The Curious Case of Seth Rollins: How a Man in Tights Became a Geopolitical Rorschach Test By the time the Tokyo Dome lights dimmed last month, Seth Rollins had already been declared everything from “the last true American hero” by a breathless Fox Sports Asia pundit to “an avatar of late-capitalist nihilism” by a semi-sober…
It began, like so many modern parables, with a local TV station’s website buffering at 3 a.m. somewhere near Manchester, New Hampshire. WMUR News—call letters that sound like a Soviet washing-machine brand—was, to the untrained eye, just another regional American broadcaster churning out school-closing scrolls and footage of moose on interstate on-ramps. Yet from Singapore…
Guadalajara—Toluca: Two Mexican Cities and the World’s Slow-Motion Existential Crisis If you spread a map of the globe across your kitchen table tonight, trace a careless thumb 460 kilometers west-to-east across Mexico’s midriff, and mutter “Guadalajara to Toluca,” you’ll notice something unsettling: you’ve just drawn the same line the planet draws when it wants to…
Somewhere between the fjords of Norway and the neon back-alleys of Tokyo, a curious ritual repeats itself every summer: stadiums fill with people who’ve never driven a pickup truck, never tasted real sweet tea, and wouldn’t know a catfish from a house cat—yet they sing every syllable of a Kenny Chesney chorus like their mortgage…
Michigan’s Schedule Is the New Geopolitical Crystal Ball By Dave’s Locker International Desk In a world where central banks blink and markets convulse, the one document that now moves global capital faster than a Russian troll farm is the humble Michigan Wolverines football schedule. Yes, the same scrap of paper your cousin in Kalamazoo tapes…
Nathaniel Rateliff: The Whiskey-Soaked Minstrel Exporting Heartbreak to a Planet Already on the Brink By the time the sun rises over the Mekong, Nathaniel Rateliff has already soundtracked three break-ups, two political implosions, and one very confused rooster in a Vientiane hostel courtyard. In a world where Spotify algorithms decide geopolitical mood swings faster than…
Temple University: A Rust Belt Campus Where the World Comes to Watch America Argue With Itself By Dave’s International Affairs Desk, with a reporter who’s slept in every major airport from Changi to Schiphol and still prefers 30th Street Station’s broken coffee machines. If you stand on the North Philadelphia corner of Broad and Montgomery…
Podgorica—population roughly the same as a mid-tier Premier League stadium on derby day—has quietly become the black-box recorder of 21st-century geopolitics. From the café terraces along the Ribnica, you can watch Chinese cranes assemble a belt-road bridge, sip Italian espresso roasted in Hamburg, and eavesdrop on German tax consultants explaining Montenegrin citizenship-by-investment to Russian crypto-millionaires…
Michael McIntyre: How a Man in Skinny Jeans Became the UN’s Unofficial Jester of the Apocalypse Byline: Dave’s Locker foreign desk, filed from an over-air-conditioned lounge in Singapore where the gin is warm but the Wi-Fi is existential. Walk into any expat bar from Lagos to Lima and you’ll hear the same low-grade grumbling about…
Austin Butler: The Last American Boy Scout the World Never Ordered By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over Greenland Let us begin with the obvious: the planet did not wake up yesterday screaming for another blue-eyed Californian who can cry on cue. Yet here he is—Austin Butler—hovering above the international dateline in a…
Jessie J and the Global Pop Machine: One Woman’s Quest to Remind Us We’re All Just Idiots with Headphones By Dave’s Locker International Bureau PARIS—If you squint past the Eiffel Tower’s nightly seizure-inducing strobe show, you’ll notice a faint, familiar wail drifting from the cafés along Rue de la Paix: “I’m feeeeelin’ sexy and freeeeee.”…
The Cucurella Doctrine: How a Spanish Left-Back Became the Canary in Capitalism’s Coal Mine By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Barcelona, Stamford Bridge, and a nondescript industrial town in Extremadura—Marc Cucurella has now contaminated all three with the same virus: hope. Once a sprightly La Masia graduate who looked like he’d been raised on tapas and…
