The Curious Case of Nick Sogard, or How One Utility Infielder Became a One-Man Metaphor for Global Uncertainty PARIS—In the grand bazaar of professional sport, where fortunes rise and fall like crypto during a regulatory panic, few commodities are as gloriously disposable as the utility infielder. Enter Nicholas Sogard—26, switch-hits, plays every infield position except…
**The Curious Case of Veronica Burton: How One Woman’s Basketball Career Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Wrong (and Right) with Modern Sport** If you’ve been anywhere near a sports bar in Ulaanbaatar lately—and honestly, who hasn’t—you’ve probably overheard heated debates about Veronica Burton’s defensive rating. The WNBA guard’s journey from Northwestern University standout to…
The Valkyries Are Back, and They’ve Got Global Entry By Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic NORWAY—On paper, the valkyries were always a Nordic HR department for the afterlife: winged middle-managers who skimmed battlefields, filed the résumés of the freshly dead, and escorted top talent to Valhalla’s open-bar networking lounge. In practice, of course, they…
Cody Mauch, North Dakota’s seventh-round offensive lineman, has become the NFL Draft’s accidental ambassador for global asymmetry. While European capitals agonize over energy sanctions and Asian markets convulse on semiconductor gossip, the planet’s most-watched sports-industrial complex paused to inspect the dental topography of a 24-year-old with a gap wide enough to smuggle a Ukrainian grain…
Manny Machado and the Global Theater of Overpaid Limberness By Santiago “Sully” Márquez, International Sports Misanthrope Somewhere between the Panama Canal’s perpetual bottleneck and the lithium mines that keep your smartphone humming, Manny Machado continues to bend his 6’3″ frame into positions that would make a Cirque du Soleil accountant blush. To the uninitiated, he…
From the concrete bowels of Detroit’s Comerica Park to the flickering smartphone screens in Saigon’s midnight cafés, the phrase “Tigers game” has metastasized into something far larger than nine innings of baseball. Mention it in Seoul and a crypto-punishing college kid pictures the Doosan Bears mascot; whisper it in Jakarta and a wildlife-trafficking middleman hears…
Columbus vs. New York City: A Tale of Two American Futures, Viewed From Afar From the vantage point of a café terrace in Lisbon—where the ghosts of empire still argue with the ghosts of debt—watching the United States argue about Columbus versus New York City feels like watching two heirs squabble over the family china…
Matt Olson and the New American Soft-Power: How a First-Baseman Quietly Became a Global Brand PARIS—In the diplomatic salons off Place de la Concorde, envoys fret over Biden tariffs, Chinese rare earths, and the latest North Korean missile tantrums. Yet last week the talk over chilled Sancerre turned, improbably, to Matt Olson, a 29-year-old first-baseman…
Frank Turek, the American apologist who insists that morality can’t exist without a cosmic referee, has lately become the improbable export the world never ordered but keeps receiving—like those plastic-wrapped “American cheese slices” that appear on supermarket shelves from Lagos to Lahore. To most of humanity, which wakes up each morning to inflation, drought, or…
Botafogo vs. Mirassol: The Quiet Apocalypse of a Tuesday Night in Rio By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you squint hard enough—past the floodlights, past the cocaine-laced energy-drink sponsorship banners—you can almost see the geopolitical fault lines tremble beneath the Maracanã turf. Botafogo versus Mirassol, a mid-table Campeonato Carioca fixture that barely registers on the…
Chivas vs Tigres: When Two Mexican Football Brands Duke It Out, the Rest of the World Pretends Not to Peek Estadio Akron, Guadalajara, 21:06 local—while global attention was busy rubber-necking between a European Super League that refuses to die and the Champions League anthem being used as background music for crypto-scams, Club Deportivo Guadalajara and…
Thursday in Baku or Bratislava used to mean nothing more than an extra shot of rakı or borovička in a dimly lit bar. These days it means the Europa League has rolled into town, trailing camera crews, riot police, and a caravan of men in Stone Island who look like they moonlight as debt collectors….
