Akron vs Nebraska: The Entire Planet Holds Its Breath (or Pretends To) Somewhere between the soy fields of Nebraska and the tire factories of Akron, two college football teams—whose combined endowments could bankroll a small Pacific island—are preparing to collide this Saturday. From Jakarta to Johannesburg, the world’s seven billion non-American residents are, of course,…
Boston College and Michigan State—two universities whose names conjure images of crisp autumn Saturdays, over-caffeinated freshmen, and the faint smell of burning tuition money—met again on the gridiron last weekend. From a distance, it looked like just another collegiate turf war: helmets clacking, alumni wallets snapping open, marching bands playing fight songs that sound suspiciously…
PARIS—Somewhere between the genteel pop of champagne corks on the Champs-Élysées and the less-genteel pop of another dislocated knee on the hard courts of Melbourne, Chris Evert keeps resurfacing like a polite ghost at the banquet of modern sport. The woman once known as the “Ice Maiden” still skates through global conversations—usually right when some…
Stanley Tucci, International Man of Culinary Mystery By “Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk” PARIS — Somewhere between a Negroni tutorial and the precise pronunciation of “pancetta,” Stanley Tucci became the planet’s most unlikely soft-power asset. While the United Nations argues over commas in climate communiqués, the 62-year-old actor-turned-gastronomic envoy is quietly colonising taste buds from Lagos…
The Curious Case of Rosie Perez: How One Brooklyn Accent Became a Global Export If you listen closely on any given Tuesday in a Berlin U-Bahn, a Manila jeepney, or a Nairobi matatu, you might catch a familiar staccato bark—half Spanish, half asphalt—delivering the line “You got a problem with my earrings, cabrón?” It’s the…
The Curious Case of Fran Brown: How One Gridiron Mercenary Became the World’s Most Reluctant Diplomat By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the hash marks and the hashish of international politics, Fran Brown has improbably emerged as the closest thing planet Earth has to a consensus-builder. On paper, he’s the new head coach of…
Courteney Cox and the Global Architecture of Nostalgia By Santiago V. Alarcón, International Desk It is a truth universally acknowledged—if only because the internet keeps repeating it—that a single actress in possession of a hair-straightener and a Netflix deal must be in want of a reboot. Thus Courteney Cox, the Alabama-born woman once tasked with…
I’m not sure who Sabalenka’s boyfriend is, and searching the global rumor mill has so far produced nothing more reliable than a blurry Instagram story and a couple of tennis-forum prophets who also swore the moon landing was faked in a Belgrade film studio. Yet the absence of confirmed facts has never stopped the international…
MADRID—At 08:37 local time, while Spain’s commuter trains were packed with people pretending to scroll their phones instead of making eye contact, a photograph of Julia Roberts sipping iced coffee appeared on the front page of El País. The headline, translated loosely, read “America’s Smile Lands in Ibiza.” Somewhere in Lagos a WhatsApp group lit…
When Sling TV launched in 2015, the world was still innocent enough to believe that “cord-cutting” was a liberation movement rather than a rebranding of the same old leash. Nine years later, the Atlanta-based service has quietly become the little Trojan horse that keeps U.S. media inside everyone else’s living room, proving that imperialism now…
BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND — Somewhere between the Black Forest and the Black Sea, a pension-age Irishman is still being asked to kidnap Europe’s collective anxieties and ransom them back in ninety-minute installments. Liam Neeson—Ballymena’s most famous export since guilt—has become a walking Rorschach test for a planet that can’t decide whether it wants to be…
Booger McFarland and the Universal Language of Ridiculous Names By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Singapore Changi T-3 The phrase “Booger McFarland” drifted across my trans-Pacific flight like a rogue sneeze particle: small, sticky, impossible to ignore. Somewhere above the Mariana Trench, a Hong Kong financier watching ESPN on the seat-back screen bark-laughed at…
