The Global Parable of Two Golfers, or How Justin Rose and Bryson DeChambeau Became a Geopolitical Rorschach Test By our man in the 19th-hole press tent, still nursing yesterday’s painkillers and tomorrow’s regrets PARIS — Somewhere between the Seine and the artificial intelligence expo that’s currently turning the City of Light into the City of…
NASHVILLE—Somewhere between the third replay of a helmet-to-helmet collision and the slow-motion montage of a marching band spelling “VOLS” with the precision of a NATO formation, it occurred to me that a football game between the University of Tennessee and Mississippi State is less a regional pastime and more a planetary temperature check. While half…
Crystal Palace vs. Liverpool: A Timeline of Beautiful, Pointless Drama That the Whole World Pretends to Care About By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere between Croydon and Calcutta 1990 – Berlin Wall still wobbling, Mandela still in the queue for parole, and Crystal Palace—yes, the pride of South London’s retail-park belt—dump Liverpool out…
Somewhere between the Rhine’s industrial haze and the Mekong’s plastic-bottle flotilla, two Midwestern baseball clubs—whose combined payroll couldn’t buy a decent London parking space—played a game that, on paper, mattered only to people who still think chili belongs on spaghetti. Yet the Reds versus Brewers tilt in Milwaukee last night rippled outward like a drunk…
LISBON—Tonight, high above the Tagus, the floodlights at Estádio da Luz will do what they’ve done since 1954: pretend the rest of the planet isn’t quietly combusting. Somewhere between the 38th parallel and the 401(k) plunge, 60,000 souls will watch Benfica versus Gil Vicente, a fixture that sounds like the title of a minor Graham…
Bobby Witt Jr. and the Last Empire: How a Kid from Texas Became the World’s Unwitting Soft-Power Asset By Dave’s International Sourpuss-in-Residence Somewhere between a NATO summit and a TikTok dance-off, the planet’s attention economy pivoted last week to a 24-year-old shortstop who still looks like he ought to be carded at a Kansas City…
**Standing with Giants: A Global Perspective on Standing Desks and the Illusion of Progress** In the fluorescent-lit cathedrals of corporate power from Silicon Valley to Singapore, a revolution is taking place—one that requires its adherents to stand. The standing desk, that peculiar altar of modern office culture, has become the latest status symbol in a…
New York City vs Inter Miami: A Proxy War for the End of Empire Somewhere over the North Atlantic, the pilot of a Brussels-bound Airbus noses his jet south just enough that the passengers can glimpse a flicker of red and green below—two football clubs playing on a patch of grass that used to be…
Getafe vs Alavés: Two Suburbs of Madrid and Vitoria Walk Into a Global Bar and Nobody Notices—Except the Algorithms By the time the referee’s whistle echoes around the Coliseum Alfonso Pérez this weekend, three continents will have already yawned, scrolled past, and queued up cat videos instead. Yet in the grand, increasingly pixelated circus of…
Mike MacDonald: The Accidental Geopolitical Phenomenon Nobody Asked For By Our Man in Five Airports and Counting Somewhere between the duty-free Toblerone at Schiphol and the lukewarm espresso that tastes like remorse at Charles de Gaulle, the name “Mike MacDonald” has started popping up on departure boards, diplomatic cables, and—because the universe enjoys cheap jokes—TikTok….
Kasımpaşa vs. Fenerbahçe: A Microcosm of Earth’s Eternal Power Struggle, Sponsored by a Turkish Telecom Company Istanbul – If you squint past the floodlights and the cigarette smoke drifting from the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Stadium’s upper tiers, Kasımpaşa versus Fenerbahçe looks less like a mid-table scuffle and more like humanity’s résumé: ambition colliding with geography,…
Mike McDaniel: The NFL’s Reluctant Diplomat in a World That Forgot How to Lose Gracefully By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the Russian rouble’s latest swan dive and the IMF’s polite reminder that the planet is still bankrupt, Mike McDaniel—Miami Dolphins head coach, Hawaiian-shirt enthusiast, and accidental geopolitical metaphor—has become the most soothingly chaotic…
