Rome once pitted lions against Christians; the Aztecs let jaguars snack on POWs; today we settle the primal score between striped predator and feathered warrior on a baseball diamond in Cobb County, Georgia. Welcome to Braves vs. Tigers, the latest episode in humanity’s endless quest to rebrand carnage as family entertainment while keeping concession margins…
Kevin Zavala and the Quiet Collapse of the Global Middle Class By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk (still waiting for our expense-account croissants to clear customs) Dateline: Everywhere and Nowhere—If you haven’t heard of Kevin Zavala yet, congratulations. Your algorithm has mercifully spared you another microscopic shard of the human mosaic now ricocheting around the planet’s…
Travis Scott: The Global Pied Piper of Retail Therapy By: Our Man in the Duty-Free Lounge Astroworld isn’t just a theme park Travis bulldozed back to life in his own image—it’s now the operating system for a planet that can’t decide if it wants to rage or just return the sneakers. From Lagos to Ljubljana,…
Rashida Tlaib: The Congresswoman Who Keeps Ruining Everyone’s Photo-Ops By Dave’s Locker International Desk In the grand diplomatic circus where heads of state sip tea and lie to one another’s faces, U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib has the unenviable talent of reminding the ringmasters that the tent is on fire. From Detroit to Davos, her mere…
Gary Oldman’s Slow Horses: A Delightfully Dysfunctional Mirror for a World That Forgot How to Gallop By Eduardo “Eddy” Valdez, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker There’s a moment in the third season of “Slow Horses” when Jackson Lamb—Gary Oldman’s flatulent, trench-coated monument to institutional neglect—lights a cigarette inside a supposedly secure MI5 safe house and growls,…
WrestlePalooza: When the World’s Problems Enter the Ring in Spandex PARIS—While the planet busied itself with minor inconveniences like climate tipping points and the slow-motion disintegration of the rules-based order, 65,000 pilgrims descended on a purpose-built arena in Riyadh for WWE WrestlePalooza. There, under 2,000 LED panels and the watchful eye of a sovereign wealth…
Anthony Boyle: The Belfast Ghost Who Haunts Every Screen on Earth By Our Man in the Last Row of Economy Class If you’ve flown long-haul recently and accidentally pressed “play” on the in-flight entertainment menu, you’ve met Anthony Boyle. There he is, a pale, red-haired specter in 4K, whispering Shakespearean menace in Danny Boy, then…
Nicholas Roske: When a Californian Knocks on the Door of the Supreme Court, the Whole World Learns the Wi-Fi Password PARIS—Among the many diplomatic cables that crossed my desk this week, one humble police report from Maryland managed to eclipse wars, coups, and crypto crashes. It concerned Nicholas John Roske, 26, a recent export from…
Perth—population 2.2 million, give or take a few FIFO* miners who’ve lost track of what day it is—sits alone on the planet’s loneliest edge: closer to Jakarta than to Sydney, closer to the Antarctic research station’s lonely beer fridge than to Canberra’s warmer political ambitions. To the rest of the world, Western Australia’s capital is…
From Oslo to Outer Darkness: Casper Ruud and the Global Tennis Afterlife By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large Somewhere beyond customs in Terminal 2, Charles de Gaulle, a Norwegian passport flutters like a polite surrender flag. It belongs—this week at least—to Casper Ruud, the 25-year-old Nordic metronome whose game is so relentlessly correct it makes Scandinavian social…
Rage Goes Global: How a Low-Budget British Zombie Flick Forecasted the Present Apocalypse When Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” limped onto UK screens back in 2002, most of the planet was busy stockpiling duct tape for the looming Iraq war and arguing over whether Nokia or Motorola made the sturdier brick-phone. Few noticed that a…
M&T Bank’s mobile banking app decided to take an unscheduled sabbatical last Tuesday, and the ripples reached well beyond Buffalo, New York. From a sidewalk café in Lisbon to a co-working pod in Nairobi, expatriates who still keep their paychecks in upstate New York suddenly discovered that money—once the world’s most dependable fiction—had gone on…
