Big Brother, Bigger Brother, Biggest Brother: A Global Prime-Time Panopticon From the concrete sprawl of São Paulo to the neon-lit insomnia of Seoul, the question ricochets through group chats, taxi radios, and half-drunk living rooms like an anxious metronome: “What time is Big Brother on tonight?” At first glance it’s a banal TV query—one more…
Quito, Ecuador – Somewhere between the Andes and a nervous hedge fund, Ecuador and Argentina are playing a game that looks suspiciously like football but smells unmistakably like geopolitics. The fixture itself—tonight at Estadio Rodrigo Paz Delgado—will decide little in the cosmic ledger: three points, a few million collective heartbeats, maybe a shattered TV or…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that two professional ball clubs, separated by the 2,000-kilometre polite fiction known as the U.S.–Canada border, can still manufacture enough existential dread to keep the rest of the planet momentarily distracted from its own flaming garbage scows. On Tuesday night the Houston Astros—those erstwhile pariahs of the sign-stealing scandal,…
The General Who Invented Traffic Jams and Détente: Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Accidental World Tour By Our Man in Geneva, still waiting for the diplomatic pouch to arrive on time The first thing you notice about Dwight David Eisenhower—if you’re unfortunate enough to be stuck behind a column of Belgian tourists on the A7 outside Lyon—is…
DENVER, Colorado—The Mile-High City’s weather forecast this week reads like a ransom note Mother Nature scribbled on the back of a bar napkin: 70°F on Monday, 7 inches of snow by Wednesday, and a 30% chance of existential dread by the weekend. To the average Coloradan this is merely Tuesday; to the rest of the…
Dancing With the Stars Premiere: When the Globe Pauses to Watch C-List Glitter Diplomacy In a week when the Arctic Circle reported its first rain-on-snow-in-August event and the Bank of Japan quietly debated whether to let the yen commit honorable seppuku, roughly seventeen million people from Reykjavík to Reykjavík (via Perth, Lagos, and that one…
It takes a certain cosmic perversity to become a global headline while standing in a half-empty stadium in Dortmund, but Ollie Watkins managed it at the precise moment most of humanity was doom-scrolling about melting ice caps or which billionaire had purchased which democracy. One swivelled right boot, one net bulge, and the Aston Villa…
England FC: A Tragicomic Opera Staged for the Planet’s Edification By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over the Atlantic If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when an entire nation decides to confuse football with group therapy, tune in to England FC every other summer. The spectacle is broadcast to 195 countries—roughly…
“Economy jobs” is the polite euphemism we now use for the sort of work that keeps the planet spinning while the rest of us refresh our portfolios. From the sweat-beaded brow of a Bangladeshi fast-fashion machinist to the algorithm-tethered soul of a Berlin “gig-economy” cyclist, these are the positions that exist precisely because someone, somewhere,…
World Cup Qualifiers Europe: Where National Hopes Go to Die (and Occasionally Resurrect) The biennial continental bloodletting known as the UEFA World Cup qualifiers is back, and with it the reassuring spectacle of 55 nations pretending their geopolitical relevance hinges on 22 men chasing a ball. From Reykjavik to Tbilisi, passports are brandished like swords…
Wales vs Canada: Two Tiny Countries Pretending to Matter on the World Stage By the time you finish this sentence, the Canadian prime minister will have apologized for something and the Welsh rugby squad will have broken into a three-part harmony about coal. That, in microcosm, is the difference between a nation that weaponizes politeness…
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…
