Chicago — It began, as most modern apocalypses do, with a push notification: “Bears vs Vikings: 3 p.m. local, 21:00 GMT, 06:00 tomorrow in Seoul.” Somewhere between the algorithmic chirp and the global reflex to refresh the scoreboard, the planet’s attention pivoted to a frozen rectangle of Midwestern sod where 106 padded mercenaries pretended the…
In the grand, increasingly surreal tapestry of 21st-century geopolitics, where billionaires launch phallic rockets to nowhere and entire nations debate whether water is a human right, the name “Kyle Monangai” has begun to flicker on diplomatic radar screens from Tokyo to Timbuktu. Who, you ask, is this Monangai fellow? A Bond villain with a climate-altering…
MILWAUKEE—In a world where the Arctic is on fire and central bankers play Jenga with interest rates, the planet paused last night to watch two American ball clubs named after beer and law enforcement chase a small white sphere across a manicured lawn. The Brewers versus the Rangers, a mid-May interleague tilt that, on paper,…
THE LAST SUPPER BEFORE CHAPTER 11: RED LOBSTER SINKS WHILE THE WORLD WATCHES WITH BUTTERED POPCORN By the time the news crawled across my phone at 3 a.m. in a rainswept Istanbul hostel, Red Lobster had already filed for Chapter 11 from the comfort of Orlando—city of theme-park miracles and, apparently, seafood insolvency. Let us…
The Washington Nationals and the Miami Marlins, two baseball franchises whose combined payrolls could bail out a modestly failing European bank, faced off last night in a contest that the global community greeted with the same polite indifference normally reserved for a UN subcommittee on agricultural tariffs. From the Maracanã to the Marina Bay Sands,…
Mets vs Phillies: Two Rust-Belt City-States Fight Over a Pastime While the Planet Melts By Ignacio “Nacho” Valdez, International Correspondent, currently hiding from his bar tab in Athens If you squint at the right moment—say, during a 3-2 changeup that dies in the humid Philadelphia night—the Mets-Phillies rivalry starts to look like a low-stakes reenactment…
Charlie Ming, the Man Who Outsourced Apocalypse GENEVA—While the rest of us spent the pandemic arguing over sourdough starters and which Netflix series most accurately predicted the collapse of Western civilization, Charlie Ming quietly built the algorithm that now decides whether your next shipment of baby formula leaves the port of Rotterdam. If that sounds…
The Cincinnati Reds, a franchise that began life as the Red Stockings when Otto von Bismarck was still young and optimistic, played a baseball game last night. This apparently parochial event in the American Midwest was streamed from Great American Ball Park to 183 countries—one more than currently recognizes Taiwan—proving once again that late capitalism…
Derrick Henry Is the Last Titan Standing While the World Runs Out of Running Backs—and Possibly Civilization Itself YULIN, CHINA—At 4:07 a.m. local time, while most of humanity was doom-scrolling about the next micro-war or the price of eggs, a 6-foot-3, 247-pound American running back named Derrick Henry was bench-pressing Buicks somewhere in Nashville. The…
Hamilton Ravens: The Feathered Oligarchs Who’ve Turned a Canadian Steel Town into a Global Metaphor By the time the rest of the planet noticed, the Hamilton Ravens had already unionized. Not the football team, mind you—those poor Ti-Cats haven’t won anything since the invention of the iPhone—but the actual corvids who roost above Locke Street…
DeAndre Hopkins, the man whose hands are insured for more than the GDP of Tuvalu, is once again a free-range wide receiver—an unsettling prospect for defensive backs and a clarion call to every franchise owner whose yacht is named after a tax haven. The NFL’s perennial trade carousel has coughed up Hopkins like a cat…
Kouvr Annon and the Great Global Fame Recycling Plant By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent, filing from a café whose Wi-Fi password is literally “Password123” If you’ve never heard of Kouvr Annon, congratulations—you have just proven you own a life. Regrettably, that life is about to be colonised anyway. Annon, a 23-year-old American content apparition, has…
