Middle Tennessee vs Wisconsin: A Microscopic Proxy War for a Planet That Can’t Even By the time the final whistle blows in Murfreesboro this Saturday, roughly 97 % of humanity will be blissfully unaware that Middle Tennessee and Wisconsin just re-enacted the global balance of power in 60 tidy minutes of American football. That’s fine;…
Columbia, Missouri – While the rest of the planet frets over melting ice caps, runaway A.I., and the faint possibility that someone might actually read the iTunes terms of service, a small quadrant of the American Midwest has narrowed its existential dread to a more manageable size: 120 yards of artificial turf and the weekly…
A Tale of Two Extremes: How “Highest to Lowest Movie” Became the Perfect Metaphor for a Planet Sliding Downhill By the time the algorithm spat out “Highest to Lowest Movie” on every streaming dashboard from Lagos to Lima, it wasn’t clear whether the title referred to a film or to humanity’s credit rating. One click…
Wake Forest Football and the Global Theater of Mild Rebellion By Dave’s International Bureau of Existential Sportswriting If the planet were a pub, American college football would be the loud regular in the corner insisting his regional lager is the finest brew ever fermented. From the outside, the spectacle looks like a gilded civil war…
Volcanic ash from Iceland had barely settled on European flight paths when, six time zones west, a modest college basketball arena in Johnson City, Tennessee, staged the kind of mismatch that makes the rest of the planet shrug, sip its espresso, and mutter, “Ah, America, still exporting spectacle over substance.” East Tennessee State—population 14,000 students,…
North Dakota vs. Tennessee: How a Pair of Overlooked U.S. States Accidentally Became a Global Parable DATELINE – Everywhere Else Somewhere between the soy-sauce scented boardrooms of Tokyo and the espresso-stained think-tanks of Brussels, international observers are waking up to the newest geopolitical cliff-hanger: North Dakota versus Tennessee. Yes, the same two states most foreigners…
Austin Peay vs. Georgia: When the World’s Problems Pause for 40 Minutes of Manufactured Hope by Diego Morales, International Correspondent-at-Large The University of Georgia Bulldogs—an outfit valued somewhere between a Baltic nation’s GDP and Jeff Bezos’ weekend yacht budget—took the floor Saturday against Austin Peay State University, whose annual athletics subsidy is roughly what the…
PARIS—Somewhere between the fifth croissant and the third existential crisis of the week, the name Kellen Moore ping-ponged through the global sports-commentariat like a ricocheting drone strike. To the average Parisian barista, the phrase “Kellen Moore” sounds like the latest Scandinavian furniture line—minimalist, vaguely threatening, and guaranteed to fall apart after four seasons. Yet on…
A Severe Thunderstorm Watch Has Been Issued—for the Entire Planet From the equatorial belt to the Arctic Circle, from the rice paddies of Guangxi to the ski resorts of Zermatt, the alert is out: the sky is in a mood and we all live under the same temperamental ceiling. The United States may have trademarked…
Texas: The World’s Favorite Cautionary Tale That Still Makes Money by Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, somewhere over the Atlantic with a lukewarm Bloody Mary If you watch the planet from 30,000 feet—preferably in business class, because who still flies coach voluntarily—Texas appears less like a U.S. state and more like a fever dream the rest of…
Notts County: The 160-Year-Old Football Club Teaching the World How to Survive Its Own Stupidity By Our Man in the East Midlands, nursing a lukewarm pint and déjà vu Meadow Lane, Nottingham – In a week when Silicon Valley titans were congratulating themselves for inventing the “metaverse pub” (basically a chat room with beer NFTs),…
Andora—pronounced with the same breathy reverence a sommelier reserves for a 1945 Château Pétrus—has quietly become the planet’s most exclusive gated community that nobody can actually find on a reliable map. Tucked between two quarrelling Iberian neighbors who can’t even agree on ham regulations, the 468-square-kilometre sovereign speck is what happens when medieval real-estate arbitrage…
