CBS Fantasy Football: How an American Pastime Became the Planet’s Most Efficient Sleeper Cell By the time most of Europe is debating whether to raise the retirement age to 75 or simply replace pensions with TikTok dances, a quiet army of 12 million global managers—yes, that is the officially sanctioned euphemism—has already spent the pre-dawn…
Lorenzo Musetti: The Last Italian Romantic in an Age of Algorithmic Tennis By our correspondent in Rome, still waiting for the espresso machine to be fixed since 2019 If tennis were still governed by Renaissance patronage, Lorenzo Musetti would already have a ceiling somewhere—probably the Sistine Chapel gift shop, between Michelangelo’s self-checkout kiosk and a…
Blue Jays vs Reds: A Global Tragedy Painted in Feathers and Box Scores By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, still wearing yesterday’s cynicism GENEVA — While the world’s finance ministers argue over digital-tax commas in Swiss conference suites, and while a forgotten war reruns its greatest hits on another continent, two North American bird-themed baseball clubs have…
GAVIN NEWSOM: AMERICA’S PRETTIEST POLITICAL WEATHER-VANE SWINGS INTO GLOBAL CROSSWINDS By Diego Serrano, Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk There are places—say, a Berlin traffic light, a Lagos street market, a Kyoto tea house—where the name Gavin Newsom lands with the faint pop of a distant champagne cork: pleasant, bubbly, and immediately forgotten. Yet for the…
Najee Harris and the Global Cargo Cult of American Football By Our Man in the Cheap Seats It is a truth universally acknowledged—at least from the VIP boxes in Dallas to the betting kiosks in Macau—that the United States exports only three things with reliable profit margins: weapons-grade anxiety, Marvel plot twists, and the National…
The Bridge of Spies: A Cold War Waltz That Never Quite Ended By Dave’s Locker International Desk Berlin—There’s something irresistibly comic about the fact that the most famous prisoner exchange in modern history happened on a bridge named after a dead communist, supervised by men who would all eventually be played by Oscar winners. Welcome…
Tony and Ziva: A Love Story the World Can’t Quit Watching (Even When It’s Trying to Look Away) By the time the latest trailer for the Paramount+ spin-off “NCIS: Tony & Ziva” dropped, the clip had already been subtitled into 27 languages, dissected by Brazilian TikTokers, and turned into a meme template by Indonesian graphic…
Musetti: A Global Love Affair With a Twelve-Cent Doughnut Hole By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and the last functioning traffic light in Naples, the planet has quietly agreed that the pinnacle of human ingenuity is a sugar-dusted sphere of fried dough the size of a golf ball. Italians call it musetti;…
Jesse Watters and the Global Export of Performative Outrage A field report from the international desk By the time Jesse Watters’ latest prime-time monologue ricocheted from a Fox studio in Midtown Manhattan to a phone screen in Lagos, then to a bar television in Warsaw, and finally to a group-chat in Manila, the clip had…
The Last Flight Out of Bucaramanga: How a Colombian Football Match Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Wrong (and Right) with 2024 If you squint hard enough through the smog of modernity, the world occasionally lines up its metaphors like dominoes waiting for a toddler with a sugar rush. Case in point: last Tuesday’s Copa…
Twitter Down: Planet Earth Holds Breath, Discovers Oxygen Still Works By Our Man in the Ether When the blue bird finally keeled over at 03:47 UTC, the silence was so complete you could almost hear the world’s influencers hyperventilating into ring lights. From Lagos to Lisbon, Seoul to São Paulo, the sudden absence of 280-character…
Downdetector: the world’s most reliable panic barometer by our roaming correspondent, still waiting for the Wi-Fi to load in the departure lounge Every civilization eventually builds a shrine to its own fragility. The Romans had aqueducts, the Victorians had rail timetables, and we—citizens of the glowing rectangle—have Downdetector. Visit the site at 03:12 local time…
