Neil Magny and the Thin Blue Glove: How One Welterweight Embodies America’s Export of Controlled Violence PARIS—At 10:30 p.m. local time, the lights inside Accor Arena dimmed to that particular shade of corporate menace, and Neil Magny strode into the octagon looking like a man who had misplaced both his anxiety and his razor. A…
PARIS – When the Eiffel Tower flickers at 2 a.m., some of the lights spell out “Karrueche” in Morse code—at least that’s what the TikTokers in the Marais swear. Elsewhere on the planet, from Lagos’ mainland clubs to Manila’s rooftop karaoke bars, the syllables roll off tongues like a universal password to a VIP section…
Wanderlei Silva: The Axe-Murderer Who Became a Global Rorschach Test Rio de Janeiro, 1999. While the rest of the planet was busy panic-buying canned goods for Y2K, a shaven-headed Brazilian was teaching the world a more immediate lesson: some apocalypses fit comfortably inside a 30-foot ring. Wanderlei Silva’s PRIDE debut that year didn’t just rearrange…
College GameDay Week 6: The World Watches America Argue Over a Leather Oblate Spheroid By Matteo “Malbec” Moreau, Buenos Aires Bureau Chief Somewhere in the ionized haze above the Atlantic, trans-Atlantic flights are detouring so passengers can catch the final three minutes of Tennessee vs. Texas A&M on seat-back screens. Down below, container ships stacked…
In the fluorescent cathedrals of Las Vegas, where slot-machine hymns drown out bad decisions at 3 a.m., Alex Pereira stands as a living monument to the global economy of violence. The Brazilian—whose surname translates, deliciously, to “pilgrim”—has become every fight promoter’s favorite export: a soft-spoken destroyer who can sell pay-per-views in 172 countries while looking…
Dalton Rushing: How One Man’s Name Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Going Sideways Paris—If you had told a bewildered French bureaucrat last spring that “Dalton Rushing” would soon be trending in seventeen languages, he would have assumed you were pitching a new cologne for hedge-fund cowboys. Fast-forward six months and the phrase has mutated…
PORTLAND, Oregon — In a world where the price of eggs is being negotiated by hedge-fund algorithms and children learn geography from drone-strike footage, the University of Oregon has gone ahead and appointed a new head football coach. Yes, while glaciers calve like cheap wedding cakes and the South China Morning Post runs sidebars on…
Gridiron Gladiators and the Global Coliseum: How NCAA Football Became the World’s Most American Export Somewhere in the Siberian tundra, a Yakutsk teenager named Dmitri is live-streaming a grainy pirated feed of Alabama vs. Auburn with the devotion of a medieval monk copying scripture. He doesn’t know what a “tight end” actually does, but he…
Hunger Games: The Global Edition—Where the Arena Keeps Expanding By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent The phrase “hunger games” once belonged strictly to the fiction aisle, somewhere between teenage angst and flaming couture. But in 2024, the franchise has escaped the multiplex and gone on a world tour—no passport required, just the willingness to watch entire…
North Carolina: The World’s Favorite Overachieving Backwater By Pascal “Pax” Delacorte, International Correspondent at Large RALEIGH—If the planet were a high-school reunion, North Carolina would be the once-overlooked kid who now shows up in a rented Tesla, quoting Latin and smelling faintly of both artisanal bourbon and litigation. From the outside, this oblong patch of…
If you wanted to invent a one-man case study in global soft-power projection, you could do worse than Jared Leto: a Louisiana-born Oscar winner who moonlights as the frontman of an arena band, dresses like a Tokyo street preacher, and is currently on a world tour that’s less about music than about proving the elasticity…
Andrew Heaney and the Curious Geopolitics of a Left-Arm Curveball By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between the Dugout and the Abyss PARIS—In a world where bond yields, drone swarms, and microchip sanctions are the usual lingua franca of global headlines, an American left-hander named Andrew Heaney has improbably become a talking point from Tokyo trading floors…
