Al-Ittihad vs Al-Nassr: The Derby That Became a Global Reality Show In the Kingdom where the desert meets the deluge of petrodollars, the Jeddah-Riyadh axis has always been a polite cold war fought with skyscrapers and sovereign wealth. Tuesday night, though, the temperature rose to the precise level required for the world’s most expensive mid-life…
Red Birds and Blue Bears: How a Midwestern Squabble Echoes Through the Collapsing Coliseum of Global Order By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic Somewhere between the missile tests in the Sea of Japan and the latest cryptocurrency implosion in a server farm the size of Liechtenstein, two baseball clubs from…
Jake Knapp’s Girlfriend: The Quiet Woman Steering a Billion-Dollar Swing Byline: Geneva, with satellites orbiting Las Vegas, Singapore, and the 19th hole at Valhalla In the geopolitics of professional golf, where every sponsor patch is a micro-treaty and every swing is live-broadcast to traders in three time zones, the phrase “Jake Knapp girlfriend” has become…
RIYADH—In a kingdom where the price of oil can swing elections on the other side of the planet, Monday night’s Al-Ittihad versus Al-Nassr match felt less like a domestic fixture and more like an off-Broadway morality play with a nine-figure budget. The Jeddah side, coached by the eternally aggrieved Nuno Espírito Santo, lined up against…
John Deacon: The Quiet Man Who Wired the World’s Last Great Rock Band and Then Vanished Like a Diplomatic Bag in Foggy Geneva By the time most mortals reach the age of 27, they are either climbing the corporate cheese grater or posting inspirational quotes in Comic Sans. John Deacon, meanwhile, had already soldered together…
The Ballad of Justin Rose, or How a Very Polite Englishman Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Weather Vane By Our Man in the Fairway, Still Nursing a Hangover from Geneva In the grand casino where nations hedge their soft-power bets—Olympic villages, World Cup stadiums, the occasional F1 paddock—golf was long dismissed as the pastel-colored safe space…
OSLO, NORWAY – Somewhere above the Arctic Circle, a 25-year-old Norwegian is single-handedly proving that the apocalypse can wait at least until Sunday. Viktor Hovland, who looks like he just walked out of a J.Crew catalog that moonlights as a death-metal album cover, has become the unlikely diplomat of an anxious planet. While governments bicker…
IND vs SL: A Scorecard for the Apocalypse Lite™ (Disclaimer: No actual locusts were harmed in the making of this fixture) Colombo, Tuesday – While half the planet argued about which billionaire should steer the asteroid-deflecting yacht, 22 men in dazzling whites reminded us that the end of the world will still be interrupted for…
When historians of late-capitalist decadence need a single face to explain how a Manchester United right-midfielder metastasized into a planetary lifestyle brand, they’ll probably pick David Beckham: the haircut that launched a thousand visa stamps. From a cramped East London terrace to the gilded benches of Qatar’s World Cup, Beckham has become the first footballer…
The world, as is its wont, ground to a halt for exactly eight hours and seventeen minutes last Saturday. Planes circled politely above the Bay of Bengal, Bitcoin dipped a respectful 2.3 %, and three minor European monarchs postponed their divorces. All because a spherical piece of leather was being hurled and walloped on a…
Rachel Scott: How One American Teenager’s Murder Became a Global Parable About Bullets, Brands, and Badly-Behaved Nations By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Between the Hague and a Shopping Mall Let us begin, as the world now insists all stories must, with the disclaimer: Rachel Joy Scott was not a geopolitical strategist, a…
Devon Franklin, the Los Angeles–bred producer-preacher hybrid who once blessed Sony’s balance sheets with Heaven Is for Real and Miracles from Heaven, has lately been exporting his particular brand of sanctified self-help to a planet that seems increasingly allergic to both sanctity and help. From Lagos megachurches that project his TED-adjacent sermons on Jumbotrons, to…
