Major League, Minor Morals: How the World’s Most Expensive Circus Keeps Re-Exporting American Exceptionalism By Ignacio “Nacho” Vega, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker PARIS—On a drizzly evening in the 15th arrondissement, a bistro TV flickers between Ligue 1 highlights and the Yankees-Red Sox tilt. The French patrons, who pretend to disdain anything louder than a mime,…
Corinthians vs. Athletico-PR: A Microcosm of the Planet’s Slow-Motion Meltdown By the time the ball is kicked on Sunday in São Paulo, the United Nations will still be debating whether “climate catastrophe” is too alarmist a term, another crypto-exchange will have “misplaced” a few hundred million dollars, and somewhere in the Pacific a container ship…
From the banks of the Potomac to the backrooms of Davos, one man’s Brooklyn vowels now echo like a geopolitical starter pistol: Senator Charles Ellis “Chuck” Schumer, the human embodiment of American legislative gridlock—and, paradoxically, the only person who can still make it move. Watching Schumer twist arms in the U.S. Senate these days feels…
Seth Rogen: The Stoner King Who Conquered the World (and Nobody Stopped Him) In a world teetering on the brink of environmental collapse, where democracy faces its midlife crisis and billionaires treat space travel like a weekend getaway, one man has achieved what diplomats and defense contractors never could: global unity through the universal language…
Shrimp: The Tiny Crustacean Steering the Planet They arrive pink, curled, and eerily compliant on cocktail platters from Dubai to Detroit, but the global shrimp economy is anything but docile. Beneath the cocktail sauce lies a supply chain so tangled it could double as a hostage negotiation: mangroves in Indonesia become fish-meal in Norway, which…
Citizens of the world, gather round: an American baseball stadium in Philadelphia has coughed up the latest iteration of “Karen”—that globally contagious strain of middle-class entitlement—proving once again that pandemics need not be viral to go planetary. While Ukrainians dodge artillery and Sudanese queue for water, the most urgent dispatch from the City of Brotherly…
The Last King of Cable: Bill O’Reilly’s Global Afterglow By our man in the departure lounge, still waiting for the apocalypse They say every empire exports its worst habits first. If that’s true, Bill O’Reilly was the 21st-century equivalent of sending smallpox-infected blankets overseas: a loud, indignant comforter stuffed with self-certainty and manufactured grievance. From…
Ted Cruz: The World’s Favorite Cartoon Supervillain By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—From the banks of the Seine, where waiters still refuse to serve Freedom Fries, Ted Cruz looks less like a U.S. senator and more like a recurring character in a prestige drama about the decline of empires. To Europeans who’ve spent the last…
Tasha Ghouri: How a Deaf Dancer From Yorkshire Became the UN’s Unlikely Soft-Power Asset and Other Tales of a Planet Gone Soft By the time the Reuters alert pinged—“UNESCO appoints Love Island alumna as goodwill ambassador for disability inclusion”—half the newsroom assumed the Slack bot had finally achieved sentience and was trolling us. But no:…
Corinthians vs. Athletico-PR: A Tale of Two Cities and the Planet’s Slow Collapse By Our Man in São Paulo, nursing his third caipirinha since dawn Somewhere between the 37th parallel south and the International Space Station’s nightly pass, Corinthians and Athletico-PR will meet tonight in the sort of football match that makes the rest of…
The Pritzker Prize: A Golden Ticket in the Age of Collapsing Roofs By Our Foreign Correspondent, still sweeping rubble off his laptop Somewhere between the cracked marble of Beirut’s port silos and the freshly unveiled titanium curls of a billion-dollar museum in Shenzhen, the Pritzker Prize quietly announced its latest laureate. To the uninitiated, the…
A 6’6″ Floridian with a fastball that could puncture the ozone layer lands in Pittsburgh and the planet tilts—imperceptibly, of course, yet just enough for the international baseball-industrial complex to recalibrate. Paul Skenes, the freshly drafted LSU ace whose surname sounds like a Scandinavian crime series, is the latest proof that the United States still…
