The San Francisco Giants, as any seasoned traveler will tell you, are not merely a baseball team. They are a portable piece of American mythology—equal parts Horatio Alger and late-stage capitalism—exported nightly by satellite to insomniacs in Jakarta sports bars, insolvency lawyers in Frankfurt, and hedge-fund analysts in Singapore who’ve never smelled garlic fries but…
Huskers: How a Corn-Fed College Nickname Took Over the Planet By the time the sun sets over the Shanghai skyline, a 19-year-old in a knock-off scarlet hoodie is live-tweeting Nebraska’s spring practice in Mandarin. Meanwhile, in Lagos, a betting syndicate is crunching play-action tendencies from grainy YouTube clips of the 1995 “Scoring Explosion” squad. Somewhere…
The Bryant Bulldogs, pride of Smithfield, Rhode Island—population 22,000, roughly the same number of people currently trying to flee Khartoum by bus—kicked off their 2024 season last weekend. On the surface, this is a quaint FCS tale: a private university founded in 1863, same year the U.S. was busy inventing modern bureaucracy, now fielding 63…
The Boilermakers Abroad: How Purdue Football Became the World’s Most Improbable Soft-Power Asset By the time the Purdue “All-American” Marching Band struck up its halftime rendition of “The William Tell Overture” in Dublin last August, half the spectators were wondering why the corn-fed brass section had smuggled a sousaphone onto sacred Irish soil, and the…
The World According to Sam Elliott: How a Baritone Drawl Became Planet Earth’s Unofficial GPS Voice By “Roving” Rodrigo Valdez, Senior Correspondent for Existential Affairs, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the last glacier and the next crypto crash, humanity looked up and realized it had quietly outsourced its moral compass to a 79-year-old man who sounds…
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…
