Penn State Football: America’s Colosseum, Now Streaming to a World That’s Forgotten Bread State College, Pennsylvania—population 40,000, or roughly one-third of the queue for a visa appointment at any U.S. consulate these days—erupts every autumn Saturday into a roar that can be heard, metaphorically, from Lagos to Lahore. To the uninitiated foreign eye, Penn State…
From the Caspian Sea to the Carpathians, geopoliticians still argue over pipelines and pacts, but on the far side of a flickering smartphone in Ulan Bator, a 19-year-old scrolls past grainy clips of Vicky Pattison hurling a prosecco flute in a Newcastle taxi and whispers, “icon.” Somewhere in that absurd transaction lies the true balance…
Ross Strictly and the Global Glitterball: How a British Dance-Off Became the Planet’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure By our London Bureau Chief (who has seen empires fall but still can’t Cha-Cha) LONDON—As the northern hemisphere slouches toward another winter of discontent, the United Nations Security Council has, predictably, failed to agree on anything beyond the catering…
Satellite dishes bloom like metallic mushrooms on rooftops from Lagos to Lima, all pointed skyward in the same devotional posture: seeking tonight’s televised scripture. In an age when glaciers file for divorce from ice shelves and trade wars are started by typo-prone thumbs, humanity still agrees on one planetary ritual—consulting the sacred scrolls known as…
Will Best, or: How the World Decided One Man’s Ambition Was a Perfect Mirror for Its Own Absurdity by Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats GENEVA—Somewhere between a Swiss bank vault and a pop-up NFT gallery, Will Best—British broadcaster, festival impresario, and walking LinkedIn profile—has become the planet’s latest Rorschach test. To Londoners he’s the…
Strictly Speaking: How the Planet Learned to Love the Cage It Built for Itself By our man in the departure lounge, passport ink still wet Strictly speaking, the word “strictly” has always had a passport problem. It shows up at customs with its shirt tucked in, visa pre-approved, declaring nothing but certainty. Yet everywhere it…
Jeremiyah Love: The Global Phenomenon of a Name That Refuses to Behave By the time Jeremiyah Love’s latest highlight reel hit 3.2 million views on a cracked smartphone in Lagos, the joke was already stale in São Paulo. “Another American running back with a name that sounds like a failed boy band,” muttered a Brazilian…
The Word Heard ’Round the World By Our Man in the Cloud Today’s Wordle answer—mercifully still un-Googled by the disciplined—is “PLANE.” Five innocuous letters that, in ordinary times, would elicit nothing more than a smug green-square tweet and a half-eaten breakfast burrito. Yet on this particular morning, as Kyiv’s air-raid sirens harmonize with Jakarta’s dawn…
Green Man Festival: When the World’s Existential Dread Dresses Up in Face Paint and Wellies By Our Correspondent, still vaguely damp from last year Brecon Beacons, Wales – Somewhere between the sheep-scented mist and the biodegradable glitter, 25,000 humans have once again assembled to prove that collective anxiety can be marketed as a boutique experience….
Bill Burr, the Red-Faced Oracle of Our Global Meltdown By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—Somewhere between the 19th nervous breakdown of the Eurozone and the 47th Marvel spin-off trailer, Bill Burr has emerged as the unlikeliest cartographer of universal despair. The balding Bostonian—equal parts pit bull and philosophy major who got kicked out for heckling…
Tony Hawk, the man whose name now serves as a shorthand for everything from skateboards to NFTs to the existential dread of being recognized but not *really* recognized, has quietly become one of America’s most successful cultural exports since the invention of the blues and the accidental global domination of Starbucks. While diplomats haggle over…
PARIS — Somewhere between the red-carpet flashbulbs in Cannes and the pixelated outrage of a Telegram channel in Minsk, Elliot Page has become a global Rorschach test. One half of the planet sees the Oscar-nominated Canadian actor as a living rebuttal to every grim statistic on trans suicide; the other half sees a convenient scapegoat…
