Aces vs Fever: How a Wednesday Night WNBA Grudge Match Quietly Became the Planet’s Most Honest Foreign-Policy Briefing By L. M. DeWitt, Senior Correspondent (currently in a smoky bar in Vilnius watching grainy League Pass on a phone held together with electrical tape) Las Vegas, USA – While diplomats in Geneva were busy drafting communiqués…
Caitlin Clark and the Global Soft-Power Dunk Heard ’Round the World By: Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Foreign Correspondent Emeritus If you’ve spent the past year orbiting anywhere outside the American sports-media bubble—say, sipping overpriced espresso in Rome or watching North Korean missile parades on mute in a Seoul hotel bar—you may have missed…
A Black-Sheep Passport: Satou Sabally and the Absurd Arithmetic of Statelessness By L. V. Mercier, roaming correspondent, currently somewhere between Frankfurt’s tax-free schnitzel and Istanbul’s overpriced baklava When the German Federal Ministry of the Interior announced last week that Satou Sabally—Berlin-born forward for the Dallas Wings and MVP-caliber irritant to WNBA defenses—had been granted a…
Napheesa Collier and the Quiet Art of Global Domination By “International Observer #7,” filing from somewhere with shaky Wi-Fi and excellent espresso In the grand, gaudy circus of 21st-century geopolitics—where billionaires race to Mars while the rest of us race to pay rent—there is something almost indecently refreshing about a 6-foot-1 forward from Jefferson City,…
From the Antipodes to the Abyss: Sandy Brondello’s Quiet Reign Over Global Women’s Hoops By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk There’s a special flavor of irony in the fact that the most influential Australian in world sport right now is a soft-spoken coach who still sounds like she’s ordering a flat white even when she’s drawing…
The Minnesota Lynx—officially the “MN Lynx” to anyone who’s ever tried to cram a Midwestern tongue-twister into a 280-character tweet—have, for reasons no algorithm can fully explain, become a minor Rorschach test for the rest of the planet. On paper they’re merely a WNBA franchise that plays in a city so cold its airport sells…
A’ja Wilson and the Quiet Art of Global Domination From the vantage point of a crumbling press box in Belgrade—where the Wi-Fi wheezes like a chain-smoker and the coffee tastes of geopolitical betrayal—the name A’ja Wilson keeps pinging across continents with the same calm inevitability as death and push-notification taxes. While the rest of us…
Dijonai Carrington and the Geopolitics of a Three-Pointer By Our Correspondent, still recovering from a press-box hot dog in Belgrade PRAGUE—While the planet’s attention was fixed on more traditional forms of brinkmanship—tank exercises in the Taiwan Strait, central bankers playing Russian roulette with inflation, or Elon Musk rebranding another social-media platform into oblivion—an unassuming 5-foot-11…
**The Curious Case of Veronica Burton: How One Woman’s Basketball Career Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Wrong (and Right) with Modern Sport** If you’ve been anywhere near a sports bar in Ulaanbaatar lately—and honestly, who hasn’t—you’ve probably overheard heated debates about Veronica Burton’s defensive rating. The WNBA guard’s journey from Northwestern University standout to…
From the upper deck of Target Center—an arena whose corporate naming rights have been traded more times than a crypto-punk’s profile picture—one can see the Minnesota Lynx doing something subversive: winning with consistency in a country that treats women’s sport the way a dieter eyes cheesecake—publicly virtuous, privately indifferent. On any given game night, the…
WNBA Scores: A Tiny Pixel in the Planet’s Fever Dream By Our Correspondent, filing from somewhere with worse Wi-Fi than you The final buzzer sounded in Brooklyn at 22:47 GMT-4, and with it the New York Liberty edged the Las Vegas Aces 93-87, a scoreline that will ricochet around the encrypted group chats of Filipino…
The Alyssa Thomas Doctrine: How a Basketball Bruiser Became a Geopolitical Metaphor By the time Alyssa Thomas slammed her 2,000th WNBA rebound through the rim last week, the ball was technically in Turkey. That’s because the Connecticut Sun’s resident freight train was in Istanbul, guest-coaching a clinic for teenage girls whose parents still remember when…
