has the Colosseum, Paris has the Louvre, and Washington, D.C. has WMATA: a living exhibit where commuters shuffle past melted cables, gaping platform pits, and the occasional flaming escalator—all while the planet takes notes. In…
Landry Shamet and the Quiet Collapse of the American Basketball Empire By Our Man in Davos, nursing a lukewarm macchiato and a deeper existential chill ZURICH—Somewhere between the fifteenth and sixteenth floor of the Marriott here—where hedge-fund analysts compare scars and room-service prices—Landry Shamet’s name surfaced over breakfast like a half-remembered password. The context: whether…
**From the Ruins of Civilization, a Burger Rises: How Rhode Island’s “Crazy Burger” Became the Last Religion Standing** In a world where democracy teeters like a drunk tourist on cobblestones and the Arctic melts faster than a Popsicle in Phoenix, humanity has found its newest spiritual anchor: a $16 hamburger served inside a renovated gas…
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…
