SEC Schedule Release: The American South’s Glorious Annual Bloodletting Goes Global Dave’s Locker International Desk, somewhere over the Atlantic The Southeastern Conference (SEC) football schedule—unveiled this week with all the pomp of a papal conclave crossed with a Black Friday stampede—has washed up on foreign shores again. From TikTok feeds in Lagos to sports bars…
**The Dawson Doctrine: How James Van Der Beek Became an Accidental Global Prophet** From the neon canyons of Tokyo to the crumbling cafés of Athens, humanity has always sought wisdom in unlikely places. Enter James Van Der Beek—that singularly named American actor whose career trajectory from teen heartthrob to cultural Rorschach test tells us more…
US News College Rankings: The Annual Olympics of Institutional Narcissism by “Roving Correspondent” (currently filing from a Wi-Fi-enabled yurt in Ulaanbaatar) Every September, like clockwork, American academia straps on its spandex of self-regard and sprints onto the world stage to see who can flex the hardest. The US News & World Report college rankings have…
Eli Manning Walks Off the World Stage, Leaving the Rest of Us to Blitz Ourselves By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats NEW YORK—While the planet busied itself with minor pastimes—ballistic missile tests in Pyongyang, runaway inflation in Ankara, and the slow-motion TikTok lobotomy of global adolescence—an unassuming man in a cable-knit sweater announced he…
Brewers vs. Padres: A Minor Skirmish in Baseball’s Forever War for Planetary Attention By Matteo “Mirthless” Morgenstern, International Desk, Dave’s Locker MILWAUKEE—Somewhere between the Baltic’s latest gas-pipeline panic and the Pacific’s newest island-building scheme, two American ball clubs squared off last night in a contest whose ramifications, we are assured by regional television executives, are…
Green Bay, Wisconsin—population 104,777, median household income $52,214, and, until recently, the last place on earth you’d expect to host a geopolitical flashpoint. Yet there stands Jaire Zakar Alexander, cornerback, human eclipse, and—depending on which global capital is doing the tweeting—either a swaggering symbol of American exceptionalism or a walking indictment of it. While the…
Ike Hilliard: The Quiet American Who Taught the World to Catch—and Then to Coach—Before We All Dropped the Ball PARIS—Somewhere between the Champs-Élysées and the 7th arrondissement’s latest pop-up absinthe bar, it’s easy to forget that the fate of American football occasionally hinges on a man named after a U.S. president and a smallish European…
Kara Lawson, the Duke Women’s Basketball coach who recently told a hushed post-game press room that “it’s bigger than ball,” has become the latest American export that nobody asked for but everyone is suddenly dissecting like a rare truffle. From Berlin sports bars to Lagos Twitter threads, the clip of her impromptu sermon on racism,…
The phrase “SEC permanent opponents” sounds like a Pentagon euphemism for countries Washington never plans to invite to the cookout. In fact, it is a scheduling innovation cooked up by the Southeastern Conference—American college football’s most profitable circus—to guarantee that certain teams play each other every year even after the league swelled to 16 members…
Xavier Worthy: The 4.21-Second Passport That Just Got Every Continent’s Attention By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Immigration Control and the 40-Yard Dash PARIS—In the same week that the UN admitted it will miss every sustainable-development target and the Doomsday Clock nudged to 89 seconds from midnight, a 20-year-old from Fresno, California, reminded the planet that…
**From Budapest to Buffalo: The Curious Case of Matt Nagy and the Global Theater of Failing Upwards** *By Our Correspondent Who’s Watched Too Much Football and Not Enough Humanity* VIENNA—In a world where nuclear powers misplace submarines, crypto exchanges vanish like Argentine pesos, and the Arctic is available for rent (August only, utilities not included),…
Kayvon Thibodeaux, the New York Giants’ resident sack-artist and occasional philosopher, is what happens when the American Dream is cross-pollinated with global supply-chain logistics. Born in South Los Angeles, polished in Oregon, and monetized in Manhattan, he is less a linebacker than an export commodity—one that Europe quietly pretends not to need, China reverse-engineers for…
