VATICAN CITY—In what seasoned curial insiders are calling “the ecclesiastical equivalent of a hostile takeover,” the global church woke up this week to discover that the Holy Spirit—long presumed to be a dove—has apparently pivoted into venture capital. The Synod on Synodality, a two-year circular conversation that began with earnest Zoom breakout rooms and ends…
Twitch: The 24-H7 Coliseum Where Nations Go to Watch Each Other Stall By the time the sun rises in São Paulo, a Korean teenager is already 17 hours into a “Just Chatting” stream, explaining in near-perfect Portuguese why he prefers Brazilian memes to K-pop stans. In the same breath, 34,000 viewers from 112 countries vote…
The Las Vegas Aviators—Triple-A farm club of the Oakland Athletics, though that parentage feels increasingly like an unpaid internship—have lately become an unlikely Rorschach test for the global condition. On any given desert night, 10,000 sun-roasted pilgrims cram into the $150 million, air-conditioned hallucination known as Las Vegas Ballpark to watch men in silver-trimmed jerseys…
Vineland: Where America’s Perpetual Midlife Crisis Goes to Die in Peace and Quiet The name itself sounds like a punch line from a forgotten Scandinavian sitcom: Vineland—population 61,000, median age 38.7, median house price $275,000, median existential dread incalculable. Yet this sun-bleached township in southern New Jersey has become an improbable global mirror, reflecting every…
Helen Flanagan, the Cheshire-raised former Coronation Street ingenue turned perennial headline-magnet, has once again managed to ricochet across the planet’s newsfeeds like a rogue ping-pong ball in a wind tunnel. This week it isn’t a jungle in Australia or a mansion in Dubai that has the world rubber-necking, but a single Instagram story in which…
The Curious Case of Chase Roberts: A Nebraska Farm Boy Who Accidentally Became a Global Geopolitical Metaphor By the time the sun rose over the corn stubble outside Lincoln, Nebraska, Chase Roberts had already broken the internet in three languages and triggered a minor diplomatic incident in the South China Sea. Not bad for a…
Alabama Football: How a Crimson Cult in the American South Became the Planet’s Most Efficient Emotional Export By Matteo “Still Jet-Lagged” Rossi, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker MUNICH—On a drizzly October evening, while most Europeans were arguing about gas prices or pretending to understand rugby, an Alabama bar near the train station erupted in synchronized howls….
Neil Magny and the Thin Blue Glove: How One Welterweight Embodies America’s Export of Controlled Violence PARIS—At 10:30 p.m. local time, the lights inside Accor Arena dimmed to that particular shade of corporate menace, and Neil Magny strode into the octagon looking like a man who had misplaced both his anxiety and his razor. A…
Wanderlei Silva: The Axe-Murderer Who Became a Global Rorschach Test Rio de Janeiro, 1999. While the rest of the planet was busy panic-buying canned goods for Y2K, a shaven-headed Brazilian was teaching the world a more immediate lesson: some apocalypses fit comfortably inside a 30-foot ring. Wanderlei Silva’s PRIDE debut that year didn’t just rearrange…
College GameDay Week 6: The World Watches America Argue Over a Leather Oblate Spheroid By Matteo “Malbec” Moreau, Buenos Aires Bureau Chief Somewhere in the ionized haze above the Atlantic, trans-Atlantic flights are detouring so passengers can catch the final three minutes of Tennessee vs. Texas A&M on seat-back screens. Down below, container ships stacked…
In the fluorescent cathedrals of Las Vegas, where slot-machine hymns drown out bad decisions at 3 a.m., Alex Pereira stands as a living monument to the global economy of violence. The Brazilian—whose surname translates, deliciously, to “pilgrim”—has become every fight promoter’s favorite export: a soft-spoken destroyer who can sell pay-per-views in 172 countries while looking…
Gridiron Gladiators and the Global Coliseum: How NCAA Football Became the World’s Most American Export Somewhere in the Siberian tundra, a Yakutsk teenager named Dmitri is live-streaming a grainy pirated feed of Alabama vs. Auburn with the devotion of a medieval monk copying scripture. He doesn’t know what a “tight end” actually does, but he…
