Britney Spears and the Collapse of the American Empire: A Global Post-Mortem If you squint from the balcony of any luxury hotel in Dubai, Shanghai, or the half-finished ghost towers of Lagos, the Britney Spears saga looks less like a pop-star meltdown and more like a state funeral for late-stage capitalism. From the neon canyons…
Tallahassee, Florida – In the grand casino of global culture, where nations gamble on oil futures, semiconductor supremacy, and the next TikTok dance, the release of a college-football schedule might appear as charmingly parochial as a parish bake sale. Yet when Florida State University—those garnet-and-gold merchants of controlled violence—dropped its 2024 slate last week, the…
Teyana Taylor’s Farewell Tour: How One Woman’s Exit Became a Global Litmus Test for Burnout By the time Teyana Taylor announced her “final” retirement from music—via an Instagram story that lasted exactly 24 hours, like everything else on that cursed platform—people in Lagos were already remixing the beat drop of “Gonna Love Me” into a…
Ohio State vs Washington: When a College Football Game Pretends to Matter to the World HOUSTON—In a cavernous stadium the size of a small principality, two American collegiate armies will collide Monday night while the rest of Earth politely pretends to watch. The “College Football Playoff National Championship” pits the Ohio State Buckeyes against the…
Nigeria is the world’s favorite cautionary tale wearing a couture agbada. Two hundred million people, Africa’s largest economy, and a daily masterclass in how to sprint while shackled—yet somehow the sprinters keep breaking world records in hope. From Berlin boardrooms to Beijing construction sites, policy nerds whisper the same question: if Nigeria ever truly gets…
Houston, We Have a Problem—And It’s Wearing Scarlet Helmets Dispatches from the Margins of the American Coliseum By the time the University of Houston Cougars lined up against their latest over-matched non-conference sacrificial lamb, the global temperature had ticked up another 0.0003 °C, a container ship the size of lower Manhattan was wedged sideways in…
Zac Gallen, Fastball Diplomat of the Apocalypse By Dave’s Locker Foreign Service (Mental Health Optional) Somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, a 28-year-old Floridian with the hair of a 1980s tennis prodigy and the temperament of a man who’s read too much Camus is throwing a baseball hard enough to make radar guns question their life…
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM—AND A PARADE They used to say everything in Texas was bigger. Having spent the last decade filing dispatches from shrinking post-industrial towns, flooded Pacific atolls, and European capitals that now double as open-air museums to their own relevance, I can confirm: Houston is still enormous, still sweating, and still acting…
A Dispatch from the Commonwealth: “Virgina Football” and the End of Global Innocence By L. Valenti, International Correspondent at Large Dateline: Somewhere over the Atlantic, Wi-Fi sputtering like a third-tier referee’s whistle. It began, as all modern scandals do, with a typo. Somewhere between a hastily drafted press release and the algorithmic digestive tract of…
Kahleah Copper, Export-Grade Swagger: Why a 6’1″ Guard From North Philly Now Dictates Exchange Rates in Istanbul and Mood Swings in São Paulo By Dave’s Locker Global Bureau I. Passport Noir In the grand, slightly mildewed ledger of American cultural exports—sandwiched between KFC and drone diplomacy—women’s basketball occupies a quiet, subversive footnote. Enter Kahleah Copper,…
Nancy Mace and the Fine Art of Global Schadenfreude By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere east of the Potomac and west of the Yangtze There are moments—rare, shimmering, and vaguely nauseating—when a single U.S. congresswoman can make the entire planet lean in like it’s binge-watching a prestige drama. Enter Representative Nancy Mace, Republican…
The word “peacemaker” used to come with a halo and a résumé full of Nobel Prizes. These days it travels with a heavier carry-on: bodyguards, nondisclosure agreements, and a suspicion that the halo might be plated, not solid. From Geneva to Gaza, from the South China Sea to a Zoom breakout room in Brussels, the…
