Dallas, Texas—never the shy type—has spent the last few weeks auditioning for the Four Horsemen. One moment it’s 28 °C and the cicadas are gossiping like hedge-fund analysts at a rooftop bar; the next, marble-sized hail is auditioning for the lead role in “The Day After Tomorrow: Suburban Edition.” International observers, once content to treat…
The People’s Lottery: When the Whole Planet Buys the Same Ticket By Diego “Lucky” Morales, International Correspondent-at-Large, currently hiding from my bookie in Lisbon They say lotteries are taxes on people who are bad at math. If that’s true, the newly christened “People’s Lottery” is the first truly global fiscal policy—voluntary, enthusiastic, and administered not…
The Mega Millions jackpot has swollen to that cartoonish, Scrooge-McDuck-pool figure again—$1.05 billion this time, give or take a rounding error that could still buy a small Balkan republic. Somewhere in Los Angeles a single ticket is now the golden Willy Wonka wrapper for the largest U.S. lottery haul in 2024. Cue the polite international…
Wednesday Season 3: The Global Hysteria Index Hits 11 While the Calendar Keeps Shrugging By L. Dagny Serrano, Senior Cynic-at-Large Somewhere between the IMF’s latest downgrade of world GDP and the moment a North Korean diplomat accidentally liked a thirst-tweet about Jenna Ortega, Netflix quietly admitted what every binge-addicted jurisdiction already suspected: Wednesday Season 3…
From a safe distance of 4,000 miles and several failed revolutions, the world watches America’s latest export of precision anxiety: Justin Tucker, the Baltimore Ravens’ resident field-goal necromancer. While lesser nations measure progress in GDP or UNESCO heritage sites, the United States has calibrated its self-worth to the arc of a leather ellipsoid booted by…
Timothée Chalamet: The Accidental Diplomat in a World That Forgot How to Grow Up By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk, somewhere between Cannes and the apocalypse PARIS—On the Croisette last May, citizens of the world’s oldest republic of glamour queued for two hours to watch a 28-year-old New Yorker pout on a 40-foot screen. The film…
**The Long Walk: Humanity’s Endless March Toward Nowhere in Particular** *By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent, Still Walking* The Long Walk is no longer a punishment devised by sadistic drill sergeants or a dystopian Stephen King plot device. It has become the defining metaphor of our age: a global, multi-directional forced march in which billions participate,…
Chargers vs Chiefs: A Micro-Melodrama for a Planet That’s Already on Fire By Diego “No Refunds” Morales, International Desk The game will be played in Kansas City on Sunday, but the real action is everywhere else. From a windowless bar in Manila where the feed lags exactly six seconds behind Lagos—just long enough for a…
Houston, We Have a Border Problem: How a Lone-Star Dust-Up Became the World’s Most Expensive Therapy Session By Our Man in the Cheap Seats The Astros and the Rangers—two baseball teams whose names sound like rival oil cartels—are busy trying to murder each other with fastballs and walk-off home runs in a little American regional…
Montreal, Wednesday—Somewhere between the racket-smashing melodrama of the Balkans and the polite Scandinavian welfare-state forehands, Felix Auger-Aliassime has emerged as the polite Canadian compromise: a tennis prodigy who apologizes after aces and thanks the net post for cooperation. In a world that can’t decide whether to blow itself up or binge another season on Netflix,…
In the grand theatre of American baseball, where the grass is greener than a Swiss bank vault and the hot dogs cost more than a week’s rent in Lagos, the Los Angeles Dodgers and Baltimore Orioles are currently engaged in a pas de deux that has the international commentariat choking on its own metaphors. One…
Mariners vs. Braves: A 7,000-Mile Proxy War for the Soul of Late-Stage Baseball Somewhere between the Space Needle and the Chattahoochee, two ball clubs—one named after 19th-century sailors, the other after Confederate infantry—are locked in a contest that feels less like sport and more like a blue-screen error in globalization’s operating system. The Seattle Mariners…
