NFL Tonight: The Empire’s Colosseum Goes Global, Again By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Tonight, as another autumn Monday unfolds beneath floodlights and corporate banners, the National Football League will once again beam its three-hour melodrama into 180 countries. From a tin-roofed bar in Lagos where generators cough like dying camels, to a sleek Tokyo bachelor…
Romeo Doubs and the Global Art of Suspended Disbelief By Special Correspondent, Somewhere over the Pacific In the grand geopolitical telenovela we all pretend is “normal life,” the most consequential act of the past week was not the BRICS summit, the latest crypto-currency implosion, or even the surprise merger of two shipping cartels that will…
The Accidental Geopolitics of Panna Udvardy Or How a 24-Year-Old Hungarian with a Two-Handed Backhand Became a Soft-Power Weapon in a World That’s Already on Fire By the time Panna Udvardy hoisted the Bogotá Open trophy last April, most of the northern hemisphere was busy doom-scrolling through grainy satellite pictures of a stalled 40-mile Russian…
In the grand geopolitical chessboard, where Beijing buys ports like children collect trading cards and Silicon Valley titans trade privacy for market share, one must look to Amherst, Massachusetts, to understand how the empire really sustains itself—through parking tickets, artisanal ramen, and a quiet, almost British refusal to acknowledge anything unpleasant. The University of Massachusetts…
The Curious Case of Saiyaara: How a Mid-Budget Pakistani Road Movie Quietly Became a Global Mood Ring By the time Saiyaara slipped onto Netflix’s “Because You Watched” ghetto last March, most of us were already doom-scrolling through our third currency collapse of the week. A modest Urdu-language caper about two mismatched truckers hauling contraband antibiotics…
Landry Shamet and the Quiet Collapse of the American Basketball Empire By Our Man in Davos, nursing a lukewarm macchiato and a deeper existential chill ZURICH—Somewhere between the fifteenth and sixteenth floor of the Marriott here—where hedge-fund analysts compare scars and room-service prices—Landry Shamet’s name surfaced over breakfast like a half-remembered password. The context: whether…
Somewhere between the Charles River and the apocalypse, Tufts University sits like an ivy-clad bunker for the globally anxious. From a distance, it looks like another postcard of New England autumn, but zoom in and you’ll see a campus where future diplomats, vaccine engineers, and hedge-fund ethicists rehearse for a planet that may not bother…
Astros-Blue Jays: A Cosmic Game of Avian Revenge Played Out on a Dying Planet By Dave’s Foreign Bureau, filed from a press box that still smells faintly of 2017 champagne and 2020 disinfectant If you squint hard enough from the international space station, Houston’s Minute Maid Park and Toronto’s Rogers Centre look like two Lite-Brite…
Chief Justice John Roberts is a man who, for reasons best known to himself, decided to spend his twilight years refereeing a constitutional demolition derby in which every contestant is driving a monster truck labeled “Originalism,” “Stare Decisis,” or “Whatever Gets Me on the 6 o’clock News.” From Lagos to Lisbon, bureaucrats, barristers, and bored…
Sophie Willan’s Sewing Bee and the End of Empires By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent PARIS—In a dimly lit arrondissement café where the espresso is priced like a Tokyo studio apartment, the television above the bar flickers to life with the unmistakable trill of BBC One. A baker from Bury is trying to sew a corset…
Jason Collins, the 7-foot center who once specialized in setting bruising picks and committing professional fouls, unwittingly became the planet’s most unlikely diplomat on 29 April 2013. When he told Sports Illustrated “I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay,” the news ping-ponged across time zones faster than an American drone contract. Overnight,…
Bethune-Cookman: A Tiny Florida Campus that Explains Why the Planet is Still on Fire Dateline – Daytona Beach, Florida – or, as it is known in the darker corners of Davos, “Exhibit A in the Tragedy of the Commons.” From a satellite’s bored eye, Bethune-Cookman University looks like a modest cluster of red-brick optimism wedged…
