The Brewers’ “magic number” is now 7, a figure that sounds almost quaint in a world where central banks toss around trillions the way teenagers burn through TikTok minutes. Yet from a corrugated-plastic bar in Lagos to a smoke-choked izakaya in Osaka, the impending clincher for Milwaukee’s baseball club has become a Rorschach test for…
Nurse Jackie and the Global Art of Self-Medication By Special Correspondent for Dave’s Locker, somewhere between customs and rehab There is a moment in the pilot of “Nurse Jackie” when our protagonist, eyes glazed like a Viennese pastry, palms a fistful of Percocet meant for a construction worker who “fell on a rebar.” In the…
Chicago Fire, Global Alarm: How a Midwestern Script Became the World’s Favorite Disaster Comfort Blanket Somewhere between the Baltic Sea and the Bay of Bengal, a commuter in a Seoul subway car is wiping away tears over the death of a fictional firefighter who never drew breath outside a soundstage in Illinois. The scene is…
Twins Game: The Global Spectacle of One Body Politic in Two Places at Once By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Somewhere between the DMZ and a Danish design fair, humanity has discovered the perfect cheat code for being in two places simultaneously: call it the Twins Game. No longer the quaint curiosity of Minnesota baseball fans…
**When Your Secrets Aren’t Worth Stealing—Just Borrowing: AT&T’s Global Masterclass in Digital Apology** By the time AT&T’s $13 million settlement hit the headlines, half the planet had already updated their passwords from “123456” to “123456a”—the cybersecurity equivalent of installing a stronger screen door on a submarine. The breach itself, which exposed roughly nine million customers’…
Washington, D.C. – In a city that excels at turning oxygen into gridlock, the United States Congress has once again pulled the emergency brake on its own government, shuttering offices and sending federal employees home with nothing but a curt “we’ll call you.” The immediate trigger this time—Democrats balking at the House Republican budget ransom…
LOS ANGELES — Somewhere between the 7th-inning stretch and the next geopolitical crisis, the Dodgers and Phillies resumed their ancient ritual of bat-meets-ball, a pastoral pageant now beamed to 182 territories that haven’t known a pastoral day in their collective lives. From Kyiv bomb shelters to Lagos traffic jams, insomniacs toggled between BBC alerts and…
Shohei Ohtani just signed the most lucrative contract in human history—$700 million, give or take the GDP of a small island nation—and the global reaction has been refreshingly unified: everyone quietly Googled “How much is 700 million in my currency?” then stared into the existential abyss for a polite three seconds. From Tokyo trading floors…
Jackie Young and the Quiet Art of Winning While the Planet Burns A dispatch from the end-of-days desk, somewhere between the Eurozone and the next recession The name Jackie Young doesn’t scream geopolitics. It isn’t chanted in Davos corridors, whispered in Brussels backrooms, or hashtagged by tinfoil influencers predicting the collapse of fiat currency. And…
PARIS—While delegates at UNESCO politely clapped for yet another PowerPoint on “sport as soft power,” Skylar Diggins-Smith was 7,500 kilometers away in Dallas, draining a contested three over two defenders and reminding the planet that soft power sometimes wears size-10 Nikes and has a mean crossover. The box score will tell you she logged 25…
Phillies-Dodgers: A Globe-Trotting Tragedy in Nine Innings By our man in the cheap seats, filing from everywhere and nowhere Across six continents—Antarctica’s penguins wisely abstain—baseball fans woke to the news that the Philadelphia Phillies and Los Angeles Dodgers were renewing hostilities. At first glance it’s just another installment of America’s provincial pastime, a 162-game soap…
From the Banks of the Bosporus to the Beaches of Bali, the world has many pressing questions: will the BRICS dethrone the dollar, can COP agreements survive another American election cycle, and—most urgent—how did a 27-year-old Georgian with frosted tips and a podcast about “holy testosterone” become a diplomatic curiosity in six languages? Meet Chase…
