FanDuel and the Great Global Gamble: How One App Turned Every Human Into a Bookie By Dave’s International Affairs Desk (currently 3-1 on whether the editor reads this) If you squint at the planet from orbit, you can almost see the faint green glow of FanDuel pulsing from every sports bar, commuter train, and questionable…
T20 World Cup Dispatch: When Pakistan Meets UAE, and the World Pretends It’s Just Cricket By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Somewhere between the endless Dubai construction cranes and a Karachi heatwave that could melt ball bearings, Pakistan and the UAE are scheduled to face off in a T20 match that the International Cricket Council insists…
Sharjah, Tuesday night – The floodlights hum like tired neon gods above a stadium that has seen empires rise and fall, and tonight it hosts the latest skirmish in the great imperial pageant of cricket: Pakistan, nuclear-armed melodrama incarnate, versus the United Arab Emirates, a nation whose passport stamp is a VIP card to global…
Supreme Court, Supreme Leader, Supreme Pizza—somewhere in the bureaucratic ether the word “supreme” has been upgraded from adjective to sovereign noun, and the planet is dutifully genuflecting. From the marble colonnades of Washington to the neon alleyways of Tokyo, “supreme” has become the ultimate linguistic passport: it opens doors, empties wallets, and occasionally topples governments….
If you squint at a world map long enough, the United States looks less like a republic and more like a giant, slightly frayed Wi-Fi router that occasionally forgets its own password. Somewhere near the blinking “SENATE” light sits Ron Wyden—Oregon’s senior senator, professional committee chair, and improbable apostle of digital privacy—busily trying to keep…
Dubai’s floodlit coliseum is once again hosting the world’s most polite blood-sport: Pakistan versus UAE, a fixture that sounds like the geopolitical equivalent of a LinkedIn request—cordial on the surface, quietly lethal beneath. On paper it’s only a cricket match; in practice it’s a diplomatic spreadsheet wearing athletic gear. One side represents a nuclear-armed republic…
Daily Horoscope for September 4, 2025 – A Global Forecast in Which Absolutely No One Gets Out Alive By Our Cynical Correspondent, currently orbiting the chaos from a press seat in Reykjavík REYKJAVÍK—Somewhere between the 14th volcanic belch of the year and the IMF’s 37th emergency Zoom, humanity reached for its horoscopes this morning like…
The Curious Case of Nik Bonitto, or How a Linebacker Became a Geopolitical Weather Vane By Our Man at the End of the Bar, Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk Somewhere between the 104th meridian west and the Prime Meridian, Nik Bonitto has become an unlikely export—Denver’s 6’3″, 240-pound outside linebacker now haunting the sleep cycles…
Nintendo eShop to Close: A Funeral March for the World’s Smallest, Most Expensive Nation-State By Dave’s International Desk (Tokyo → Rio → Lagos → Your Couch) TOKYO—On a humid Thursday, Nintendo politely informed the planet that, come March 2025, the eShop for 3DS and Wii U will flat-line. The announcement landed in fourteen languages, which…
C-SPAN: The World’s Dullest Telescope on America’s Loudest Democracy By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva Every civilization eventually builds a monument to its own attention span. The Romans had the Colosseum, India has the Taj Mahal, and the United States—ever the pioneer in low-cost masochism—gave us C-SPAN. Conceived in 1979 as a charitable…
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Great American Fever Dream By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic PARIS—Watching Bobby Kennedy III’s namesake crisscross Iowa in a Patagonia vest and a voice hoarse from anti-vax testimonials is, for the rest of the planet, like bingeing a prestige dramedy in which the writers’…
BBC iPlayer: The Empire Streams Back By Our Man in the Ether, somewhere between GMT+8 jet-lag and existential dread The British Broadcasting Corporation, once content to beam clipped vowels into crackling short-wave radios from Lagos to Lahore, has quietly reinvented itself as the Netflix your history teacher warned you about. BBC iPlayer—originally pitched in 2007…
