Iva Jović, the 16-year-old tennis prodigy from Serbia, has been crowned the Orange Bowl champion, a title that once served as a crystal ball for future Grand Slam winners back when newspapers still mattered. While the planet teeters between climate catastrophe and TikTok diplomacy, the international press corps has dutifully pivoted from COP28 meltdowns to…
Office 365: The World’s Most Ambitious Digital Colony By our roving correspondent in a Wi-Fi cave somewhere between GMT+8 and existential despair When Microsoft announced that Office 365 would henceforth be “Microsoft 365,” the planet reacted with the same collective shrug it reserves for new UN resolutions and gluten-free airline meals. Yet beneath the rebranding…
Nobody Wants This—But the Planet Keeps Getting It Anyway By Our Man in the Departures Lounge GENEVA—At precisely 14:03 Central European Time, the latest global consensus was delivered via diplomatic cable, subtitled tweet, and a half-hearted Slack emoji: “Nobody wants this.” The memo, drafted in six languages and one exhausted sigh, refers to everything from…
**The Ballad of Bryce Eldridge: How One Teenage Baseball Prodigy Became a Global Rorschach Test for Our Collective Delusions** In a world where nuclear powers can’t afford fertilizer and billionaires rocket themselves into existential crises, humanity has found its latest vessel for hope: a 6’7″ eighteen-year-old from Virginia who can apparently hit a baseball into…
Cris Collinsworth: The Accidental Diplomat in a World That Can’t Stop Watching American Football By the time the satellite feed reaches Ulan Bator, it is already Tuesday morning. Mongolian herders are coaxing stubborn yaks across the steppe, yet a few kilometers outside the capital, inside a yurt wired for 200 Mbps, a teenager rewinds Cris…
Ray Romano and the Global Giggle-Industrial Complex By a Correspondent Who Has Watched Too Many Sitcoms in Economy Class Somewhere over the Kara Sea, seat 42B on Aeroflot 243 is vibrating with canned laughter. The in-flight entertainment system has queued up an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, subtitled in Cyrillic and Mandarin, and the Russian…
The Las Vegas Aces are not a basketball team; they are a geopolitical weather balloon released above the Mojave Desert, drifting across time zones to see who on Earth still believes in fairy-tale endings. On paper they’re merely the reigning WNBA champions, but in the grand casino of international soft power, they’ve become a high-roller’s…
Aaron Jones and the Global Choreography of a 40-Yard Dash There is a moment, somewhere between the 30- and 35-yard lines at Lambeau Field, when Aaron Jones stops being a mere running back and becomes a geopolitical Rorschach test: a blur of green and gold that 196 countries interpret according to their own neuroses. To…
**The Mullet That Marched Across Borders: Jared Allen’s Accidental Diplomacy** While diplomats in Geneva negotiate trade deals over lukewarm coffee, somewhere in Eastern Europe a farmer wears a Minnesota Vikings jersey with “Allen 69” stretched across his beer-enhanced torso. This is what passes for American cultural export these days: not democracy or innovation, but a…
Carrie Underwood: How a Farm-Girl Soprano Became the UN’s Unofficial Soundtrack for Late-Stage Capitalism By Our Correspondent in Exile, Currently Somewhere Between Nashville and Narnia MOSCOW—Somewhere between the Kremlin’s nightly news and the latest oligarch yacht auction, a familiar voice crackles over a tinny radio in a Lada dashboard: “Jesus, take the wheel.” It is…
Yankee, Go Home (But First, Explain Yourself) PARIS — The word “Yankee” has always traveled poorly. At a smoky bar in Istanbul the syllable passes for an insult; in Manila duty-free it’s a credit card; in Caracas it’s the ghost of every coup since 1954. A single term, half-slur, half-brand, now stands in for the…
Somewhere between the 50-yard line and the existential void, a man named Daniel Jones is busy reminding the planet that even in a sport played almost exclusively in one country, the ripple effects can lap at shores from Lagos to Luleå. Jones, the New York Giants’ quarterback and walking embodiment of “maybe this year,” has…
