The Oche World Order How a pub game from Leicestershire became the planet’s last honest theatre of war By the time the final dart thunked into double-top in the Sheikh Zayed Stadium, Abu Dhabi, the 64 men still conscious in the Irish bar next door cheered like hostages who’d just heard ransom negotiations succeeded. It…
NFL Week 2: A Global Audit of the American Gladiator Circus by Matteo “The Passport” De Luca, International Affairs Desk KIGALI—While the Central Bank of Rwanda debates whether to de-dollarize before or after lunch, 73 million Americans are busy screaming at a flat-screen because a man in Cincinnati failed to throw an inflated bladder in…
**The Global Thirst for Victory: How a Modest Brewers Score Became the World’s Favorite Distraction** While diplomats bickered in Geneva and central bankers wrung their hands over inflation graphs this week, a far more consequential drama unfolded in Milwaukee. The Brewers scored—repeatedly, dramatically, and with the sort of statistical flourish that makes grown men weep…
THE QUIET MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD A GOAL: CONOR CHAPLIN AND THE GLOBAL PONZI SCHEME OF HOPE Dateline: Somewhere between the Suffolk fens and the fever dreams of Premier League scouts—where the air smells faintly of wet grass, stale lager, and the desperation of 27 million YouTube highlight reels. Conor Chaplin, age 27, currently…
Hatton: The One-Word Riddle Currently Ruining Every Foreign Correspondent’s Sleep Cycle By Our Man in a State of Perpetual Jet Lag Every so often the planet coughs up a proper noun that seems to have been devised by a committee of prankish linguists and bored algorithm engineers. “Hatton” is the latest entry in that noble…
**Gridiron Prophecies: How NFL Picks Became the World’s Favorite Guessing Game** While the rest of the planet grapples with climate summits, currency fluctuations, and the occasional coup d’état, a peculiar American ritual has infected the global consciousness like a particularly virulent strain of cultural influenza. NFL picks—those weekly predictions about helmeted gladiators chasing an oblong…
Jacob Murphy and the Quiet Art of Being a Global Nobody By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the North Sea There is a moment, somewhere around the 78th minute of a Thursday-night Europa Conference League tie, when Jacob Murphy collects the ball on the touchline and 32,000 Geordies exhale as one. In…
James Beattie: The Scottish Philosopher Who Accidentally Invented Global Burnout Culture By Our Correspondent in a Café That Still Charges for Wi-Fi (Edinburgh, GMT+1) It is 4:07 p.m. local time, and the Edinburgh drizzle is performing its usual impression of a world-weary accountant: constant, grey, and impossible to fire. Inside the café, a barista misspells…
Washington, D.C.—On a humid Sunday that felt imported straight from the Mekong Delta, 20,000 pairs of overpriced carbon-plated sneakers slapped the asphalt from the Capitol to Hains Point and back. The DC Half Marathon, an event whose very name is a polite fiction (the advertised 13.1 miles somehow always measures closer to 13.4—clearly the same…
Southampton vs Portsmouth: A Tiny English Rivalry That Explains Why the World Keeps Shooting Itself in the Foot The M27 Derby, as locals sniffily call it, is a 19-mile grudge match between two port cities whose combined population could fit—standing room only—into a Shanghai metro carriage. Yet when Southampton and Portsmouth square off this Saturday,…
**The Global Circus of World Athletics: Where National Pride Meets Pharmaceutical Innovation** The World Athletics Championships have concluded in Budapest, leaving behind the usual debris of shattered records, broken dreams, and the faint whiff of performance-enhancing substances that somehow always manages to permeate these international gatherings of humanity’s most chemically-enhanced specimens. This year’s spectacle featured…
**When a Forgotten English City and a Self-Proclaimed European Royalty Remind the Planet Why Football is Still the World’s Most Expensive Soap Opera** By the time the final whistle blew on Leicester City 3, Liverpool 1, the global audience had already metabolised the result three different ways: British pubs spilled disbelief into kebabs; Lagos viewing…
