Monday Night Football: The Glittering Coliseum Where the World Watches America Argue With Itself Dave’s Locker International | Dispatches from the End of the Couch Somewhere between the fall of Kabul and the rise of Ozempic, Monday Night Football became the last universally accepted American export that doesn’t arrive accompanied by sanctions or a drone…
Adam Schefter and the Global Gladiator Economy By Dave’s Locker International Desk On any given Tuesday, while most of the planet is busy filing taxes or dodging drones, 8.7 million people—an audience roughly the size of Switzerland—stop everything to watch a 57-year-old man in a tailored suit read text messages aloud. That man is Adam…
Chase Edmonds and the Global Cargo Cult of the NFL’s Disposable Heroes By Our Correspondent in a Time Zone You’ve Probably Never Heard Of On the surface, Chase Edmonds is merely a 28-year-old running back who recently packed his playbook and signed a one-year deal with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers—hardly the stuff of midnight UN…
VIKINGS VS FALCONS: A TIRED SCRIPT IN A WORLD THAT’S ALREADY ON FIRE By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent (currently self-medicating with fermented yak butter in Reykjavík) Somewhere between the first drone strike of the morning and the last cryptocurrency crash of the night, roughly 66,000 Americans—plus a few bewildered tourists who thought “NFL” was a…
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…
In the grand geopolitical casino, few chips are traded faster than a 22-year-old American who can run 40 yards in 4.49 seconds and still remember the quadratic formula. Enter Jordan Addison, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ newest wide receiver, whose off-season transfer from Minnesota to Pennsylvania has apparently altered the balance of power in a world currently…
**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…
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…
Tyquan Thornton and the Quiet Collapse of the American Dream—One Hamstring at a Time By “Lucky” Lucien Marceau, roving correspondent, somewhere between a Dublin pub and a Jakarta noodle stall In the great global bazaar of human endeavor, where billion-dollar start-ups pivot to vaporware and presidents tweet their own indictments, Tyquan Thornton’s left hamstring has…
Spencer Shrader and the Global Art of Missing the Point From a windowless bar in Brussels—where the beer is cold, the Wi-Fi is tepid, and the jukebox thinks “Wonderwall” is still a fresh idea—a television flickers with highlights of yet another American kicker drilling a 59-yard field goal. The patrons, a polyglot mix of Eurocrats…
Devonta Smith: The Featherweight Who Punched the NFL’s Global Vanity Scale PARIS—From the Right Bank cafés where philosophers sip €9 espressos and argue whether anything truly matters, to the fluorescent-lit call centers of Mumbai where cricket tragics sneak illicit NFL RedZone tabs between IPL overs, the name Devonta Smith has become a quiet punchline in…
NFL Charlie Kirk and the Curious Case of the Global Gladiator If you type “NFL Charlie Kirk” into a search bar, the algorithm shrugs, coughs up a picture of the conservative podcaster in a suit, and then—because it’s a helpful little idiot—throws in a highlight reel of whichever linebacker happens to share the surname. Somewhere…
