Milano-Cortina 2026: The Last Winter Games Before the Thaw By the time the Olympic cauldron sputters to life in the Dolomites, the planet will have endured another 1,800-odd days of record-breaking heat, two more COP summits that achieve less than a kindergarten show-and-tell, and roughly 1.4 billion TikTok videos of cats skiing on cardboard. Welcome…
Toluca vs Puebla: When Two Mexican Towns Turn a Soccer Rivalry into a Global Parable of Inflation, Emigration, and Existential Despair By the time the whistle blew last Saturday night, Estadio Nemesio Diez looked less like a football ground and more like a Hieronymus Bosch painting sponsored by Coca-Cola. Smoke from illicit flares mingled with…
Toluca to Puebla: The 120-Kilometer Fault Line Where Mexico Explains the Planet to Itself By Our Man in the Middle of Somewhere Every country keeps a stretch of asphalt that functions as its emotional ECG strip. The United States has I-95, France has the périphérique, and Mexico, bless its melodramatic heart, has the 95D from…
Boston College vs Stanford: A Duel of Jesuit Guilt and Silicon Valley Optimism on the World’s Most Expensive Stage By Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Pacific Let us begin with the obvious: a football game between Boston College and Stanford is not, by any sober metric, a seismic event. It will not move the Shanghai…
Travis Crawford, age 29, is not a household name—unless your household happens to keep dossiers on the quiet foot soldiers of global data brokerage. Last week, Crawford was escorted out of a WeWork in Tallinn, Estonia, by two very polite Interpol agents who apologized for interrupting his oat-milk cortado. The charge: trafficking 1.7 billion user…
Texas State vs Arizona State: A Microscopic Lens on the Macroscopic Mess We Call Civilization By Our Correspondent in Exile, Somewhere Over Greenland The dispatch arrives, as most do these days, via a cracked iPhone screen glowing in the half-light of a budget airline cabin: Texas State University will face Arizona State University in something…
Julian Sayin, a 17-year-old quarterback whose surname sounds like a misspelled philosophical treatise, has become the latest export from the American South to set global tongues wagging. The five-star prodigy from Carlsbad, California—population 115,000 and exactly one future NFL pension plan—announced last week that he will spurn Alabama’s crimson clutches for Ohio State. From Seoul…
Max Kellerman and the Global Echo Chamber: How One American Jock-Talker Became the World’s White Noise If you tune into sports radio in Lagos at 2 a.m., you will eventually hear Max Kellerman’s voice—piped in via podcast, chopped into TikTok bait, or re-voiced by a Nigerian impressionist who has perfected Kellerman’s trademark nasal crescendo. Half…
Big Bear, California—population 5,000 when the Wi-Fi cooperates—has become the planet’s most improbable weather vane. While the rest of us doom-scroll through melting Antarctic shelves and European rivers evaporating like cheap gin, this pine-scented pimple on the San Bernardino Mountains keeps serving up allegories in real time. A Siberian oligarch’s Gulfstream touches down, disgorges a…
Matt Leinart: The Cautionary Tale of American Excess Exported Worldwide The international community has long observed America’s peculiar habit of transforming collegiate athletes into demigods, only to later wonder why they crumble under the weight of expectations. Few exemplify this phenomenon better than Matt Leinart, the USC quarterback who briefly embodied the American Dream before…
The World According to Floyd: How One Undefeated Boxer Became Planet Earth’s Favorite Punchline By Dave’s Locker International Desk Ladies, gentlemen, and offshore-betting syndicates from Macau to Minsk, gather round the global campfire. We are here to discuss Floyd “Money” Mayweather—not as mere athlete, but as a walking, talking, Gucci-swathed Rorschach test for the 21st-century…
Atlético Nacional vs. Bucaramanga: A Tale of Two Cities, One Country, and the Global Gladiator Games There is a moment, roughly the 73rd minute of any Colombian league fixture, when the floodlights in Medellín’s Atanasio Girardot Stadium hit the billboards just so and the whole place starts to look like a Las Vegas chapel that…
