The Ballad of Slaven Bilić: A Balkan Bard in a World That Stopped Listening to Rock ’n’ Roll By the time Slaven Bilić reached Beijing in 2023—fresh off a red-eye that smelled equally of instant noodles and Chinese state-media cologne—he carried the same leather jacket he’d worn while head-banging at AC/DC concerts in Zagreb circa…
Daria Kasatkina is not the tennis story most broadcasters lead with. She doesn’t smash rackets, date pop stars, or hire an entourage the size of a NATO battalion. Instead, the 26-year-old Russian has spent the last year turning press conferences into miniature Nuremberg trials—minus the dramatic lighting—while still finding time to dispatch top-ten opponents with…
Basement Submarines and the End of the World A Dispatch from the Planet’s Lower-Middle Floors By the time you read this, someone in Jakarta, Jakarta-on-the-Rhine (Cologne), or a newly soggy suburb of Detroit is probably up to their ankles in what used to be a wine cellar. The flooded basement—once the punch line of American…
Paris, 2024 – Somewhere between the pâtisserie and the palace, Emmanuel Macron has managed to turn the very idea of political gravity into a flaky, buttery croissant: crisp on the outside, hollow in the middle, yet weirdly irresistible to anyone watching from abroad. To the rest of the planet, “Macron” is no longer just a…
Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Global Catastrophes By Our Special Correspondent, Somewhere Between the 9th and 10th Circle of Fact-Checking VIENNA—From the mahogany-paneled briefing rooms of the IAEA to the fluorescent-lit call centers of Manila, humanity has reached a rare consensus: we prefer our mendacities artisanal, preferably with a local accent and a…
Ekaterina Alexandrova and the Fine Art of Being Russian While Winning By the time Ekaterina Alexandrova cracked the Top 20 last season, the Kremlin had already annexed a chunk of Ukraine, Wimbledon had politely asked Russian players to compete as neutrals, and several European governments were debating whether a tennis ball could be considered a…
Home-Run Diplomacy: How Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani Accidentally Became Soft-Power Envoys By Dave’s Locker Global Desk TOKYO—While the world’s foreign ministries argue over tariffs and tweets, the two men most likely to decide the 2024 MLB home-run crown are conducting their own brand of shuttle diplomacy—one swing at a time. Aaron Judge, the 6-foot-7…
Global Piggy Banks, Empty Promises: The International Battle to Save Anything at All by S. Mortimer, roving correspondent, somewhere between a Zurich vault and a Manila remittance counter ZURICH—Ask a Swiss banker what “savings” means and he’ll wax lyrical about fiduciary duty while discreetly sliding a brochure for numbered accounts beneath the marble counter. Ask…
ATHLETICS: THE PLANET’S MOST EXPENSIVE MASS COPING MECHANISM By the time the sun rises over the Maracanã, it has already set on a makeshift track in Svalbard where three Norwegian scientists jog in minus-20°C darkness, trying to outrun existential dread. Athletics, in its noble guise as the pursuit of human excellence, is really just the…
Argos, the ancient Greek city-state, has been quietly redefining the phrase “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” While the rest of the world obsesses over quarterly earnings and TikTok algorithms, Argos has been busy demonstrating that history is less a dusty attic and more a revolving door on a particularly vindictive carousel. From…
The Last Derby That Still Matters By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere between Tegucigalpa and the apocalypse They call it El Clásico Nacional, which is a charming bit of branding for what is essentially a quarterly civil-war cosplay between two neighborhoods separated by roughly six traffic lights and 112 years of mutual contempt….
SURVIVOR 49: THE WORLD’S MOST RELIABLE DIPLOMATIC CHANNEL, NOW IN ULTRA-HD Somewhere over the South Pacific, a customs agent in Nadi is stamping the 47th passport of a contestant who claims her profession is “influencer–slash–crypto-visionary.” She’s heading to a Fijian sand-spit so small it doesn’t appear on Google Earth unless you zoom in on the…
