Zack Baun and the Global Theater of American Football: A Small Linebacker, a Large Stage By the time Zack Baun’s name appeared on NFL draft boards in 2020, the world had already endured a pandemic preview, watched Australia burn on live stream, and discovered that the most coveted commodity on earth was not oil or…
Michael Strahan: The Gap-Toothed American Export the World Never Asked For (But Got Anyway) PARIS—In most countries, a 1.5-centimeter diastema between one’s incisors is considered an orthodontic emergency. In the United States, it became a billion-dollar brand. Michael Strahan, the former New York Giants pass-rusher turned television polymath, has managed to turn a dental liability…
**Gridiron Diplomat: How Dak Prescott Became the World’s Most Reluctant Soft-Power Asset** From the glass towers of Doha to the noodle stalls of Ho Chi Minh City, a curious phenomenon has emerged: grown men in Ezekiel Elliott jerseys arguing about Dak Prescott’s contract leverage while their local football—*actual* football—matches drone on in the background. Somewhere…
Bernardo Silva is the kind of footballer who makes you wonder whether the gods ever actually left Olympus or just relocated to a boutique gym in Monte Carlo. At 29, the Portuguese midfielder has become a quiet but persistent reminder that elegance can still survive in an era when the sport is mostly a high-frequency…
Harry Potter and the Global Hangover: How a Boarding-School Fairy Tale Became the Planet’s Shared Mother Tongue Twenty-seven years after a broke single mum on a delayed Manchester-to-London train sketched out a story about a boy with a facial scar and a talent for property destruction, the Wizarding World has metastasized into the closest thing…
The Curious Case of Jared Verse: How a Pass-Rusher Became a Global Metaphor By the time the news reached the frigid fjords of Tromsø, Norway—where locals were debating whether to watch the aurora borealis or the NFL draft—Jared Verse had already been reduced to a single, tidy archetype: the American export nobody asked for but…
**The Voice That Outlasted Empires: Brent Musburger’s Accidental Reign Over Global Sports** Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, Brent Musburger became the accidental emperor of American sports broadcasting—a role that somehow managed to export itself across the globe like McDonald’s with better vocabulary. While European football commentators were…
Nico O’Reilly and the Quiet Art of Global Overachievement by Our Man in the Departures Lounge Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, between the tepid lasagna and the second plastic thimble of Shiraz, Nico O’Reilly’s name flashed across seat-back screens like an inside joke the planet had finally decided to share. To the uninitiated, he is merely…
Joanna Gaines and the Worldwide Gospel of Shiplap: How a Texan Farmhouse Became the New Soft Power From the refugee tents of northern Syria to the glass-walled co-working lofts of Singapore, one aesthetic keeps popping up like an unsolicited push notification: white-washed shiplap, matte-black fixtures, and the faint smell of eucalyptus pretending to be a…
Reijnders: The Dutch Dynamo Who Proves National Stereotypes Are Just Lazy Copywriting By the time Tijjani Reijnders curled a 25-yard daisy-cutter past Gianluigi Donnarumma last month, the global football commentariat had already exhausted every possible “wooden shoes, wooden touchline” joke. From Lagos betting shops to Tokyo izakaya screens, the 25-year-old Alkmaar export had become the…
Drew Brees and the Global Art of Turning a Spiral into Soft Power By Our Paris Bureau Chief, nursing a 2005 Bordeaux and a mild case of existential dread PARIS—Somewhere between the pâté and the second bottle of Burgundy, it dawned on the assembled diplomats, hedge-fund escapees, and one very confused Senegalese rapper that the…
The Fixture List as Geopolitical Weather Report By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere between the Etihad and the end of history It begins, as all modern catastrophes do, with a PDF. At 09:00 BST precisely, Manchester City’s 2024-25 fixture list drops onto millions of phones from Lagos to Lahore, each ping a tiny…
