Omarion Hampton and the Great American Export of Hope By L. A. “Loop” Marquez, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker ZURICH—In a city that still measures its self-worth by numbered bank accounts and discreetly acquired Picassos, the name Omarion Hampton is being whispered over $24 Spritzes like it’s the next cryptocurrency crash. To the Swiss, he’s an…
By the time the rest of the planet had finished arguing about the correct pronunciation of “Omicron,” the Chicago Sky quietly won a WNBA championship. That sentence alone should tell you how geopolitically lopsided our attention spans have become. While COP26 delegates in Glasgow were busy swapping business cards printed on recycled oat milk cartons,…
Margot Robbie Storms the Moors: A Global Reckoning with Heathcliff, Hotties, and the End of Civilization As We Know It By L. D. Smythe, International Correspondent-at-Large PARIS—Somewhere between the third croissant and the fourth existential crisis this morning, the world woke up to the rumor that Margot Robbie is circling a new adaptation of *Wuthering…
Sinner: The World’s Favorite Scapegoat, Now Available in Multiple Languages By Dave’s International Affairs Correspondent Who Has Personally Sinned on Three Continents Before Breakfast PARIS—If you believe the marketing, the term “sinner” has never been more cosmopolitan. Once the exclusive property of medieval flagellants and small-town preachers armed with megaphones and cholesterol, the label is…
Silksong: The Phantom Game That Has the Whole World Waiting—And Why That Says Everything About Us Dave’s Locker | International Desk | 06.11.2024 Somewhere between the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and the next scheduled heat-death of Twitter, humanity has found a new shared obsession: a 2-D bug princess who may or may…
Chorrillo vs. América: A Micro-Cosmic Spectacle for the End of the World By Diego “Doomsday” Delgado, International Correspondent-at-Large Panama City, 2:47 a.m. local time—an hour when sane people consider either sleep or arson—yet Estadio Rommel Fernández is lit up like a hedge fund manager’s conscience. Inside, Club Deportivo Chorrillo—population: the entire neighborhood plus two stray…
Yankee Game Today: A Global Dispatch from the Republic of Bread and Circuses By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker NEW YORK—Somewhere between the Hudson’s toxic shimmer and the Hudson Yards tax write-off, the New York Yankees are scheduled to play a baseball game this afternoon. While 46,000 ticket-holders prepare to genuflect at the altar of pinstripes, the…
Kaitlan Collins and the Global Gladiator Pit A dispatch from the front row of the world’s most expensive reality show By the time the sun rises in Kyiv, Kaitlan Collins has already made three governments flinch. By dusk in Jakarta, she’s on every diplomatic WhatsApp group, her questions clipped, translated, and weaponised. The 32-year-old CNN…
The Global Ballad of ESPN Fantasy: How Imaginary Sports Became the Last Universal Currency By the time the sun rose over Reykjavik last Sunday, 3.4 million people—spread from Lagos to Lapland—had already checked their ESPN Fantasy lineups. They did so before breakfast, before brushing teeth, before remembering whether their actual national football teams were still…
The world’s most consequential geopolitical contest this week is not playing out in the South China Sea but in a dimly lit spare bedroom in suburban Milwaukee, where Trevor—an actuarial analyst who once misspelled “Ukraine” on a conference call—is deciding whether to start Jordan Addison or bench him for a London game that kicks off…
Yahoo Fantasy Football: The Last Empire America Still Runs Better Than the U.N. By Diego “Draft Day” Serrano, International Correspondent filing from a Wi-Fi dead zone near the Syrian-Turkish border If you want to witness a functioning global bureaucracy that still inspires mass participation without drone strikes or debt ceilings, skip Davos and open the…
Naomi Osaka, the soft-spoken grand-slam dispenser who once made an entire stadium hush like a library in a police raid, has become a global Rorschach test. From Melbourne to Manhattan, Lagos to Lausanne, people peer at the 26-year-old and see whatever the zeitgeist needs: a mental-health pioneer, a corporate cash-cow, a reluctant activist, or—depending on…
