Kelvin Gastelum, A Microcosm of the Planet’s Perpetual Underdog Story By Eduardo “The Jet-Lagged Prophet” Morales, international desk, Dave’s Locker Somewhere in São Paulo a taxi driver is replaying Gastelum’s left hook on loop between WhatsApp memes. In a Seoul PC-bang, a kid toggles between League of Legends and a pirated UFC 236 stream just…
Karachi, Wednesday, 3:47 a.m.—While half the planet doom-scrolls through another night of inflation alerts and celebrity divorces, a 22-year-old left-handed opener named Saim Ayub is quietly threatening to rewrite one of the few remaining instruction manuals that still brings the human race together: how to play Twenty20 cricket. From the floodlit graveyard shift of the…
Fatal Frame 2: A Global Séance in Pixels, or How Japan Taught the World to Fear Its Own Camera Roll By Our Bureau Chief of Supernatural Trade Relations, currently hiding in a Kyoto capsule hotel that still smells of 2003. Kyoto, Japan – While the rest of the planet was busy inventing selfie sticks and…
Mega Raichu and the Global Arms Race of Make-Believe By Our Correspondent, somewhere between the ninth circle of fandom and the tenth circle of late-stage capitalism GENEVA—Delegates at this week’s WTO summit barely noticed when the delegate from Fiji slipped out of the plenary hall to queue for a “Mega Raichu” hologram card, one of…
Hades 2: A Global Release Date for a World Already in Limbo By our correspondent in the Hotel Charon, Terminal 3, Anywhere-but-Here International If the planet’s collective mood were a video game, we’d all be stuck on the loading screen, watching the same spinning coin of fate while background music loops a minor chord. Into…
Across oceans and borders, in the smoky backrooms of Geneva think-tanks and the fluorescent glare of Seoul sports bars, the name Malcolm Brogdon has started to carry the faint whiff of geopolitical metaphor. Not because the 6’4″ guard can single-handedly reboot supply chains or lower global interest rates—heaven forbid we inflate another athlete into a…
Tyler Robinson and the Quiet Rebellion of One-Man Nations By our jaded foreign desk Somewhere between the death rattle of the twentieth-century nation-state and the TikTok-fication of geopolitics, Tyler Robinson—age 32, passport holder of no fixed narrative—has become the planet’s most unlikely cartographer. While the rest of us binge-watch the collapse of supply chains and…
Coronation Street Vicky: A Soap-Opera Saga for the End of the World By Our Foreign Desk, Somewhere between a Manchester drizzle and a geopolitical tempest LONDON – In the grand tradition of British understatement, the nation currently losing prime ministers faster than most people lose AirPods has decided that its most pressing international export is…
Meth, Morality, and the Global Branding of a Fictional Monster By Dave’s Locker International Desk When a mild-mannered chemistry teacher from Albuquerque starts cooking blue rock that ends up on coffee tables from Jakarta to Johannesburg, you know the planet has officially run out of original sins. “Breaking Bad” premiered in 2008, back when the…
Emanuel Emegha: The Accidental Poster-Boy for a World That Can’t Kick Its Addiction to Speed By the time Emanuel Emegha buried the ball in the far corner for Royal Antwerp last month—clocked at an eye-watering 36.2 km/h by the league’s semi-reliable tracking drones—he wasn’t just outrunning a back-pedalling right-back. He was outpacing the attention span…
Priyanka Chopra Jonas: The Global Empress of Strategic Ambiguity By Our Resident Bureau Chief, Nursing a Third Espresso in a Hotel Bar Somewhere Between Continents When the United Nations announced its newest Goodwill Ambassador in 2016, diplomats who had spent the morning arguing over the precise definition of “genocide” were treated to the spectacle of…
WISSA INJURY: WHEN THE WORLD CUP MET THE WORLD’S MOST RELIABLE ACHILLES TENDON By the time the third orthopedic surgeon in three countries had tapped the same spot on Mohamed Wissa’s left hamstring, the injury had already become an international incident. Egyptian striker, Italian MRI machine, Qatari hospital, French rehab guru, and a global audience…
