Boston College vs Stanford: A Duel of Jesuit Guilt and Silicon Valley Optimism on the World’s Most Expensive Stage By Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Pacific Let us begin with the obvious: a football game between Boston College and Stanford is not, by any sober metric, a seismic event. It will not move the Shanghai…
Somewhere between the soy latte belt and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, two MLS franchises will meet on Saturday night in what the marketing department politely calls “a Western Conference showdown.” The rest of the planet, busy watching oil prices, missile parades, and the slow-motion implosion of several democracies, will glance over just long enough to…
In the grand theater of global sport, where the Champions League final can still be interrupted by a pitch invader in a tutu and a World Cup can be bought for the price of a few luxury hotels in Doha, this weekend’s Major League Soccer sideshow between LA Galaxy and Seattle Sounders carries the geopolitical…
From the vantage point of a bar in Brussels that still smells faintly of tear-gas from last week’s farmers’ protest, the Uvalde school massacre looks less like a uniquely American tragedy and more like the loudest episode in a planetary sitcom titled “Humans: The Director’s Cut.” Nineteen children and two teachers were erased on 24…
**The Monument to a World That Never Learned** The twin reflecting pools descend 30 feet into the earth like inverted towers, each acre of falling water designed to drown out the sounds of a city that apparently never learned to listen. On any given Tuesday—because terror, like capitalism, never takes holidays—you’ll find the 9/11 Memorial…
**The Global Cost of American Football: How NFL Sunday Ticket Pricing Became a Barometer of Civilization’s Decline** While the world grapples with climate refugees, food insecurity, and the occasional attempted coup, America’s most pressing crisis appears to be the escalating cost of watching grown men in spandex concuss each other for three hours every Sunday….
Another Thursday, Another Gun: Fremont Joins the Global Chorus of Trigger-Happy Tuesdays By Matteo “Bullets & Bylines” Ricci, Foreign Correspondent-at-Large FREMONT, California—It happened at 4:17 p.m. local time, which was 0:17 a.m. in Kyiv, 6:17 a.m. in Singapore, and precisely cocktail hour on the International Space Station where, presumably, astronauts were too busy admiring the…
The UNLV Football Coach and the Theater of American Dreams By our Las Vegas bureau chief, still recovering from the all-you-can-eat buffet of hope LAS VEGAS—Somewhere between the wedding chapels offering “Marry a Stranger, Get a Free Margarita” coupons and the slot machines that cough out cryptocurrency instead of coins, the University of Nevada, Las…
LOS ANGELES – In the same week that the International Monetary Fund politely warned the planet may be circling the drain, 22 millionaires in neon footwear kicked a ball around a converted baseball diamond and called it progress. The occasion: LA Galaxy versus Houston Dynamo, a fixture that, on paper, promises nothing more than three…
Amy Coney Barrett and the Spectacular Collapse of American Exceptionalism: A Global View From the Cheap Seats By Our Man in the Departures Lounge The rest of the planet first met Amy Coney Barrett on a Monday night in late September 2020, when she materialized beside Donald Trump like an impeccably-coiffed genie summoned by a…
The USMNT Conundrum: America Learns That Soccer Is Not a Tax Write-Off By Our Man in the Global Press Box The United States Men’s National Team—abbreviated like a hedge fund that never quite delivered—has once again wandered onto the world stage, blinking like a tourist who forgot to exchange currency. From Berlin to Bogotá, seasoned…
Bishop Montgomery Football and the Decline of Western Civilization (As Viewed from 30,000 Feet) By the time the private-jet set touched down in Riyadh last week—fresh from Davos, COP 28, and a discreet stop in Davos again for good measure—news of Bishop Montgomery High’s latest gridiron triumph had already ping-ponged through the encrypted group-chats of…
