Sophie Cunningham and the Art of Being Cancel-Proof: A Global Case Study in the Death of Nuance By the time Sophie Cunningham’s latest novel dropped in Melbourne, the algorithmic tide had already rolled through Lagos, São Paulo, and a dozen other megacities where bookshops now double as co-working spaces for digital nomads who treat literature…
The Curious Case of Germie Bernard, or How One College Receiver Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Wrong and Right With Us By the time most Europeans finished their second espresso on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, Twitter had already decided that Germie Bernard—freshly transferred wide receiver from Alabama to Washington—was either the second coming of…
The Curious Case of Jalynn Polk, or How a 19-Year-Old Wide Receiver Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Rorschach Test By the time most teenagers have figured out which end of a tax form is up, Jalynn Polk has already been drafted by the New England Patriots, weaponized by Chinese sports-apparel bots, meme-ified by Nigerian football-fan accounts,…
Hull FC vs Warrington Wolves: A Microscopic Fracas in the Macrocosmic Dumpster Fire By Our Man on the Touchline, Nursing a Flat White and Existential Dread The Black and Whites rolled into the Halliwell Jones Stadium last night, a venue whose corporate nomenclature sounds suspiciously like a hedge fund that lost your pension in 2008….
TALLAHASSEE, Thursday—While COP delegates in Bonn argue over half-degree temperature increments, another climate summit convenes 7,800 km away inside Doak Campbell Stadium: the Florida State Seminoles’ 2024 football schedule, where the only melting ice is in overpriced margaritas. To the untrained eye, it’s a tidy twelve-game slate—Duke, Clemson, Miami, the usual suspects—sprinkled across the calendar…
Brentford vs Chelsea: A Timeline for the Age of Absurdity By Our Correspondent in Self-Imposed Exile, Somewhere Over the Atlantic 1935 – The First Whistle Brentford, then a modest First Division side, beats Chelsea 3-1 at Griffin Park. Newspapers report it soberly, because the world still believed in sentences without emojis. Adolf Hitler is re-arming…
Lainey Wilson and the Great American Brand Export: How a Bell-Bottomed Arkansan Became a Global Stress Ball PARIS — On any given Tuesday, the Café de Flore smells of Gauloises, existential dread, and—since last spring—bourbon. Not because the French have finally noticed Kentucky exists, but because the house playlist has surrendered to a woman in…
South Alabama vs. Auburn: A Microscopic Proxy War in a World That’s Already Over By the time the final whistle blows on Saturday night, roughly 87,000 Alabamians will have screamed themselves hoarse inside Jordan–Hare Stadium while another 25,000 will have discovered the existential terror of a half-empty Hancock Whitney Stadium in Mobile. To the rest…
The quaintly named “HCU vs Nebraska” is, on first glance, only a scrap of American collegiate sport, a dust-up between Houston Christian University—population: one modest Texas campus—and the University of Nebraska, whose football program alone could probably float a small sovereign debt issue. Yet, like a well-traveled diplomat who pretends to sip tea while negotiating…
The World Watches Central Michigan vs. Michigan, or: How We All Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mid-Major By L. Marlowe, International Desk, somewhere between despair and a Marriott minibar. From the banks of the Tigris to the glass towers of Singapore, humanity awoke last Saturday to discover the globe’s most pressing geopolitical fault…
**The Empire Strikes Back: How Rangers FC Became Scotland’s Accidental Ambassador to the World’s Darkest Corners** In the grand theater of global football, where petrostates launder reputations through inflated transfer fees and oligarchs collect clubs like distressed real estate, Rangers FC stands as a peculiar anachronism—a 150-year-old institution that somehow embodies both the triumph and…
Haynes King: The Quarterback Who Became a Global Metaphor for Second Chances By our jaded but still-sentimental foreign correspondent If you’ve never heard of Haynes King, congratulations—you’ve successfully avoided the American habit of exporting every middling athletic drama as if it were the Magna Carta. Yet here we are, dragging the Texas A&M quarterback onto…
