Gridiron Gladiators and the Global Coliseum: How NCAA Football Became the World’s Most American Export Somewhere in the Siberian tundra, a Yakutsk teenager named Dmitri is live-streaming a grainy pirated feed of Alabama vs. Auburn with the devotion of a medieval monk copying scripture. He doesn’t know what a “tight end” actually does, but he…
Somewhere between the Baltic’s rusting shipyards and a Manila karaoke bar at 3:17 a.m., the term “seawolf” has mutated from nautical folklore into a corporate euphemism for the modern privateer. These are not the cuddly, whiskered cousins of the otter you’re picturing. Picture instead a floating LinkedIn profile with a flag of convenience, a shell…
Madrid, Spain—In the grand casino of global sport, Real Madrid is the house that never loses. While governments teeter, currencies wobble, and the planet itself runs a low-grade fever, the white-shirted mercenaries of the Bernabéu continue to collect pot after pot with the indifferent efficiency of a croupier who knows the wheel is rigged. Last…
Necaxa-Juárez and the Quiet Apocalypse of Provincial Football By Our Man in the Americas, nursing a mezcal and a migraine in row 17, Estadio Victoria The world’s attention has been, understandably, elsewhere: Gaza’s rubble livestream, Musk firing another 3,000 people over emoji, and the International Olympic Committee debating breakdancing’s spiritual purity. Yet on Saturday night,…
Meth, Morality, and the Global Branding of a Fictional Monster By Dave’s Locker International Desk When a mild-mannered chemistry teacher from Albuquerque starts cooking blue rock that ends up on coffee tables from Jakarta to Johannesburg, you know the planet has officially run out of original sins. “Breaking Bad” premiered in 2008, back when the…
**The Global Brotherhood of Ambulance Chasers: How Accident Lawyers Became the World’s Most Universal Profession** From the neon-lit streets of Tokyo to the pothole-ridden avenues of Bucharest, one profession has achieved what world peace summits and climate accords never could: truly global harmony. Accident lawyers, those magnificent vultures of human misfortune, have spread across our…
Somewhere between the Arctic Circle and a midtown Manhattan pharmacy counter, the Danish firm Novo Nordisk has quietly become the most influential geopolitical actor nobody voted for. What began in 1923 as a modest insulin cooperative in a Copenhagen loft has metastasized—appropriately—into a global empire whose market cap now exceeds the GDP of oil-rich Norway….
Dirtbag Billionaire: A Global Field Guide to the New Gilded Age’s Anti-Hero By the time you finish this paragraph, another hoodie-clad centi-millionaire will have declared himself a “dirtbag billionaire” on a podcast recorded from the cargo hold of his Gulfstream. The phrase—equal parts self-deprecating marketing stunt and accurate character assessment—has already achieved the rare linguistic…
Personal Injury Attorneys: The World’s New First Responders They say every society gets the ambulance-chasers it deserves, but in 2024 the ambulance itself is optional. From Lagos to London, the humble personal-injury attorney has metastasized into a borderless species of legal velociraptor—equal parts grief counselor, venture capitalist, and late-night infomercial star. Slip on a grape…
Al Davis, the late czar of the Oakland Raiders, never held elected office, never commanded armies, and—astonishingly—never learned how to use e-mail. Yet his silhouette still looms across the planet like a stubborn smog cloud, proof that the most durable empires are sometimes stitched from shoulder pads and bad attitude. From the dockyards of Naples…
