Pedro Pascal, the Chilean-born actor who now looks permanently exhausted in eight different time zones, has become the first truly global celebrity of the post-hope era. From Seoul subway ads hawking The Last of Us to Berlin bus shelters promising “more daddy issues than you can fit in a Bundesliga stadium,” Pascal has achieved that…
TV Guide, International Edition: The Remote-Controlled Decline of Civilization By the time you read this, 6.2 billion people—give or take the population of Luxembourg—will be clutching a remote control like it’s the One Ring. The humble TV guide, once a stapled pamphlet that doubled as a coaster and emergency fly-swatter, has metastasized into a global…
The Eternal Burn of América vs. Deportivo Cali: A Global Parable Played in Yellow and Red Cali, Colombia – Somewhere between the salsa bars and the bulletproof-vest boutiques, two football clubs are re-enacting the Cold War in miniature, only with more choreography and fewer plausible denials. América de Cali and Deportivo Cali—nicknamed Los Diablos Rojos…
NFL Divisions: How Eight Petty Fiefdoms in Shoulder Pads Became a Global Rorschach Test By the time the sun rises in London, the citizens of the United Kingdom have already placed their accumulator bets on whether the Miami Dolphins will remember what a defense is. By lunchtime in Lagos, WhatsApp groups light up with hot…
Dakota Fanning and the Quiet Apocalypse of the American Child Star By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent (currently self-exiled in a Reykjavik basement where the northern lights can’t find me) If you squint through the smog of 2024, Dakota Fanning still looks exactly like the prophesied Last Good Kid—blonde, polite, preternaturally articulate, the sort of child you…
Mike Evans and the Mirror He Holds Up to a World That Can’t Catch By the time Mike Evans’ latest one-handed, gravity-defying grab hits the highlight reels from Lagos to Lisbon, three things are already certain: (1) the Earth will keep turning, (2) Tom Brady will still be playing somewhere, and (3) at least one…
Stanford vs BYU: When Silicon-Valley Nihilism Meets Mormon Moral Fibre on a Football Field and the World Watches, Bewildered From the vantage point of a Paris café where the espresso is bitter and the Wi-Fi is worse, the annual collision between Stanford University and Brigham Young University looks less like a collegiate football game and…
**From Dublin to Dystopia: Domhnall Gleeson and the Global Art of Looking Uncomfortable** While the world burns, melts, or simply descends into whatever fresh hell the algorithm serves up today, there’s something perversely comforting about watching Domhnall Gleeson master the universal language of existential dread. The Irish actor has become our global ambassador for looking…
From the banks of the Detroit River to the palm-lined avenues of Los Angeles, the Matthew Stafford saga has become a rare trans-Pacific parable about talent, loyalty, and the fine print of late capitalism. The American footballer—yes, the one who throws the oblong brown projectile—recently found himself the unwilling protagonist in a story that ricocheted…
Transamerica: A Road-Trip Through the Twenty-First-Century Soul by “The Bureau Chief Who’s Had Too Much Airport Coffee” From the cracked sidewalks of San Francisco’s Tenderloin to the fluorescent glow of a São Paulo data-center, the word “Transamerica” no longer belongs exclusively to a 1970s insurance logo or a B-movie about gender transition. It has metastasized…
The World Sharpened Its Claws for a Canadian Mutant: Why the Marvel Wolverine Game Matters Beyond Your Couch By Our Man in a Hotel Minibar Somewhere Over the Atlantic PARIS—In the same week that the IMF politely reminded 190 nations they’re collectively broke, and the Arctic Circle filed a missing-person report for winter, humanity did…
Bobo Baldé and the Global Comedy of Errors in Defense By our Special Correspondent in the Cheap Seats Every so often the world rediscovers a name it once filed under “That guy who used to play for Celtic,” and the name currently doing the rounds—thanks to a viral clip of an own-goal compilation, a podcast…
