Rays vs Blue Jays: The Balkanization of Baseball and Other Tragedies in Miniature By “Roving” Rodrigo Amarante, foreign correspondent stuck in a Tampa strip-mall Starbucks Tampa, Florida—The Tropicana Field roof is doing its best impression of a half-deflated bouncy castle, sagging under subtropical humidity and the accumulated sighs of 14,000 ticket holders who suspect they’ve…
Weather Las Vegas: A Mirage of Normalcy in the Age of Global Pyrotechnics By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large (currently hiding from the sun in an airport bar) LAS VEGAS—The Strip’s thermometers are doing that coy little dance again, flickering between 109°F (42.7°C) and “Surface-of-Mercury.” Locals call it “dry heat,” a phrase that translates internationally as “at…
Pirates vs Braves: The World Keeps Betting on the Wrong Outlaws By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between the Black Sea and the Red Tape If you thought “Pirates vs Braves” was merely a late-night baseball score, congratulations—your innocence is adorable. From Singapore to Somalia, the planet now stages the same tired morality play: men with eye…
Rangers vs Guardians: A Global Power Struggle Rebranded By the time you finish reading this sentence, three new “rapid-response task forces” will have been announced by governments that can’t reliably deliver mail. From the peat bogs of Borneo to the conference lobbies of Davos, the planet is suddenly awash in people who insist they are…
Adele: The Last Diva Standing While the World Burns The last time a British export caused this much synchronized weeping across continents, it was Winston Churchill’s funeral. Yet here we are again, mascara pooling in the same time zones from Lagos to Lima, all because a Tottenham-raised contralto has decided that thirty-four is the perfect…
The Orioles vs. Yankees, A Statistical Proxy War in Polyester By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere east of the Chesapeake and west of existential dread BALTIMORE—In the grand theatre of American exceptionalism, two flocks of birds—one orange, one pin-striped—took the field last night to decide nothing less than which corporation’s laundry would preen…
While the rest of the planet juggles runaway inflation, sovereign debt crises, and the slow-motion implosion of the post-war order, a pocket of the Caribbean diaspora in Queens and a sun-bleached corner of South Florida spent three late-autumn evenings locked in a duel that, on the surface, concerns nothing more than who gets to spray…
On paper, the phrase “Tigers vs Red Sox” sounds like a nature documentary that ends with David Attenborough narrating the disembowelling of a Fenway usher. In practice it is merely another installment of Major League Baseball’s seasonal pageant, a rivalry now beamed to 183 countries by satellite feeds so powerful they can probably give low-orbit…
Frozen Treats, Hot Blood: How a Texas Yogurt Shop Massacre Became the World’s Cold-Case Comfort Blanket By T. J. Voss, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker AUSTIN—In December 1991, four teenage girls were hog-tied, raped, shot, and set ablaze inside an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! franchise. The blaze melted the toppings bar into a psychedelic swirl…
White Sox vs Nationals: A Quiet Apocalypse in the Mid-Atlantic By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere between Geneva and Des Moines Baseball, that most provincial of American pastimes, rarely registers on the global Richter scale. Yet here we are, watching the Chicago White Sox—once the pale hose of Comiskey, now the pale shadow…
The Shire Goes Global: How a Fantasy Card Set Became the New Geopolitical Weather Vane Dave’s Locker | International Desk | 12 June 2024 It began, as most modern crises do, with a Zoom leak. A blurry slide deck from Wizards of the Coast’s quarterly earnings call—captioned in Comic Sans, no less—revealed the next Magic:…
Twins vs Phillies: When Baseball’s Midwestern Doppelgängers Drop the Gloves in the Shadow of the World By the time the Twins and Phillies finished their three-game set in Minneapolis last week—Minnesota 13, Philadelphia 11 over the series—most of planet Earth had moved on to fresher geopolitical wounds. Tokyo’s Nikkei had already digested the Bank of…
