The NFL’s Thirty-Two Flags: How a Provincial Pastime Conquered the Planet and Forgot to Apologize By Correspondent M. A. “Mac” Guffin, filing from a hotel bar in Singapore that still thinks the Super Bowl is a plumbing fixture. When the Kansas City Chiefs lifted their third Lombardi Trophy in February, fireworks crackled over Manila, Lagos,…
From a safe distance of 4,000 miles and several failed revolutions, the world watches America’s latest export of precision anxiety: Justin Tucker, the Baltimore Ravens’ resident field-goal necromancer. While lesser nations measure progress in GDP or UNESCO heritage sites, the United States has calibrated its self-worth to the arc of a leather ellipsoid booted by…
Jason Kelce and the Global Theater of Linemen: How One Bearded American Gladiator Explains Everything There comes a moment—usually around 3 a.m. in a Berlin hostel kitchen—when a French backpacker, two Korean crypto-traders, and a Canadian on a gap year discover they share a single cultural reference point: the bearded, bare-chested, beer-sloshing demigod known as…
Jordan Peele’s horror is the only American export that terrifies both Beijing’s censors and Davos’ keynote speakers—proof that fear, like debt, is borderless. While Washington still pretends soft power means jazz diplomacy and Marvel post-credit scenes, Peele quietly weaponized popcorn anxiety into a global mirror. The result? A Ugandan film student in Kampala cites Get…
Karol G and the Globalization of Reggaeton Guilt By Dave’s Locker, International Desk In a world where half of Europe is re-nationalizing its energy grids and the other half is busy banning TikTok, Colombia’s Carolina Giraldo—known to Spotify, Interpol, and your downstairs neighbor as “Karol G”—has quietly become a one-woman IMF for the Spanish-speaking pop…
Fenway Park, 37,000 seats of brick, beer, and inherited heartbreak, will tonight welcome the Arizona Diamondbacks—a franchise whose entire existence is younger than most of the rust on Lansdowne Street. To the foreign eye this looks like a quaint regional pageant: two American ball clubs meeting for the first time since 2019, when the Red…
Lucid: The Word the World Pretends to Understand While Hitting Snooze By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Jet Lag and Existential Dread Lucid, adj. — clear in expression or thought; rational; easily understood. A lovely, optimistic scrap of Latin that somehow survived the fall of Rome, two world wars, and an internet full of conspiracy theories…
Timothée Chalamet: The Accidental Diplomat in a World That Forgot How to Grow Up By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk, somewhere between Cannes and the apocalypse PARIS—On the Croisette last May, citizens of the world’s oldest republic of glamour queued for two hours to watch a 28-year-old New Yorker pout on a 40-foot screen. The film…
Meghan Trainor and the Global Bass Line of Late-Stage Capitalism By our man in the departure lounge Somewhere above the North Atlantic, between the in-flight sushi and the eighth rewatch of “All About That Bass,” it hit me: Meghan Trainor is the perfect sonic ambassador for an era when geopolitical borders are closing but pop…
Deestroying: The Global Art of Making Nothing From Everything Paris, 03:42 a.m. local time – Somewhere between the Seine and the 24-hour pâtisserie that will eventually outlive us all, a city worker in a hi-viz vest is feeding another perfectly functional park bench into an orange shredder. The bench was installed last spring. It will…
Jennifer Garner and the Geopolitics of Nice: How America’s Sweetheart Became a Soft-Power WMD By our correspondent in the neutral wasteland between Hollywood and reality PARIS—While the Northern Hemisphere frets over ballistic missile tests and the Southern Hemisphere drowns in micro-plastics, the United States has quietly deployed its most destabilizing weapon yet: Jennifer Garner. Not…
**The Global Rashee Rice Reckoning: How One Grain Became the World’s Most Overachieving Carbohydrate** In the pantheon of foods that have accidentally conquered the world, rashee rice sits somewhere between quinoa (the grain that made Bolivian farmers unable to afford their own lunch) and avocados (the fruit that funds Mexican drug cartels). This particular strain…
