From the upper deck of Target Center—an arena whose corporate naming rights have been traded more times than a crypto-punk’s profile picture—one can see the Minnesota Lynx doing something subversive: winning with consistency in a country that treats women’s sport the way a dieter eyes cheesecake—publicly virtuous, privately indifferent. On any given game night, the…
Volleyball, that quaint pastime once reserved for beach tourists and high-schoolers too uncoordinated for basketball, has somehow become a geopolitical barometer. And nowhere is this more evident than in the unlikely epicenter of Madison, Wisconsin, where the Badgers women’s program has turned a Midwestern campus into a proxy battleground for every anxious superpower with a…
Cody Mauch, North Dakota’s seventh-round offensive lineman, has become the NFL Draft’s accidental ambassador for global asymmetry. While European capitals agonize over energy sanctions and Asian markets convulse on semiconductor gossip, the planet’s most-watched sports-industrial complex paused to inspect the dental topography of a 24-year-old with a gap wide enough to smuggle a Ukrainian grain…
The Curious Case of Kaitlin Olson: How a Philadelphia-Trained Clown Became the Last Reliable Export the United States Still Makes Dateline: Anywhere with Wi-Fi and a streaming account You know the world is on fire when a 48-year-old American comic actress becomes the closest thing we have to globally trusted currency. While Silicon Valley titans…
Penn State Volleyball: The Glittering Empire Where College Kids Hit Spikes and the World Hits Existential Crisis By the time the Nittany Lions polish their 2023 NCAA trophy—now so numerous it doubles as a very expensive paperweight—half the planet is still arguing about how to spell “volleyball” in Cyrillic. Yet from State College, Pennsylvania, a…
The Last Chin Standing: Jay Leno and the Global Afterglow of American Late-Night There’s a moment, somewhere between the Caspian Sea and the Sea of Japan, when exhausted cargo-ship crews tune their shortwave radios to whatever English chatter they can catch. Over the crackle drifts the unmistakable drone of Jay Leno—still yukking it up about…
The Alyssa Thomas Doctrine: How a Basketball Bruiser Became a Geopolitical Metaphor By the time Alyssa Thomas slammed her 2,000th WNBA rebound through the rim last week, the ball was technically in Turkey. That’s because the Connecticut Sun’s resident freight train was in Istanbul, guest-coaching a clinic for teenage girls whose parents still remember when…
Matt Olson and the New American Soft-Power: How a First-Baseman Quietly Became a Global Brand PARIS—In the diplomatic salons off Place de la Concorde, envoys fret over Biden tariffs, Chinese rare earths, and the latest North Korean missile tantrums. Yet last week the talk over chilled Sancerre turned, improbably, to Matt Olson, a 29-year-old first-baseman…
Lesley Manville: The Empire’s Quietest Weapon of Mass Instruction By the time the credits rolled on “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” a frothy confection about a widowed charwoman who buys a Dior dress, viewers in Wichita and Wuhan were wiping away the same sentimental tear. It’s a miracle of late-stage capitalism that a 67-year-old Englishwoman…
Penny Mordaunt and the Global Art of Falling on One’s Ceremonial Sword By Our Special Correspondent, still jet-lagged from watching Britannia rearrange the deckchairs LONDON—When Penny Mordaunt strode into Westminster last week clutching a 17th-century sword the size of a small flagpole, half the planet wondered if the British had finally decided to auction off…
Chivas vs Tigres: When Two Mexican Football Brands Duke It Out, the Rest of the World Pretends Not to Peek Estadio Akron, Guadalajara, 21:06 local—while global attention was busy rubber-necking between a European Super League that refuses to die and the Champions League anthem being used as background music for crypto-scams, Club Deportivo Guadalajara and…
NASHVILLE — Somewhere between the neon baptism of Lower Broadway and the algorithmic altar of Spotify, Lee Brice has become America’s most exportable baritone. To the uninitiated, he is merely another baseball-capped balladeer singing about tailgates and heartbreak; to the global listener, he is a soft-power Trojan horse wheeled into every airport lounge from Dubai…
