The Beautiful Game’s Ugly Cousin: A Timeline of Marseille vs PSG, or How France Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Grudge Match By the time the first whistle blew in 1971, Olympique de Marseille and Paris Saint-Germain had already mastered the only skill that truly matters in modern sport: holding a grudge. What began…
The curiously code-named “RR stock” has been lurching across trading screens from São Paulo to Singapore like a drunken aristocrat at last call, generating the sort of global buzz usually reserved for royal weddings or minor nuclear incidents. At first glance it appears to be nothing more than the ticker for Rolls-Royce Holdings—yes, the same…
The Global Sigh That Is Russia-Ukraine: A Spectator Sport for the Rest of Us By Our Correspondent Who’s Running Low on Both Coffee and Hope KYIV, MOSCOW, AND EVERYWHERE ELSE—Somewhere between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, two nations have been locked in a pas de deux of artillery and acronyms for so long…
Cathay Pacific Flies Straight Into the Turbulence of a Multipolar World By our correspondent in the airport lounge where optimism goes to die Hong Kong—On paper, Cathay Pacific is just another airline trying to coax human cargo into ever-smaller seats while its accountants figure out how to charge for oxygen. In practice, the 77-year-old carrier…
The silver-gray silhouettes that streak across the Sea of Okhotsk are not just machines; they are postcards from a country that insists on writing in all-caps. Russian fighter jets—Sukhois, MiGs, and that theatrical new kid, the Su-57 “Felon”—have become the Kremlin’s preferred punctuation marks in every geopolitical sentence it deems too subtle. One day they…
THE CHIEFS OF THORNTON: HOW A SUBURBAN FOOTBALL CLUB BECAME THE WORLD’S MOST IMPROBABLE GEOPOLITICAL METAPHOR The Thornton Chiefs, for those blessedly unfamiliar with the particulars of English non-league football, are a semi-professional club whose greatest achievement—until recently—was existing in that peculiar purgatory of British suburban life where ambition goes to drink itself into oblivion….
Giants vs. Chiefs: The World Watches Two Mediocre Powers Trade Body Blows By our jaded foreign correspondent, still waiting for the apocalypse to RSVP GENEVA—In the grand coliseum of global affairs, where nuclear codes are swapped like Pokémon cards and trade wars are fought with the gusto of a Black Friday stampede, this week’s marquee…
Montez Sweat: The Defensive End Exporting American Anxiety to a World Already on Edge By the time Montez Sweat was traded from the Chicago Bears to the Washington Commanders last October, the planet had already endured two years of pandemic, spiraling inflation, and the creeping realization that every smartphone notification might herald either a missile…
The Curious Case of Erika Kirk: How One Mid-Level Bureaucrat Accidentally Became the World’s Most Watched Woman GENEVA—In a glass-and-steel conference room overlooking Lake Geneva, Erika Kirk, a 42-year-old trade attaché from a midsized European nation most people confuse with a discount airline, is learning that global notoriety travels faster than diplomatic mail. What began…
The Curious Case of Luther Burden III: How a 19-Year-Old from East St. Louis Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Pawn By the time Luther Burden III stiff-armed his way into the end zone against Kansas State last November, grain futures in Kyiv ticked upward 0.3 percent. Not because the sophomore wide receiver has any known sway…
Gridiron Geopolitics: How the NFL Standings Quietly Rule the World Order By A. Correspondent, filing from a hotel bar in Singapore that still thinks the Patriots are the bad guys — The NFL’s weekly standings, for the uninitiated, look like a benign spreadsheet of wins, losses, and a few decimal points masquerading as science. But…
Somewhere between an earthquake in Vanuatu and the International Monetary Fund’s latest shrug at sovereign debt, today’s football scores have arrived like a pack of nicotine patches at an AA meeting: briefly distracting, mildly uplifting, and ultimately unable to cure the deeper addictions of a planet that still believes 22 millionaires kicking a sphere somehow…
