Reds Game: The Planet’s Newest Blood-Sport, Now Available in HD Somewhere between the 38th meridian and your mother’s Wi-Fi router, a baseball club wearing the color of unpaid invoices has become the global economy’s most reliable Rorschach test. The Cincinnati Reds—yes, those Reds, the ones whose payroll looks like a rounding error on a Bundesliga…
CLEVELAND—Somewhere between the rust-spotted skyline and the eternal optimism that Lake Erie refuses to drown, the Cleveland Guardians have quietly become the most geopolitically interesting nine innings on earth. To the average European, the name conjures images of stone-faced gargoyles and Brexit negotiations; to a Tokyo commuter it sounds like a new cyber-security protocol; to…
When the lights went up at the Cannes premiere of Moulin Rouge! in 2001, John Leguizamo—painted green, four-foot-tall, and dying of tuberculosis—was not the obvious candidate to become a walking Rorschach test for the planet’s shifting power dynamics. Yet, two decades later, the Colombian-American polymath has quietly become one of the most efficient export mechanisms…
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…
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…
The World’s Longest IOU: A Global Tour of Government Borrowing, or How to Run Up a Tab in Every Time Zone By Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk If the planet ever files for collective bankruptcy, the hearing will be held in five languages, chaired by a Swiss accountant, and catered—on credit—by the same governments that…
Black Rabbit, Jason Bateman, and the Worldwide Art of Selling Nothing Very Loudly By Diego M. Salgado, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the Kremlin’s latest cryptic press release and TikTok’s newest dance craze performed on a melting glacier, Netflix dropped the trailer for “Black Rabbit.” The limited series stars Jason Bateman as a middle-aged…
DAVID LETTERMAN: AMERICA’S LATE-NIGHT EXPORT THAT TAUGHT THE WORLD HOW TO YAWN IN SARCASM By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Pacific The first time a bar in Reykjavík stayed open past 2 a.m. to simulcast “Late Night,” the locals thought Letterman’s gap-toothed grin was a US dental-insurance commercial. By the second…
Steven Merryday and the Planet-Sized Implications of One Stubborn Judge in Tampa By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, Nursing a Flat White and Existential Dread TAMPA, FLORIDA—From the air-conditioned gloom of a courthouse that smells faintly of toner and ambition, Senior U.S. District Judge Steven Douglas Merryday has, once again, reminded the world that…
From the Baltic to the Bolshoi, the planet’s favorite geopolitical boogeyman is enjoying what might charitably be called a vintage year. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin—ex-KGB judoka, bare-chested horse-whisperer, and the only man who can annex a peninsula before breakfast and still insist he’s just tidying up the yard—continues to set the tempo for our weary waltz…
Oxford Still Beats Cambridge, Earth Still Orbits Sun: 2025 Global Rankings Confirm British Universities Are Expensive, Excellent, and Slightly Alarmed by L. V. Merriweather, International Affairs Correspondent LONDON—The annual scholastic beauty pageant known as the QS World University Rankings sashayed down the runway this week, and British institutions once again collected tiaras like a kleptocratic…
ODEON: How a Greek Word for Singing Became the World’s Loudest Love Letter to Escapism By the time you finish this sentence, roughly 3,200 people in 31 countries will have swiped their credit cards at an Odeon-branded box office to watch something explode in Dolby Atmos. From Oslo to Mumbai, the name—“singing place,” courtesy of…
