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…
Tre Harris and the Great Global Redistribution of Hope By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk If you haven’t yet heard of Tre Harris, congratulations—you still possess the blissful ignorance that 7.9 billion other people lost somewhere between the third TikTok remix and the seventeenth think-piece. Harris, a 20-year-old wide receiver out of Mississippi State, has spent…
Coachella: The World’s Most Expensive Apocalypse Dress-Rehearsal by “Diego del Muerto,” Senior Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Pacific Every April, while half the planet still argues over whose refugees are more inconvenient, 125,000 of the planet’s best-looking carbon footprints descend on the Coachella Valley to practice the end of the world in fringe and feather. From…
The 2025 Champions League final whistle hasn’t even blown yet, and already the planet has started rotating a little faster on its axis—purely to accommodate the extra television satellites. From Jakarta to Johannesburg, punters, presidents, and popcorn vendors alike have paused to watch 22 millionaires chase an inflated leather sphere around a lawn the size…
Quentin Johnston’s Name Travels Faster Than a Diplomatic Cable—And That’s the Problem By the time you read this, Quentin Johnston—wide receiver, Los Angeles Chargers, owner of a 4.3-second 40-yard dash—has already been misfiled by at least three foreign ministries as a new Pacific micro-nation. Somewhere in Brussels, a junior attaché is drafting a memo titled…
Ole Miss Head Coach Lane Kiffin—yes, the Twitter-addicted, visor-tilting American football savant—has quietly become a global Rorschach test. From the shadow of Oxford’s Confederate statues to the fluorescent glare of Seoul’s Gangnam sports bars, Kiffin’s 280-character grenades ricochet across oceans, reminding the planet that the most American export isn’t corn or democracy but unfiltered, algorithmic…
Raiders vs Chargers: When Two Expats Duke It Out in a City That Barely Noticed They Arrived by Diego “The Jet-Lagged” Marlowe, International Sports Desk Las Vegas—if you squint past the LED volcanoes and crypto-bro wedding chapels—looks less like a city and more like a pop-up ad for late-stage capitalism. Into this neon fever dream…
The Curious Diplomatic Career of Keenan Allen, Accidental Ambassador of a Fractured Planet From the moment Keenan Allen snagged a 17-yard slant on a humid Midwestern Sunday, the tremor registered on seismographs in Reykjavik, on trading floors in Singapore, and in group chats from Lagos to Lahore. No one handed the Los Angeles Chargers wide…
From a smoky bar in Tórshavn to a noodle stall in Ho Chi Minh City, the name Dont’e Thornton Jr. is now being murmured into phones, printed on bootleg jerseys, and scrawled on betting slips. The 6’4″ wide receiver who once ran post routes for the University of Oregon—and more recently for North Carolina—has become…
**Nashville’s Soft-Power Envoy: How Brad Paisley Became the Accidental Soundtrack of a Fracturing Planet** By the time the first chorus of “American Saturday Night” reaches a dive bar in Lagos, the beer is warm, the generator is coughing diesel, and nobody in the room has ever seen a Chevy—yet they still mouth the words “French…
**Nashville’s Favorite Kiwi: How Keith Urban Became the UN Secretary-General of Stadium Country** By the time Keith Urban strums his opening chord in Hamburg, São Paulo, or Singapore, the same ritual unfolds: 20,000 strangers who can’t agree on tax policy, carbon targets, or whether pineapple belongs on pizza suddenly achieve perfect four-part harmony on “Somebody…
Las Vegas, that shimmering mirage of neon and regret, has always been a port city for the desperate. So when the Raiders’ latest quarterback—let’s call him the Seasonal Savior—steps under the Allegiant Stadium lights, the spectacle is less about football than about the global theater of hope recycling. From Macau’s baccarat pits to Lagos’s betting…
