In the spring of 2025, governments from Reykjavík to Rabat will once again reach into the same threadbare pocket and pull out a fistful of freshly minted cost-of-living payments—those discreet fiscal love-taps meant to convince citizens that inflation is just a passing mood swing. The sums vary: Berlin dishes out €300 per adult, Jakarta opts…
Aires in the Age of Over-Sharing: A Global Tour of Hot Air and Cold Hard Cash By the time you finish reading this sentence, roughly 847 new “aires” will have been minted—cryptic aires, green aires, luxury aires, even aires-for-people-who-hate-aires. The suffix, once the modest dominion of French real-estate agents (“trois pièces, deux aires ouvertes”), has…
Flushing, Queens—population 2.4 million if you count the pigeons—plays host today to a modest nine-inning affair between the New York Mets and whoever fate has lined up to be sacrificial. On the surface it’s merely “Mets game today,” three words that sound as routine as a Tokyo salaryman bowing to the 6:02 a.m. Chuo Line….
South Alabama Football: When American Pageantry Meets the Global Panic Room By “Jet-Lagged” Javier, filing from somewhere between Doha Duty-Free and a Mobile, Alabama Waffle House The Jaguars of the University of South Alabama do not, at first glance, look like geopolitical actors. Their stadium seats barely 25,000—roughly the capacity of a mediocre European airport…
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…
Gamer After: How the World’s Thumb-Warriors Are Re-Engineering Reality Once the Console Clicks Off By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere between Reykjavík and regret In the beginning was the joystick, and the joystick was with the teenager, and the joystick was the teenager. Then the pandemic arrived like an overdue DLC nobody asked…
Southern Miss vs Louisiana Tech: A Microcosm of Global Decline, Played on Astroturf in Hattiesburg By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent-at-Large There are, at any given moment, roughly 7.9 billion people who do not care that the University of Southern Mississippi is scheduled to collide with Louisiana Tech on a mild Saturday in Conference-USA’s death rattle….
Georgia State vs Vanderbilt: When a Commodore Meets a Panther, the Rest of the World Checks Its Watch By Our Man in Exile, currently somewhere over the Atlantic In the grand tapestry of human endeavor, there are events that tilt continents and others that merely rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. Somewhere between those…
Sam Houston vs. Texas: When an Empire’s Favorite Son Tries to Secede from the Secessionists By Diego “Still Paying Rent in Six Currencies” Morales, International Affairs Desk, Dave’s Locker PARIS—Over croissants that cost more than a day’s wage in Caracas, French diplomats were overheard asking one another last week: “Did Texas just pick a fight…
Flushing, Queens—Tuesday night—where the Mets are busy losing in extra innings while the rest of the planet pretends to be asleep. Somewhere above Citi Field, a Lufthansa A-350 banks toward Frankfurt, its passengers blissfully unaware that their 401(k)s are now being piloted by a rookie relief pitcher who just walked the bases loaded. In the…
São Paulo, Brazil – Somewhere on the other side of the equator and most of the civilized world’s attention span, the letters “SE LA” and “LSU” are being hurled at one another like undercooked empanadas in a family WhatsApp group. To the uninitiated, it sounds like the latest cryptocurrency rug-pull. To the initiated—mostly residents of…
Pachuca vs. Querétaro: the fixture that sounds like a regional bus route but somehow matters to the algorithmic overlords who decide what 3 a.m. insomniacs from Jakarta to Johannesburg are allowed to scream at on their phones. Welcome, dear reader, to the globalised circus known as Liga MX, where two mid-table Mexican sides can still…
