When Rob Reiner ambled onto the world stage in 1971, the planet was busy with other matters—China had just discovered ping-pong diplomacy, Nixon was rehearsing his exit lines, and half of Europe was still trying to find a decent tomato. Yet somewhere between Archie Bunker’s hollering and a meathead’s earnest protest, Reiner quietly became a…
Padres Game Today: A Global Ritual in the Church of Distraction By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Tokyo-Paris-Mexico City Shuttle SAN DIEGO—While the Indian subcontinent roasted under another “wet-bulb” heatwave that makes human sweat obsolete, and while European finance ministers argued over whether to call their latest bailout a “bail-in” or merely “financial yoga,”…
Padres, Papas, and the Planet: A Dispatch from the Universal Fatherhood Front By our Special Correspondent, still recovering from a three-continent Father’s Day bender The word “padre” once conjured images of incense, guilt, and the sort of Latin-lover priest who could absolve you on Sunday and sell you discounted rosaries by Monday. Today it is…
The MLB Standings: A Global Scoreboard for American Soft Power and Existential Dread Somewhere between a Japanese semiconductor shortage and a French pension riot, the American pastime has quietly re-branded itself as the planet’s longest-running reality show. The standings that scroll across smartphones from Seoul to São Paulo are no longer just arithmetic for the…
Daiyan Henley and the Global Supply Chain of Hope By the International Desk, Dave’s Locker PARIS—While delegates in Brussels argue over Russian gas pipelines and the UN Security Council debates who still has enough credibility left to chair a meeting, a 22-year-old linebacker from Los Angeles has become an unlikely pressure gauge for planetary anxiety….
Padres Game: America’s Pastime as Global Gladiator Spectacle By Our Correspondent Who’s Seen Cricket Riots and Calcio Fistfights PETCO Park, San Diego—While the rest of the planet debates grain-export corridors and which despot has the shiniest nuclear toys, 42,067 sunburned souls here have arranged themselves into a neat capitalist mandala to watch grown men in…
Padres Score, World Shudders: How a San Diego Box Line Became the Planet’s Moral Thermometer By Dave’s International Affairs Desk Somewhere between a ballistic missile test in Pyongyang and a €200 million European Central Bank rate hike, a small orange graphic flashed on millions of screens: Padres 6, Dodgers 3. The alert pulsed in twelve…
Dodgers Score Again, Earth Shrugs: How Nine Innings in Chavez Ravine Became a Global Barometer of Apocalypse Fatigue By “World-Weary” Wu, Senior Correspondent LOS ANGELES—Another night, another crooked number on the Dodger Stadium scoreboard. The boys in blue hung a 7-spot on whoever the poor saps from the Midwest were this time—details blur when you’ve…
The Conjuring: Last Rites and the Global Economy of Dread By L. Marlowe, Senior Correspondent, Somewhere Between a Screening Room and Existential Despair If you believed the Vatican’s only export these days is schism and papal merch, think again. The Conjuring: Last Rites—Warner Bros.’ latest dispatch from the ecclesiastical horror-industrial complex—turns exorcism into a passport-stamped…
SEATTLE—While the planet’s stock markets convulsed like a drunk on a mechanical bull and diplomats traded insults thick enough to butter bread, some sixty thousand souls squeezed into T-Mobile Park on Tuesday to ask the only question that still unites a fractured world: can the Mariners string together more hits than the Houston Astros before…
For anyone who has ever tried to explain baseball to a cricket-obsessed Bengali rickshaw driver, the American League West standings feel like a cosmic joke told in a language no one outside the Pacific time zone ever bothered to learn. Yet here we are, late May, and the Seattle Mariners—those soggy, oft-ignored denizens of Puget…
# The Last Free Men: How 1.6 Million Mariners Keep Your Avocado Toast from Being a Lie Somewhere between the 20-knot winds of the Drake Passage and the diesel fumes of the Singapore Strait, the modern world still depends on a caste of sun-blasted nomads who haven’t updated their LinkedIn since dial-up. Meet the 1.6…
