From the Basque Hills to the Boardrooms of Beijing: A Brief, Cynical History of Real Sociedad vs Real Madrid By Our Man in Madrid, who has seen smaller clubs swallowed whole and richer ones vomit up managers like bad paella. 1909 – Birth of a David Real Sociedad pops into existence in San Sebastián, a…
Fulham vs Leeds: A Timeline of Mutual Self-Destruction, Now Broadcasting Worldwide By Our Man in the Departure Lounge London, 14:03 GMT – Somewhere above the Atlantic, a Singaporean hedge-fund analyst toggles between two tabs: one tracking the Nikkei’s latest swan dive, the other a grainy stream of Fulham vs Leeds from 2003. He isn’t nostalgic;…
Sitting in a café that claims to be “Parisian” but smells exclusively of burnt sugar and desperation, I watch the replay of Newcastle United versus Wolverhampton Wanderers on a screen whose pixels long ago surrendered. Around me, Japanese tourists photograph croissants, a Russian oligarch haggles over the price of bottled water, and an American podcaster…
PARIS—Somewhere between the fall of Kabul and the collapse of the Lira, humanity found a new daily barometer for civilizational decline: a five-letter word that may or may not contain two vowels and our collective dignity. The “Wordle hint” has become the lingua franca of a planet too exhausted to read the news but still…
How a Friday-Night Lights Scoreboard in Michigan Became the Ouija Board of Global Destiny By A. R. Blackstone, Senior Correspondent, Somewhere over the Mid-Atlantic There is something almost touching—if one’s heart still admits the emotion—about the ritual posting of MHSAA football scores every autumn weekend. A constellation of adolescent gladiators in polyester armor pushes pigskin…
Times Now, or the Art of Watching the Planet Burn in Real Time By Our Man in Everywhere at Once PARIS—The phrase “times now” used to belong to poets and prophets, those gentle souls who warned that the end was nigh but still had the courtesy to schedule it for next Thursday. These days the…
Moscow, 3:14 a.m. — While the rest of the planet argues about carbon credits and the ethics of self-driving Teslas, a quieter, more dependable industry is quietly booming in every time zone: the international brotherhood (and sisterhood) of the auto accident attorney. From the neon-lit billboards of Los Angeles to the hand-painted plywood signs nailed…
In the grand theatre of 2019, while real-world borders were being hardened with barbed wire and performative press conferences, Gearbox Software quietly released Borderlands 3 and invited the planet to spend 60 USD on a cartoonish map where every nation is a punchline and every passport is a gun permit. The timing was exquisite: the…
Charlton Athletic vs Millwall: A Timeline of South-London Antipathy Viewed From a Safe Distance By our world-weary correspondent, currently hiding in a neutral-zone Wetherspoon’s 1925 – The Football League, still high on post-Victorian optimism, slots two factories-with-whistles—Charlton (the “Valiants”) and Millwall (the “Lions”)—into the same postcode. No one yet suspects that 100 years later the…
Silent Hill F: Japan Exports a New Nightmare, and the World Lines Up for Tickets By Dave’s Locker International Desk TOKYO—In the same week that global inflation refuses to die and the Doomsday Clock nudged another metaphorical millimeter toward midnight, Konami decided what the planet really needed was a fresh reason to sleep with the…
Milwaukee, Wisconsin—population 577,000, beer-per-capita champion of the Midwest, and, this week, the unlikely geopolitical barometer for the rest of the planet. While CNN loops footage of glaciers doing their best Titanic impression and the EU debates whether to classify “pleasant spring day” as a protected heritage item, Milwaukee has opted for a more avant-garde climate…
Fantasy Football Scout: The Global Cottage Industry Built on Billionaires’ Benchwarmers By Our Correspondent, currently hiding from ultras in a Moldovan sports bar ZURICH—While the planet debates grain corridors and methane pledges, roughly 250 million earthlings spent last week frantically DMing strangers in Sunderland to discover whether a 19-year-old left-back from Burkina Faso might start…
