Small Town, Big Stage: How Huddersfield Town Became the World’s Accidental Metaphor There are, according to the United Nations, roughly 10,000 inhabited places on Earth that could credibly call themselves “towns.” Statistically, then, the odds of any single one of them mattering to a rice farmer in Java, a crypto-bro in Singapore, or an arms…
The Red and the Rust: How Liverpool vs Sunderland Became the World’s Favorite Metaphor PARIS—Somewhere between the croissants and the existential dread, I found myself explaining to a French diplomat why a second-tier English football match still matters more than most UN Security Council votes. The subject was Liverpool versus Sunderland, a fixture that sounds…
Red Star, Green Money: A Balkan Derby With Global Side-Effects By Dave’s Balkan Bureau (currently operating from a café whose Wi-Fi password is “NATO2000”) Belgrade—When Crvena Zvezda and Celtic jog out onto Rajko Mitić Stadium tonight, the floodlights will illuminate more than just twenty-two footballers in various states of hair-gel. They will spotlight two competing…
The Curious Case of Suryakumar Yadav: How a Middle-Class Mumbaikar Became the UN Secretary-General of T20 Cricket By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Arabian Sea NEW DELHI—Late one humid evening, as Delhi’s air flirted with the toxicity levels of a small chemical spill, Suryakumar Yadav—population 1.4 billion’s newest export—waltzed down the…
Glazed Hegemony: How Krispy Kreme Became the Soft Power the State Department Never Ordered By C. Valdez, Senior Carbohydrate Correspondent PARIS—While the Quai d’Orsay was busy negotiating submarine deals and the Élysée was lecturing the world on gastronomic purity, an American doughnut quietly rolled off a secret production line in the Paris suburbs and into…
Shubman Gill: The Accidental Messiah of a Nation That Can’t Decide Whether It Needs Saving or a Netflix Subscription By Our Correspondent, still recovering from a 3 a.m. doom-scroll in economy class NEW DELHI—In the blue haze of Narendra Modi Stadium—capacity 132,000, or roughly the population of Reykjavik poured into a concrete cereal bowl—Shubman Gill…
Dwight Howard Lands in Taiwan and the World Shrugs—Then Checks the Box Score By our sardonic foreign correspondent, still jet-lagged from watching civilization decline in real time Taipei—While the rest of the planet argued over grain shipments, hypersonic missiles, and whether Twitter will survive the decade, Dwight Howard—yes, that Dwight Howard—quietly signed to play for…
A Cuban-American dancer glides across a British ballroom, watched by 11 million Britons clutching their cups of tea and existential dread, while WhatsApp groups from Manila to Mexico City ping with the same question: “Who the hell is Janette Manrara, and why is my algorithm suddenly obsessed?” Welcome to the 21st-century fame centrifuge, where a…
Michelle Keegan: A Nation’s Guilt-Free Addiction in an Age of Guilt-Heavy Everything Else By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between a collapsing Antarctic ice shelf and another crypto-billionaire’s rocket launch, the global attention economy still finds a spare half-hour to ask itself: “But what is Michelle Keegan wearing today?” It is, frankly, the perfect crime….
Richard Madeley: Britain’s Export-Grade Embarrassment and the Global Art of Cringe Diplomacy by our Special Correspondent in Existential Freefall There is a moment—usually about 3 a.m. local time—when hotel televisions in foreign capitals surrender to the BBC World feed and something extraordinary happens. Statesmen pause mid-sentence, warlords lower their satellite phones, and even the hotel…
Sheryl Underwood and the Infinite Scroll of Global Empathy Fatigue By Our Correspondent in a Hotel Room with One Working Lightbulb Somewhere between the burnt-coffee time zone of U.S. breakfast television and the 3 a.m. doom-scroll in Jakarta, Sheryl Underwood cracked a joke about her own wig budget and accidentally became a diplomatic incident. It…
Let it go, they said. The planet promptly did—melting glaciers, rising seas, and a thousand TikToks of toddlers belting out the same three notes in thirty-two languages. Somewhere in that planetary karaoke bar stands Idina Menzel, Broadway’s favorite ice queen turned accidental geopolitical weather event, still slightly stunned that a power ballad about repression became…
