Guardians of What, Exactly? A world tour of the people, algorithms, and heavily armed toddlers who claim they’re keeping us safe. From the marble colonnades of Washington to the fluorescent bunkers beneath Seoul, the word “guardian” is having a moment. It appears in press releases like a polite burglar—never announced, always already inside. The American…
Volleyball, that quaint pastime once reserved for beach tourists and high-schoolers too uncoordinated for basketball, has somehow become a geopolitical barometer. And nowhere is this more evident than in the unlikely epicenter of Madison, Wisconsin, where the Badgers women’s program has turned a Midwestern campus into a proxy battleground for every anxious superpower with a…
Cody Mauch, North Dakota’s seventh-round offensive lineman, has become the NFL Draft’s accidental ambassador for global asymmetry. While European capitals agonize over energy sanctions and Asian markets convulse on semiconductor gossip, the planet’s most-watched sports-industrial complex paused to inspect the dental topography of a 24-year-old with a gap wide enough to smuggle a Ukrainian grain…
WNBA Scores: A Tiny Pixel in the Planet’s Fever Dream By Our Correspondent, filing from somewhere with worse Wi-Fi than you The final buzzer sounded in Brooklyn at 22:47 GMT-4, and with it the New York Liberty edged the Las Vegas Aces 93-87, a scoreline that will ricochet around the encrypted group chats of Filipino…
The Curious Case of Kaitlin Olson: How a Philadelphia-Trained Clown Became the Last Reliable Export the United States Still Makes Dateline: Anywhere with Wi-Fi and a streaming account You know the world is on fire when a 48-year-old American comic actress becomes the closest thing we have to globally trusted currency. While Silicon Valley titans…
Penn State Volleyball: The Glittering Empire Where College Kids Hit Spikes and the World Hits Existential Crisis By the time the Nittany Lions polish their 2023 NCAA trophy—now so numerous it doubles as a very expensive paperweight—half the planet is still arguing about how to spell “volleyball” in Cyrillic. Yet from State College, Pennsylvania, a…
Argos, the ancient Greek city-state, has been quietly redefining the phrase “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” While the rest of the world obsesses over quarterly earnings and TikTok algorithms, Argos has been busy demonstrating that history is less a dusty attic and more a revolving door on a particularly vindictive carousel. From…
**The World’s Favorite Reality Show: Why Trump’s Poll Numbers Still Matter (Even If You’d Rather They Didn’t)** While Americans obsess over their former president’s approval ratings with the fervor of teenagers checking Instagram likes, the rest of us watch from the cheap seats of this tragicomedy, popcorn in hand, wondering when the intermission might finally…
Marlins, those silver-torpedo aristocrats of the ocean, have quietly become the unofficial diplomats of the planet’s rising temperature. From the teak-lined bridges of super-yachts bobbing off Monte Carlo to the patchwork skiffs of Haitian fishermen who still use sardine cans as tackle boxes, the fish’s sudden cosmopolitanism is less a nature documentary and more a…
Melania’s Canary: How a Single Yellow Dress Became the Planet’s Rorschach Test By our correspondent in the departure lounge of history GENEVA—It began, as most twenty-first-century cataclysms do, with a photograph. There she stood, the former First Lady of the United States, wrapped in what Pantone would clinically label “Solar Power #FFD700,” waving from the…
The Tragicomic Global Odyssey of Trent Grisham, Baseball’s Wandering Metaphor By Dave’s International Desk of Disenchantment In the grand bazaar of global sport, where Premier League oligarchs flip super-clubs like condos and Chinese streaming giants bankroll esports teenagers who’ve never seen daylight, Trent Grisham stands as a quaint anachronism: a 27-year-old center-fielder from Fort Worth…
PARIS—Somewhere between a Greek philosophy seminar and a Berlin squat party, the word “antifa” slipped its linguistic moorings and became a global Rorschach test. To one half of the planet, it is a vigilante boogeyman lurking behind every broken Starbucks window; to the other, it is the last lonely fire brigade in a world already…
