**The Global Metaphor in a Duke Freshman: Jared McCain and the World’s Endless Appetite for Distraction** In a world where nuclear powers exchange threats on social media and climate change accelerates while leaders debate the economics of action versus inaction, humanity has found its latest collective obsession: a 19-year-old who can shoot a basketball through…
**From the Caucasus to the Cosmos: How a Georgian Kid Named Ladd McConkey Became the World’s Most Unlikely Geopolitical Rorschach Test** While the planet’s 8 billion inhabitants were busy arguing about whether democracy is dying or merely on life support, a 21-year-old from Chatsworth, Georgia—population 4,696, or roughly the same number of people who claim…
PARIS—On the red-clay courts of Roland-Garros this week, a curious sideshow has been unfolding next to the strawberries-and-cream set: Donald Trump Tennis, an unofficial, unsanctioned, yet oddly magnetic phenomenon that began when the former U.S. president’s name was spotted on the reservation sheet of an indoor court in Palm Beach and then ricocheted across continents…
**The Grand Illusion: Tom Brady and the Global Theater of American Exceptionalism** In the pantheon of modern deities, where cryptocurrency evangelists rub shoulders with vaccine prophets and wellness gurus, Tom Brady stands as perhaps America’s most perfectly engineered false god—a man whose greatest achievement was convincing the world that throwing an oddly-shaped ball constitutes meaningful…
