The Last Empire’s Day Off: A Cubs Game as Global Parable Chicago—Somewhere between the seventh-inning stretch and the inevitable ceremonial first pitch from a hedge-fund mascot in a custom jersey, it struck me that the Cubs are less a baseball team than an international Rorschach test. To the locals, they’re a civic pacifier; to visiting…
Managua, Nicaragua – Tuesday, 4:07 p.m. local time, which in this city means the sun is already staging its daily coup against any concept of punctuality. From the cracked balcony of the Crowne Plaza, you can watch the volcano Momotombo smolder like a chain-smoker who’s read too many climate reports and decided to keep puffing…
Red Sox, Blue Planet: How a Faded Baseball Dynasty Became a Global Metaphor for Decline By Our Correspondent, still recovering from a $14 Fenway frankfurter BOSTON—From the banks of the Charles to the neon canyons of Tokyo, the phrase “Red Sox” once conjured a very American cocktail of curses, catharsis, and cash. Today, in boardrooms…
SANTA MARTA, Colombia – On a recent Tuesday that smelled faintly of sea salt and impending recession, Carlos Vives stood on the same Caribbean shore where Spanish galleons once ferried stolen gold and syphilis to the wider world. The Colombian singer was launching yet another “Vives Tour,” a planetary caravan that will soon disgorge accordions…
Klint Kubiak: The Accidental Geopolitical Football By the time the rest of the planet learned how to pronounce “Kubiak” (it’s “KYOO-bee-ak,” not the sneeze-like “kuh-BYE-ack”), the 37-year-old offensive coordinator had already become a Rorschach test for whatever ailment your hemisphere happens to nurse. In Brussels he is evidence that the American meritocracy is terminal; in…
The Diplomatic Incident You Can Wear: NFL Rivalry Jerseys as Soft-Power Sabotage By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over the Atlantic LONDON—Somewhere between the duty-free Toblerone and the tannoy announcing yet another delay to the 15:35 to Frankfurt, a man in a Dallas Cowboys jersey strode past me at Heathrow Terminal 3. Nothing…
Guardians Game Today: How One Ninth-Inning Pop-Up Can Echo From Caracas to Cairo By the Bureau Chief Who Once Mistook a Cricket Match for a Cult Ritual The “guardians game today” isn’t just nine innings of polite Midwestern masochism; it’s a planetary referendum on human hope. When the Cleveland Guardians (yes, the team that swapped…
Marvin Harrison Jr. and the Great American Export Machine By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over the Mid-Atlantic The planet’s most popular unintentional satire—American football—has coughed up another prodigy, and the rest of us are expected to feign surprise. Marvin Harrison Jr., a 21-year-old wide receiver from Ohio State, is the latest specimen…
Griff McGarry and the Global Ballet of Broken Dreams By our Special Correspondent in Existential Bullpens PHILADELPHIA—At first glance, Griff McGarry is just another American pitcher whose fastball once flirted with triple digits and whose elbow now flirts with medical bankruptcy. Zoom out, however, and you find a perfectly serviceable metaphor for the twenty-first-century order:…
East Carolina University’s football team, the Pirates, usually sails under the radar of the global sports-industrial complex—an oddly comforting fact in a world where footballers in the Persian Gulf now command salaries pegged to sovereign-wealth-fund spreadsheets and the price of Brent crude. Yet every autumn, in a modest 50,000-seat stadium carved out of tobacco-scented North…
Amazing Race 2025: Passport Stamps, Panic Attacks, and the Gentle Art of Global Collateral Damage By R. K. Caldwell, Foreign Correspondent-at-Large Geneva—The producers of CBS’s venerable demolition derby of relationships, The Amazing Race, have unveiled next year’s route. It begins in Reykjavik, ends in Ulaanbaatar, and, in a touching nod to budget airlines everywhere, makes…
The planet’s rotation didn’t pause, stock exchanges didn’t suspend trading, and no emergency UN sessions were convened, yet somewhere between the Sea of Japan and the Pacific a 25-year-old human with a 6-foot frame and a 94-mph fastball quietly shifted the tectonic plates of global sport. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the latest export from Osaka’s baseball factory,…
