Draymond Green: The Empire’s Court Jester Goes Global By Diego “The Sardine” Martinez, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker If you want to understand late-stage American soft power, skip the State Department pressers and watch Draymond Green conduct a press conference in Paris, Tokyo, or—God help us—Riyadh. There he is: 6-foot-6, built like a bouncer who moonlights…
Big Brother, Bigger Brother, Biggest Brother: A Global Prime-Time Panopticon From the concrete sprawl of São Paulo to the neon-lit insomnia of Seoul, the question ricochets through group chats, taxi radios, and half-drunk living rooms like an anxious metronome: “What time is Big Brother on tonight?” At first glance it’s a banal TV query—one more…
Venezuela vs The Known Universe: A One-Sided Bout in Extra Rounds By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over the Caribbean CARACAS—In the blue corner, weighing in at 916,445 km² and shrinking fast, stands a country whose inflation rate once clocked 130,060 %—a figure so cartoonish it made Zimbabwe blink. In every other corner,…
Quito, Ecuador – Somewhere between the Andes and a nervous hedge fund, Ecuador and Argentina are playing a game that looks suspiciously like football but smells unmistakably like geopolitics. The fixture itself—tonight at Estadio Rodrigo Paz Delgado—will decide little in the cosmic ledger: three points, a few million collective heartbeats, maybe a shattered TV or…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that two professional ball clubs, separated by the 2,000-kilometre polite fiction known as the U.S.–Canada border, can still manufacture enough existential dread to keep the rest of the planet momentarily distracted from its own flaming garbage scows. On Tuesday night the Houston Astros—those erstwhile pariahs of the sign-stealing scandal,…
Oracle Stock: When the Cloud Touches Every Passport on Earth By Dave’s Locker’s resident globe-trotter, still nursing jet-lag from three time-zones and one existential crisis Redwood Shores, California—home of Oracle Corporation—sits 11,000 kilometers from the nearest Russian troll farm, 9,000 from the closest Nigerian fintech hub, and exactly one Zoom call away from every finance…
If you drew a diagonal across South America from Quito to Buenos Aires, you’d slice through roughly 4,000 kilometres of Andean vertigo, pampas melancholy, and the sort of political pendulum swings that would make Newton reach for stronger coffee. Ecuador versus Argentina, then, is not merely a fixture on the Copa América group-stage bingo card;…
Tigers vs Yankees: A Proxy War in Pinstripes and Whiskers By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere over the Pacific If you squint hard enough from the press box of the Tokyo Dome, the Detroit Tigers look less like a baseball team and more like a floundering nation-state: rich in nostalgic glory, poor in…
System of a Down: Four Diaspora Kids Who Weaponized Genocide into a Global Mosh-Pit By L. Vartanian, International Correspondent, somewhere between Yerevan and the Yerevan-shaped hole in Los Angeles In the grand bazaar of geopolitical noise, few stalls peddle a product as combustible as System of a Down. To the casual ear they’re a nü-metal…
The General Who Invented Traffic Jams and Détente: Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Accidental World Tour By Our Man in Geneva, still waiting for the diplomatic pouch to arrive on time The first thing you notice about Dwight David Eisenhower—if you’re unfortunate enough to be stuck behind a column of Belgian tourists on the A7 outside Lyon—is…
Don Lemon and the Global Ripple of a Very American Firing By “Cynicus Maximus,” Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker PARIS—In most latitudes, when a television host is shown the door, the story is buried somewhere between the obituaries and the weather. But when CNN dispatches Don Lemon—its last primetime anchor who still pronounced “Kyiv” correctly on…
Pirates vs Orioles: A Global Parable Written in Pine Tar and Despair By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, filing from a bar in Lisbon that still thinks the Cold War is on Let us begin with the obvious: when a club named after 17th-century maritime criminals meets a club named after a small orange songbird, the universe…
