Friday evening in Milwaukee, and the only thing colder than the lake-effect wind is the existential dread creeping in past the seventh-inning stretch. The Brewers—an outfit whose name still sounds like a failed microbrewery IPO—are hosting the Padres, a team whose branding evokes Catholic guilt and surfer slang in equal measure. To the uninitiated, it’s…
Rudi Johnson and the Quiet Collapse of the American Dream, as Observed from a Safe Distance ZURICH—Somewhere between the Alps and the next overpriced fondue, it’s easy to forget that in Cincinnati there is a man named Rudi Johnson who once carried a football 1,300 times in a single NFL season, then vanished into the…
If you squint at the MLB playoff bracket long enough it starts to look like a Rorschach test for geopolitics: twelve blots of color arranged in neat little brackets, promising order where none actually exists. From a barstool in Montevideo or a rooftop in Lagos, the diagram is less a sports schedule than a coded…
The Ravens vs Lions Showdown: A Global Metaphor for Our Collective Descent Dakar, Senegal – As the Baltimore Ravens prepare to face the Detroit Lions in a contest that will be beamed into 197 countries this Sunday, the world watches with the peculiar intensity usually reserved for nuclear negotiations or celebrity divorces. Here in West…
The Arranged Marriage Arms Race: How “Married at First Sight UK” Became a Geopolitical Weapon Every empire eventually exports its most embarrassing habit. The Romans gave the world vomitoria; the British, queueing and now—via a glossy Channel 4 franchise—step-by-step instructions on how to commodify intimacy for binge-watching nations with abandonment issues. “Married at First Sight…
The Humble Bublik: How a Soviet-era Bread Ring Became the World’s Most Honest Political Compass Moscow, Paris, New York—Somewhere between the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the rise of gluten-free everything, a small, chewy torus of bread quietly slipped across borders, passports unstamped, customs declarations blank. The bublik—often mistaken for its more photogenic cousin,…
KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI – Somewhere between the Missouri River’s lazy meander and the distant hum of NATO air-traffic control, the Kansas City Chiefs politely disembowelled the New York Giants 27-17 on Sunday. To a planet juggling heat domes, sovereign-debt brinkmanship, and the slow-motion collapse of social media civility, the box score looked almost quaint: Patrick…
Patriotism, like a cheap lager, travels poorly. What froths patriotically in Cleveland becomes xenophobia in Cologne, and in Caracas it’s merely Wednesday. Yet every government—whether draped in red, saffron, or ironic teal—keeps a cooler of the stuff on permanent ice, ready to pop open whenever tax receipts look thin or the press starts asking why…
The Vikings Game: How a Digital Longship Full of Loot Boxes Conquered the Planet By Our Man in Every Airport Lounge at Once In the year of our bandwidth 2024, the phrase “Vikings game” no longer evokes frostbitten reenactors in a Norwegian field whacking each other with rubber axes. Instead, it summons 1.3 billion thumbs…
The phrase “eagles oc” has flapped, talons-first, into the global conversation like a raptor on methamphetamine. Originally a humble American football shorthand for the Philadelphia Eagles’ Offensive Coordinator, it has since mutated—thanks to the universal solvent of boredom known as the internet—into a trans-continental Rorschach test. From a Lagos cyber-café to a Helsinki vape bar,…
The Bads of Bollywood: A Global Tragedy in Three Acts and a Dance Number By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Mumbai, India — If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a $2.4-billion-a-year dream factory begins to snore loudly in public, look no further than Bollywood. Once the planet’s most reliable export of synchronized pelvic thrusts and family-friendly…
Woody Allen, that diminutive neurotic with horn-rimmed glasses and a lifetime subscription to existential dread, has somehow become the global Rorschach test for the late-capitalist psyche. From Seoul to Seville, his face—equal parts guilty conscience and self-deprecating punchline—adorns subway posters for 1979’s Manhattan next to ads for K-pop comebacks and oat-milk lattes. It’s as if…
