Liam Delap and the Global Supply Chain of Dreams By Our Man in the Transfer Tavern, filing from everywhere Wi-Fi still works Somewhere between the Suez Canal and a half-empty stadium in Ipswich, a 21-year-old striker named Liam Delap is being repackaged as a commodity more volatile than cobalt and almost as expensive. In the…
The world, it seems, has overdosed on espresso and is now sprinting in twelve directions at once, each one convinced it’s late for a meeting that was cancelled last quarter. From the bullet-train commuters of Tokyo who can nap with their eyes open at 320 km/h, to the Lagos okada riders threading traffic like caffeinated…
The Alphabet: Twenty-Six Letters and a World of Trouble by L. M. “Ludo” Mercier, Foreign Correspondent at Large It began, as most mischief does, in the Levant. Some enterprising Phoenician merchants, bored of tallying amphorae with scratches on clay, condensed Egyptian hieroglyphs into a tidy set of squiggles that could be carved into cedar and…
The planet’s collective calendar just received another immovable holiday: EA Sports has decreed that FC 26 will land on 26 September 2025. Mark it in crimson—right next to elections no one trusts, COP summits no one honors, and the next “once-in-a-century” storm. From the glass towers of Singapore to the tin-roof bars of La Paz,…
Diana Shnaider: A Tennis Prodigy for the Age of Global Collapse From the clay of Roland-Garros to the hard courts of Flushing Meadows, 19-year-old Diana Shnaider has materialized like a polite but lethal apparition, reminding us that even as the planet smolders, someone somewhere is still practicing drop shots with monastic devotion. Born in Moscow,…
The American Pastime’s Autumnal Hunger Games: A Globe-Trotting Dispatch on the MLB Playoff Picture By Our Man Who Once Saw a Cricket Match End Because Everyone Got Bored Let us begin with the obvious: most of the planet does not, technically speaking, give a solitary damn about the Major League Baseball postseason. In Lagos traffic,…
**Gridiron by the Numbers: How America’s Statistical Obsession Became the World’s Guilty Pleasure** While the rest of the planet was busy with that other football—the one where feet actually touch balls—America spent the last century perfecting the art of turning padded gladiators into spreadsheet entries. Now, in a plot twist that would make even the…
Turnstiles: The World’s Tiniest Border Guards By the time you finish reading this sentence, roughly 2,700 people will have pushed through a turnstile somewhere on the planet. They will do so in languages that span 180 alphabets, under currencies that may collapse by suppertime, and with pockets containing everything from expired metro cards to emergency…
A big bold beautiful journey used to mean a silk-lined suitcase, a steamer ticket, and the faint hope that your name wouldn’t be misspelled at Ellis Island. Today it means 4.9 billion smartphones chanting the same algorithmic rosary while their owners scroll through thirty-seven near-identical photos of someone’s brunch in Bali. The distance between romance…
Week 3 Fantasy Rankings: The World’s Most Popular Export Since Disappointment By: Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Global Desk GENEVA – While the UN Security Council argues over grain corridors and carbon ceilings, half a billion otherwise rational adults are locked in a far more consequential struggle: whether to start a Chicago third-string running back ahead of…
Geneva, Switzerland — Somewhere between a Swiss banker’s yawn and a climate refugee’s cough, Apple quietly dropped iOS 26, the operating system that promises to unite the planet in a shared hallucination of progress. The keynote was streamed live from a carbon-neutral bunker 30 meters beneath Lake Lucerne—because nothing says “global harmony” like an underground…
Dodgers Games: The Global Circus Where Baseball Meets Geopolitical Theater By Our Correspondent Who’s Seen More Bullpens Than Bull Markets LOS ANGELES—While the rest of the planet obsesses over missiles, microchips, and methane, 53,000 sunburned pilgrims still shuffle into Chavez Ravine each night to watch grown men in pajamas swing sculpted lumber at a sphere…
