Lisbon, 9 April — In the grand tapestry of global events, where nuclear submarines play hide-and-seek in the South China Sea and central bankers rehearse their lines about “transitory” inflation, a modest football match at the Estádio da Luz somehow elbowed its way onto the world stage last night. Benfica versus Santa Clara, a fixture…
Sevilla’s Ramón Sánchez-Pizjuán Stadium, 21:00 local time, Tuesday. The floodlights slice through Andalusian night like surgical lamps over a patient that keeps insisting it’s perfectly healthy. Sevilla—perennial Europa League addicts and Champions League group-stage escape artists—host Elche, the modest club from Alicante whose greatest international achievement is probably being mispronounced by British commentators (“El-chee? Elsh?…
Bayer Leverkusen vs Eintracht Frankfurt, Saturday night at the BayArena—two modest German postal codes temporarily elevated to the status of a United Nations Security Council session, only with better beer and worse refereeing. To the naked eye it’s a mid-table Bundesliga fixture. To the rest of the planet it is a barometer of everything from…
Tampa Bay Rays versus Chicago Cubs: a pairing that sounds less like a playoff preview and more like an eco-tourism brochure gone rogue. Somewhere an endangered Florida manta glides past the ivy-strewn bricks of Wrigley, wondering why its name is being invoked in a contest featuring grown men chewing sunflower seeds at industrial scale. Yet…
Batman, Brand, and the Bleak Ballet of Global Fame: Robert Pattinson’s Accidental Geopolitics By “Gravedigger” G. M. Alonso, filing from the last airport lounge still serving warm beer PARIS—Somewhere above the Atlantic, Robert Pattinson is probably trying to sleep in business class while the rest of us mortals doom-scroll through cascading crises. The man once…
Kelvin Gastelum, A Microcosm of the Planet’s Perpetual Underdog Story By Eduardo “The Jet-Lagged Prophet” Morales, international desk, Dave’s Locker Somewhere in São Paulo a taxi driver is replaying Gastelum’s left hook on loop between WhatsApp memes. In a Seoul PC-bang, a kid toggles between League of Legends and a pirated UFC 236 stream just…
Noah Wyle and the Last ER: How One American Actor Quietly Became the Global Hospital’s Patron Saint of Controlled Chaos By the time most of the planet had locked its doors in March 2020, Noah Wyle—once television’s most over-qualified pediatric ER resident—was in Amman, shooting a refugee-camp miniseries that nobody outside the Arab world had…
KARACHI, PAKISTAN – Somewhere between a sandstorm and a smartphone screen, Fakhar Zaman is busy proving that national heroes are just like the rest of us, only with better highlight reels and worse visa queues. The 33-year-old left-handed opener has become a walking metaphor for a country that insists on swinging for the boundary even…
The Maldives, that necklace of coral atolls tossed across the Indian Ocean like a billionaire’s broken bracelet, has always punched above its weight in the apocalypse sweepstakes. While other nations merely flirt with existential doom, the Maldives brings a dowry of 1,192 islands, an average elevation you could clear with a decent jump shot, and…
Marc-André Fleury and the Great Geopolitical Face-Off By our man in the crease, watching the world slide five-hole MONTREAL—While diplomats in Geneva trade barbs over whose turn it is to nearly start World War III, a 38-year-old goalie from Sorel-Tracy, Quebec, has quietly become the most reliable border guard on the planet. Marc-André Fleury’s latest…
Washington County: Where the World’s Problems Go to Rehearse By Dave’s Foreign Desk Somewhere on the ragged edge of Appalachia, Washington County—Maryland, Pennsylvania, Oregon, take your pick—has quietly perfected the art of being nobody’s headline and everybody’s dress-rehearsal stage. Call it geopolitical karaoke: before the planet tries a crisis for real, it drops by a…
Mega Raichu and the Global Arms Race of Make-Believe By Our Correspondent, somewhere between the ninth circle of fandom and the tenth circle of late-stage capitalism GENEVA—Delegates at this week’s WTO summit barely noticed when the delegate from Fiji slipped out of the plenary hall to queue for a “Mega Raichu” hologram card, one of…
