USC vs Illinois: An American Civil War Reenactment the World Didn’t Ask For By Our Man on the Pacific Rim Who’s Already Had Too Much Coffee Los Angeles—While most of the planet was busy watching the ruble impersonate a rock climber and the Arctic circle audition for a beach holiday, the United States chose Friday…
Ohio State vs Washington: When a College Football Game Pretends to Matter to the World HOUSTON—In a cavernous stadium the size of a small principality, two American collegiate armies will collide Monday night while the rest of Earth politely pretends to watch. The “College Football Playoff National Championship” pits the Ohio State Buckeyes against the…
Nancy Mace and the Fine Art of Global Schadenfreude By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere east of the Potomac and west of the Yangtze There are moments—rare, shimmering, and vaguely nauseating—when a single U.S. congresswoman can make the entire planet lean in like it’s binge-watching a prestige drama. Enter Representative Nancy Mace, Republican…
Blackpool’s Fireworks: A Pyrotechnic Mirror for a World That’s Already on Fire By the time the first shell arcs over the Irish Sea and detonates in a chrysanthemum of magnesium and regret, half the planet is watching—some via livestream, others through the grainy lens of a refugee-camp phone charger jury-rigged to a car battery. The…
The World Waits for One More: Why “99 to Beat” Is the Planet’s Newest Collective Delusion By Dave’s Locker International Desk TOKYO—From the neon canyons of Shibuya to the tin-roof bars of Lagos, humanity has found a new, gloriously pointless obsession: “99 to Beat.” The premise is as elegant as it is idiotic—ninety-nine candidates, one…
The bout that nobody asked for, yet everyone will watch, has finally been inked: Jake “Problem Child” Paul versus Gervonta “Tank” Davis, scheduled for late autumn in—where else?—Saudi Arabia. The announcement detonated across WhatsApp groups from Lagos to Lahore like a push-notification Chernobyl, proving once again that the global attention economy has all the restraint…
Trey Gowdy and the Exportable Art of the Congressional Spectacle By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Foreign Correspondent Club, Geneva If you’ve ever watched a developing nation stage its first televised parliamentary brawl—plastic chairs hurled like discus, neckties used as garrottes—you may have wondered how mature democracies manage to look civil while accomplishing even…
Kimberly Guilfoyle, the American political commentator whose surname sounds like a brand of discount cologne, has transcended mere domestic notoriety to become a curious specimen of late-imperial pageantry. From Manila to Milan, observers watch her performative patriotism with the same detached fascination usually reserved for slow-motion train derailments or North Korean parades—equal parts horror and…
Queen Elizabeth II died exactly when the planet needed a two-week televised funeral more than, say, a functioning biosphere. From Lagos to Lima, screens flickered with scarlet-clad guards and plumed horses while inflation, drought, and war politely waited their turn. The BBC called it “history unfolding”; everyone else called it an exquisite displacement activity. In…
Texans vs Buccaneers: How a Floridian Squall and a Lone-Star Dust-Up Became the World’s Weirdest Diplomatic Rorschach Test ———————————————————————————————————————— Rome had its gladiators, London its football hooligans, and now—because history insists on punchlines—planet Earth has the Houston Texans and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, two professional American football teams whose meeting on a Sunday evening in NRG…
SoFi Stadium: The $5-Billion Coliseum Where the World Comes to Watch America Argue with Itself by “Marco ‘Bleachers’ Delgado,” filing from a press box that smells faintly of truffle oil and existential dread LOS ANGELES—On the edge of Inglewood, a neighborhood once famous for gang injunctions and now for artisanal coffee, rises SoFi Stadium: a…
Cardinals Game: A Feathered Spectacle in Which the Planet Gambles on Red Robes and Higher Stakes By Our Man in the Eternal City, nursing an espresso and existential dread Rome, Thursday – While half the world was doom-scrolling through inflation charts and the other half was busy re-branding war as “special military operations,” roughly 120…
