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…
DENVER, Colorado—The Mile-High City’s weather forecast this week reads like a ransom note Mother Nature scribbled on the back of a bar napkin: 70°F on Monday, 7 inches of snow by Wednesday, and a 30% chance of existential dread by the weekend. To the average Coloradan this is merely Tuesday; to the rest of the…
The Thunder in the Void: Why Benin vs Lesotho Is the Geo-Political Cage Match Nobody Ordered By the time you read this, the world’s attention will have already flitted elsewhere—probably to whatever tropical island a crypto billionaire just sank his yacht on—but for one shimmering, slightly ridiculous moment, the planet’s idle gaze fixed itself on…
Kingdom Hearts 4: The Planet-Spanning Power Fantasy We Can’t Quit By Cora Voss, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker International Bureau It’s 2025, half the Northern Hemisphere is either on fire or underwater, and the other half is arguing on Discord about whether Sora’s new sneakers constitute cultural appropriation. Yet here we are—again—salivating over a fresh trailer…
Dancing With the Stars Premiere: When the Globe Pauses to Watch C-List Glitter Diplomacy In a week when the Arctic Circle reported its first rain-on-snow-in-August event and the Bank of Japan quietly debated whether to let the yen commit honorable seppuku, roughly seventeen million people from Reykjavík to Reykjavík (via Perth, Lagos, and that one…
The Andes vs. the Chaco: Why a Tuesday Night Qualifier in Asunción Matters More Than Your Mortgage Rate By Our Man in Lima, Still Waiting for the Bus In any other week, the planet’s attention would be fixed on the usual circus: a G-7 finance minister explaining how “transitory” now means “permanent,” or a tech…
Brazil vs Bolivia: A Quiet Derby for the Soul of South America By: Our Man in a Hammock with Wi-Fi RIO DE JANEIRO—While the rest of the planet was busy measuring the global recession in crypto-converted lattés and wondering whether World War III will be fought on TikTok, Brazil and Bolivia spent last week conducting…
THE QUIET IMPERIALISM OF HENRY BIENEN, OR HOW A NORTHWESTERN PRESIDENT TAUGHT THE WORLD TO LOVE ITS NEOLIBERAL OVERLORDS By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between the Quad and the IMF It is tempting, in the age of instant outrage and TikTok summits, to dismiss Henry Bienen as a quaint Midwestern apparition: tweed, tortoiseshell glasses, and the…
Elizabeth Tsurkov and the Global Hostage Economy: A Graduate Student, a War, and the Price of Curiosity By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk When Elizabeth Tsurkov, a Russian-Israeli doctoral candidate at Princeton, vanished in Baghdad last March, the world performed its now-customary shrug: another intellectual swallowed by the Levantine wood-chipper. Nine months later, the Islamic Resistance…
