The Global Gladiator Games: Morehouse vs Howard as a Barometer of a Fractured World By Matteo “Malcontent” Marquez, Senior Correspondent (and reluctant optimist) If you happened to tune in from Tokyo, Lagos, or a damp bedsit in Glasgow, you might have assumed “Morehouse vs Howard” was some sort of pay-per-view boxing bout sponsored by a…
The Curious Case of Germie Bernard, or How One College Receiver Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Wrong and Right With Us By the time most Europeans finished their second espresso on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, Twitter had already decided that Germie Bernard—freshly transferred wide receiver from Alabama to Washington—was either the second coming of…
The Curious Case of Jalynn Polk, or How a 19-Year-Old Wide Receiver Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Rorschach Test By the time most teenagers have figured out which end of a tax form is up, Jalynn Polk has already been drafted by the New England Patriots, weaponized by Chinese sports-apparel bots, meme-ified by Nigerian football-fan accounts,…
Bayern Munich: The Bavarian Empire That Outlasted Empires By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Munich, late afternoon. The Marienplatz bells toll exactly once before they remember that punctuality is a Prussian stereotype and decide to stay fashionably Bavarian. In the distance, the Allianz Arena glows like a gigantic discarded Tetris block—an alien mothership that landed on…
West Ham and the Decline of Western Civilisation: A Dispatch from the Olympic Stadium’s Third Tier London, 2024 – Somewhere above the floodlights, in the thin alpine air of the London Stadium’s upper ring, a man in a knock-off Corinthians shirt is explaining to his eight-year-old why bubbles still matter. Below them, West Ham United—once…
Lainey Wilson and the Great American Brand Export: How a Bell-Bottomed Arkansan Became a Global Stress Ball PARIS — On any given Tuesday, the Café de Flore smells of Gauloises, existential dread, and—since last spring—bourbon. Not because the French have finally noticed Kentucky exists, but because the house playlist has surrendered to a woman in…
The quaintly named “HCU vs Nebraska” is, on first glance, only a scrap of American collegiate sport, a dust-up between Houston Christian University—population: one modest Texas campus—and the University of Nebraska, whose football program alone could probably float a small sovereign debt issue. Yet, like a well-traveled diplomat who pretends to sip tea while negotiating…
Oklahoma vs Temple: A Dispatch from the Imperial Margins By Sergei “Sarge” Volkov, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The alert pinged in from a bar in Tbilisi, a city that knows something about being a buffer zone between empires. A college football game—Oklahoma versus Temple—was trending worldwide. Not because the Sooners might drop 50 points on…
Somewhere between a Spotify chill-pop playlist and the geopolitical fault lines of soft power, Russell Dickerson has become an unlikely export—Tennessee by way of TikTok, heartbreak by way of algorithm. To the average listener in Jakarta or Johannesburg, he is simply the guy who scored a wedding-song monopoly with “Yours.” To the rest of us—those…
It began, as most modern miracles do, with a viral clip: a cherubic 16-year-old from Warrington, England, flattening men twice his age on the oche like a cosmic steamroller powered by Monster Energy and GCSE stress. Luke Littler’s run to the PDC World Darts Championship final wasn’t just a sporting anomaly; it was a Rorschach…
Everton vs Aston Villa: A Tale of Two Cities, Three Continents, and One Very Expensive Mid-Table Grudge Match By our man in the global cheap seats, still wondering why airlines charge extra for legroom but not for existential dread. On the face of it, Saturday evening at Goodison Park is merely another Premier League fixture…
MADISON, Wisconsin—While the rest of the planet was busy debating whether A.I. will replace us before climate change finishes the job, roughly 80,000 bipeds clad in dairy-scented scarlet fleece poured into a concrete horseshoe on a Saturday night to scream at 19-year-olds in tights. Welcome, dear cosmopolitan reader, to Wisconsin football: the Midwestern passion play…
