Under the shadow of Appalachian foothills, where strip-mall sushi meets Civil War reenactments, the Kennesaw State Owls have decided to migrate. Not to richer feeding grounds—this is still collegiate athletics, not venture capital—but upward into the Football Bowl Subdivision, that glitzy aviary where ESPN cameras preen the plumage and the cadaverous remains of amateurism are…
Idaho’s capital is not, by any stretch, a geopolitical choke point. Yet on a crisp Saturday evening in late November, the Boise State Broncos and the Air Force Falcons will square off on a rectangle of blue plastic so garish it can be seen from the International Space Station—an orbital fact proudly cited by locals…
Duquesne vs. Akron: The Tiny Mid-Season Collision Reverberating from Pittsburgh to Pretoria By: Our Man in the Dugout, Still Nursing Jet Lag and Existential Dread It begins, as so many planetary tremors do, in a half-empty gym whose air smells faintly of popcorn and the slow death of dreams: Duquesne University versus the University of…
Ben Arbuckle Is the Quietest Man on Earth—and That Terrifies Us All by Dave’s Locker International Desk Geneva—For a planet that never stops talking, the sudden appearance of a man who refuses to is, frankly, an act of war. Meet Ben Arbuckle, 42, American passport, no fixed address, and—according to the only leaked Interpol file—a…
South Carolina vs Missouri: A Diplomatic Incident Disguised as a Football Game By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva Bureau Chief GENEVA—The Treaty of Westphalia, the Congress of Vienna, and now, apparently, Williams-Brice Stadium on a humid Saturday night. While the world’s chancelleries were busy drafting stern communiqués about supply chains and semiconductor embargos,…
BBC iPlayer: The Last Empire Still Broadcasting in Glorious Standard Definition of British Guilt By the time you read this, iPlayer has already expired on your cousin’s smart fridge in São Paulo. The BBC’s flagship streaming service—once a plucky national catch-up platform—now functions as a sort of 21st-century East India Company, only with more buffering…
Welcome to the post-post-apocalypse, dear reader. While most of the planet is still busy arguing about vaccine passports and the correct pronunciation of “Kyiv,” a small but determined slice of humanity has decided the real geopolitical flashpoint is a downloadable texture pack called Cyberpunk 2077: Chrome. CD Projekt Red’s latest free update—essentially a digital spa…
Roy Campanella, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ three-time MVP catcher, has long been filed under “American baseball legend” and left to gather dust alongside other sepia-toned curios. Yet if you squint past the nostalgia, Campy’s story turns out to be a surprisingly useful lens on the planet’s chronic inability to play fair—on the diamond, in passport queues,…
Arkansas State versus Kennesaw State: A Microscopic Civil War, Televised for the World’s Schadenfreude by Dave’s Locker Global Desk Somewhere between the Ozark foothills and the outer ring-roads of Atlanta—those asphalt moats we once called suburbs before they metastasized—two modest American universities are preparing to bludgeon one another with shoulder pads this weekend. To most…
Nathaniel Rateliff: The Whiskey-Soaked Minstrel Exporting Heartbreak to a Planet Already on the Brink By the time the sun rises over the Mekong, Nathaniel Rateliff has already soundtracked three break-ups, two political implosions, and one very confused rooster in a Vientiane hostel courtyard. In a world where Spotify algorithms decide geopolitical mood swings faster than…
Another Day, Another Script: The ABC10 Shooting as Global Re-run By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Pacific The shots that rang out near Sacramento’s ABC10 studios on Tuesday didn’t even crack the top-three trend on Weibo; Xi’s economic “bazooka” and Messi’s ankle were busy hogging the pixels. Still, the incident—one dead,…
Temple University: A Rust Belt Campus Where the World Comes to Watch America Argue With Itself By Dave’s International Affairs Desk, with a reporter who’s slept in every major airport from Changi to Schiphol and still prefers 30th Street Station’s broken coffee machines. If you stand on the North Philadelphia corner of Broad and Montgomery…
