The Ballad of Nick Chubb, or How a Quiet Man from Georgia Became a Rorschach Test for the Planet By L. Ortega-Mendoza, International Desk, Dave’s Locker CLEVELAND—Somewhere between the 41st and 42nd parallel, where the Cuyahoga River once caught fire for sport, Nick Chubb continues to run as if the Industrial Revolution were still looking…
In a smallish corner of Foxborough, Massachusetts, 65,000 people are presently losing their minds over a leather prolate spheroid. The rest of the planet, meanwhile, is busy losing its mind over everything else—meteorological tantrums, sovereign-debt cliffhangers, and the latest celebrity-sponsored crypto rug-pull—yet somehow still finds bandwidth to rubberneck at the Patriots game today. Why? Because…
The New York Giants, a franchise whose very name evokes both mythic enormity and the crushing weight of expectations, have long served as America’s accidental export of existential dread wrapped in shoulder pads. To the average fan from Jakarta to Johannesburg, they are less a football team than a weekly morality play about the futility…
From an altitude of 37,000 feet somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, the phrase “Texas Rangers” sounds less like a baseball franchise and more like a geopolitical Rorschach test. To the Japanese businessman nursing a second sake beside me, it evokes memories of the 2010 World Series—his first live game at Tokyo Dome, where the only thing…
Lindsay Lohan: The World’s Favorite Cautionary Tale, Now Available in Multiple Languages By Our Correspondent Who Has Watched Civilizations Rise and Fall Faster Than Her IMDb Starmeter VIENNA—While the UN Security Council spent last week debating whether a grain corridor in the Black Sea counts as a “strategic success” or merely “lunch,” Lindsay Lohan quietly…
Deion Burks and the Geopolitics of a 40-Yard Dash By Dave’s Locker Global Desk If you’ve never heard of Deion Burks, congratulations—you have successfully avoided every American football highlight reel, every NIL money tracker, and every algorithmic rabbit hole that begins with “Top WR sleepers 2024.” For the rest of us, the name now carries…
The World Watches as Two Southern American Colleges Duke It Out—And Pretends to Care Geneva, Switzerland – While the United Nations Security Council was busy debating the finer points of who gets to veto whom this week, an arguably more urgent geopolitical flashpoint erupted in the American Deep South: Louisiana-Monroe versus Alabama. Yes, the Warhawks…
Ohio State Football: America’s Gladiatorial Cult Reaches Out to the World By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Buenos Aires The first thing to understand is that in most countries, the word “football” conjures images of Lionel Messi gliding past defenders or a rain-soaked Champions League night in Manchester. In Ohio, however, it summons 102,780…
FAYETTEVILLE, USA — Somewhere between the Ozarks and the Ozempic, the Arkansas Razorbacks are playing football again. That may sound like local color to most of the planet, but in an era when American college sports have become the last reliable export that doesn’t explode on the launchpad, the Razorbacks are—believe it or not—global news….
From the Desk of Dave’s International Bureau, Somewhere Over the Atlantic— While COP29 delegates in Baku argued over commas in a footnote on methane, the real existential drama played out under portable LED masts in the American Midwest. Friday night in Iowa—population three million, hog-to-human ratio negotiable—high-school football scores flickered across the Twittersphere with the…
BILLY BOB THORNTON: AMERICA’S SOUTHERN-FRIED EXPORT OF MENACE, MISANTHROPY, AND MISPLACED ROMANCE By the time you finish reading this sentence, Billy Bob Thornton will have been married in at least one additional time zone. The man who once wore Angelina Jolie’s blood in a vial around his neck has become, against all odds, the United…
The NFL’s Thirty-Two Flags: How a Provincial Pastime Conquered the Planet and Forgot to Apologize By Correspondent M. A. “Mac” Guffin, filing from a hotel bar in Singapore that still thinks the Super Bowl is a plumbing fixture. When the Kansas City Chiefs lifted their third Lombardi Trophy in February, fireworks crackled over Manila, Lagos,…
