Steven Lenhart: The Man Who Turned MLS Fouls Into Performance Art and Accidentally Forecasted the End of the American Century By A Correspondent Who Once Watched a Friendly in Pyongyang and Still Has the Whistle Marks PARIS—Somewhere between the croissants and the existential dread, the name Steven Lenhart still surfaces in bars along the Boulevard…
S&P 500: The Planet’s Favourite Barometer of American Optimism—And Other Fairy Tales By the time the opening bell rings at 9:30 a.m. in New York, half the world has already gone to sleep clenching its jaw about what the S&P 500 might do. Tokyo fund managers are sipping canned coffee at 11:30 p.m. local time…
TALLAHASSEE, Wednesday—Across the globe, diplomats in Geneva fret over carbon thresholds, container ships idle in the Red Sea dodging drones, and the yen wobbles like a freshman kicker after three espresso shots. Yet for one humid Saturday in the Florida panhandle, the planet’s attention pivots to a patch of grass where young men in garnet…
**The Global Village Idiot: How Joe Rogan Became the World’s Most Influential American Export (Sorry, Democracy)** In an era where American soft power traditionally meant Hollywood blockbusters, jazz music, or the occasional aircraft carrier, humanity has collectively decided that our most significant cultural export is… a former Fear Factor host who looks like he could…
Minnesota Golden Gophers Football: How a Prairie College Team Quietly Became a Geopolitical Rorschach Test By the time the Golden Gophers trot onto Huntington Bank Stadium this autumn, most of the planet will be busy pretending to care about something else: the Bundesliga, the Rugby Championship, the latest coup d’état, or that mesmerizing TikTok of…
ROME ODUNZE AND THE GLOBAL RELIGION OF VERTICAL LEAP Somewhere between the radioactive neon of Las Vegas and the more genteel smog of Seattle, a 6-foot-3 American human-torpedo named Rome Odunze has become the latest high priest in the worldwide cult of “game-breaking wideout.” To most of the planet—where football still means Lionel Messi and…
PARIS—Somewhere between the fifth croissant and the third existential crisis of the morning, the world’s sporting press decided that Pierce Clarkson is the new yardstick for planetary hope. That’s a heavy load for a 17-year-old quarterback whose most pressing daily decision used to be whether to top his Chipotle bowl with guac or mild salsa….
COLE BISHOP, THE ACCIDENTAL DIPLOMAT: HOW ONE AMERICAN SAFETY WITH A FRENCH NAME IS REDRAWING THE NFL’S GLOBAL MAP By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent (currently hiding from customs in a Reykjavik airport bar) It’s hard to find a more American export these days than the National Football League, that padded pageant of concussions and commercial…
Jim Kelly, the Buffalo Bills legend who once quarterbacked four consecutive Super Bowl defeats—surely the most heroic act of sustained disappointment in modern sport—died this week at 63. The world, hunched over its collective smartphone, paused for roughly the time it takes to scroll past a funeral tweet, then resumed doom-scrolling. Yet for those old…
Robert Kraft: Portrait of a Billionaire in the Age of Globalized Schadenfreude By the time the news of Robert Kraft’s alleged misadventure at a Florida strip-mall spa reached the breakfast tables of Singapore, the story had already been translated into seven languages, meme-ified in four alphabets, and turned into a cautionary haiku on Japanese Twitter….
NFL SCORES, OR HOW THE WORLD LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE A 6–3 THRILLER Dave’s Locker – Global Desk If you’re reading this from a café in Lagos, a metro tunnel in Seoul, or a bomb shelter in Kharkiv, congratulations: you’ve already outlasted several American quarterbacks. Last weekend’s NFL scores—Chiefs 27, Ravens 24; Cowboys…
From the Frozen Tundra to the Thawing World: The Green Bay Packers as Accidental Geopolitical Metaphor By Our Correspondent Somewhere North of Reason If you mention the Green Bay Packers to a pub full of Berliners, the reaction will be roughly the same as if you’d asked them to recite the Wisconsin state fish: polite…
