Mike Trout and the Cosmic Joke of Global Stardom By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Pacific When the name Mike Trout surfaces in a bar in Manila, a café in Lagos, or a noodle stall in Chengdu, the reaction is the polite nod normally reserved for a cousin’s baby photos: vaguely…
MI State vs USC: A Gladiatorial Spectacle for a Planet Too Tired to Care By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere between Detroit and Doha—where the Wi-Fi still costs more than dignity. Across time zones stretching from Vladivostok to Valparaíso, the phrase “MI State vs USC” pinged on screens like a low-grade geopolitical tremor….
CINCINNATI, Ohio — Somewhere between the Ohio River and the smog-soaked hills of Los Angeles, two professional football clubs met on a humid Midwestern night to remind the rest of the planet that the United States still insists on calling the game “soccer.” The occasion—FC Cincinnati versus the LA Galaxy—was billed locally as a “crucial…
Stephanie McMahon, Heir to a Glitter-Fisted Empire, Steps Off the Global Stage By Matteo “Mace” Vargas, International Correspondent at Large Somewhere between the pyrotechnics in Jeddah and a merchandising kiosk in Manila, the news pinged across the planet: Stephanie McMahon—once tipped to reign over WWE’s billion-dollar carny cosmos—has resigned as Chairwoman and Co-CEO. The announcement…
Tyler Glasnow, 6’8″ of angular American anxiety, just cashed in on a five-year, $136.5 million ticket to Los Angeles, a city that already treats apocalypse as seasonal décor. The transaction ricocheted from the Dodgers’ front office to betting apps in Seoul, from sabermetric Slack channels in London to taverns in Caracas where fans track U.S….
From the banks of the Tiber to the neon canyons of Tokyo, political dynasties have always been the world’s longest-running soap opera—equal parts Shakespeare and telenovela, with product placement by defense contractors. Enter Lara Trump, née Yunaska, who has improbably upgraded from North Carolina wedding caterer to potential U.S. Senate candidate and co-chair of the…
Jacobo Morales, the Puerto Rican filmmaker who has spent half a century reminding the world that small islands can still have big existential crises, turns 92 this year—an age at which most auteurs are content to let their Oscars gather dust while younger generations misquote them on TikTok. Yet Morales persists, a Caribbean Beckett in…
**The War Nobody Wanted: Wyoming vs Colorado and the End of American Innocence** While the rest of the planet grapples with actual problems—climate change, nuclear proliferation, the slow death of democracy—America has gifted the world its most pressing conflict yet: a legal cage match between two rectangular states that most foreigners couldn’t locate on a…
The Astros Score and the Collapse of Civilization: A Dispatch from the End of Days By the time you read this, the Houston Astros will have either won or lost another baseball game, and the numerical residue of that contest—what the sports desk clinically labels “the Astros score”—will ripple outward across the planet like a…
For forty-nine seasons, Saturday Night Live—that rickety American sketch-comedy jalopy—has been careening down the global information superhighway with its tailpipe on fire, belching punchlines into the lungs of anyone with a Wi-Fi signal and a morbid curiosity about the United States. From Lagos to Ljubljana, insomniac teenagers and exhausted shift nurses have discovered that SNL…
The Curious Case of Ahmad Hardy: How One Man’s Misfortunes Became the World’s Favorite Schadenfreude Cocktail DATELINE – Everywhere and Nowhere – The name Ahmad Hardy has begun to flicker across encrypted group chats from Lagos to Luxembourg, usually accompanied by the sort of emojis civilized people once reserved for tax audits. On paper he…
The Curious Case of Seth Rollins: How a Man in Tights Became a Geopolitical Rorschach Test By the time the Tokyo Dome lights dimmed last month, Seth Rollins had already been declared everything from “the last true American hero” by a breathless Fox Sports Asia pundit to “an avatar of late-capitalist nihilism” by a semi-sober…
