Utilita Arena Birmingham: A Concrete Coliseum for the Age of Disposable Fun By Our Man in the Mid-Atlantic, nursing a lukewarm Balti and a colder world-view From the air, Birmingham’s utilitarian slab looks like a dropped shipping container that someone forgot to collect. Up close it is worse: a 15,800-seat Tupperware box squatting beside a…
Leverkusen vs. Mönchengladbach: Two Postcards from the Rhine, One Global Existential Crisis In normal times, the 25-kilometre stretch between Leverkusen and Mönchengladbach is just a meander of the Rhine and a few autobahn exits. On derby day, however, it mutates into the fault line where Bayer’s corporate optimism collides head-on with Borussia’s artisanal pessimism, and…
ODEON: How a Greek Word for Singing Became the World’s Loudest Love Letter to Escapism By the time you finish this sentence, roughly 3,200 people in 31 countries will have swiped their credit cards at an Odeon-branded box office to watch something explode in Dolby Atmos. From Oslo to Mumbai, the name—“singing place,” courtesy of…
