Drew McIntyre: The Last Scotsman Standing in a World That Forgot How to Fall Gracefully By Our Man in Every Airport Lounge from Glasgow to Guadalajara The planet tilts on its axis because somebody, somewhere, is still trying to body-slam another human through a folding table. In that grand, slightly deranged tradition steps Drew McIntyre:…
Henry Cavill: The Last British Export Standing Between Us and Total Cultural Collapse By the time you finish this sentence, another streaming service will have announced its own gritty reboot of something Henry Cavill once touched. The man has become less an actor and more a geopolitical constant, like the price of crude oil or…
Jazz Chisholm Jr. and the End of the Empire: How a Bahamian Infielder Explains the 21st-Century World Order By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from the 2016 Election and Other Existential Jokes NASSAU, THE BAHAMAS — While the United States busies itself weaponizing nostalgia for a 1950s that never quite existed, its erstwhile colony 185 miles…
Phillies vs. Diamondbacks: A World Series So American It Could Only Happen on a Planet Circling the Drain By the time the first pitch left Zack Wheeler’s hand in Game 1, half of humanity was busy Googling “What is a Phillie?” The other half, having already memorized the 2001 Luis Gonzalez bloop single, was refreshing…
The Strange Afterlife of Greg Schiano, or How One American Football Coach Became the World’s Accidental Diplomat By Our Man in the Neutral Zone Somewhere between the hash marks of a soggy Rutgers practice field and the marble corridors of FIFA’s Zurich bunker, Greg Schiano has quietly become the planet’s most improbable export. To the…
The NFL’s Quiet Empire: How a 100-Yard Strip of Astroturf Conquered the Planet By Diego “The Referee” Marconi, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker On the surface, last Sunday’s Super Bowl was a quintessentially American carnival: pop stars descending from the rafters like glitter-dipped angels, 30-second commercials that cost more than the GDP of Tonga, and a…
WrestlePalooza: When the World’s Problems Enter the Ring in Spandex PARIS—While the planet busied itself with minor inconveniences like climate tipping points and the slow-motion disintegration of the rules-based order, 65,000 pilgrims descended on a purpose-built arena in Riyadh for WWE WrestlePalooza. There, under 2,000 LED panels and the watchful eye of a sovereign wealth…
Anthony Boyle: The Belfast Ghost Who Haunts Every Screen on Earth By Our Man in the Last Row of Economy Class If you’ve flown long-haul recently and accidentally pressed “play” on the in-flight entertainment menu, you’ve met Anthony Boyle. There he is, a pale, red-haired specter in 4K, whispering Shakespearean menace in *Danny Boy*, then…
The Quartermaine Doctrine: How a Fictional Matriarch Became the UN’s Unofficial Moral Compass By Dave’s International Bureau of Implausible Soft-Power Assets GENEVA—While the Security Council bickered over grain corridors and submarine cables last week, an emergency Zoom convened by the WHO quietly added a new slide to pandemic-preparedness briefings: “What Would Monica Quartermaine Do?” The…
Rugby: the game where grown adults willingly hurl themselves into one another’s clavicles for eighty minutes and then spend the after-party pretending their ears aren’t about to fall off. For decades this ritual was marketed as the exclusive domain of men whose necks are wider than their heads. Then someone in a blazer finally noticed…
Wendell Smallwood and the End of the American Century By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker PARIS — Somewhere between the Champs-Élysées and the 24-hour döner kebab stand that now passes for French cuisine, the name “Wendell Smallwood” flickered across a sports ticker. It was 03:42 local time, the hour when insomniacs, night-shift nurses, and futures traders in…
Tottenham versus Manchester City—two words that, depending on your passport, either trigger Pavlovian yawns or a Pavlovian grab for the credit card. In a world where grain ships dodge Russian drones in the Black Sea and COP delegates argue over commas, the planet still finds time to debate whether Son Heung-min can outrun a back…
