Marcus Mariota, erstwhile savior of the Tennessee Titans and current itinerant quarterback, is the rare American football export who can make the rest of the planet shrug in unison. While the NFL busies itself inflating viewership numbers in London pubs and Munich beer halls, Mariota has become a walking metaphor for globalization’s limits: a Samoan-Hawaiian,…
By the time the sun finally rose over Reykjavik last Tuesday, the Coldwater Cast had already been streaming for nine hours. Somewhere in a dimly lit Oslo basement, “MackerelMikkel” was teaching 23,000 viewers how to debone a fish with a butter knife; in Valparaíso, Chile, an ex-banker named Camila was narrating her descent into artisanal…
Barcelona—The city that once exported anarchism and now exports paella-flavored NFTs—hosted another episode in the long-running Iberian passion play known as La Liga. RCD Espanyol versus RCD Mallorca: two clubs whose initials sound like failed boy bands but who, for ninety minutes plus whatever VAR decides to tack on, carried the psychic baggage of two…
Monday Night Football: The Glittering Coliseum Where the World Watches America Argue With Itself Dave’s Locker International | Dispatches from the End of the Couch Somewhere between the fall of Kabul and the rise of Ozempic, Monday Night Football became the last universally accepted American export that doesn’t arrive accompanied by sanctions or a drone…
Tyler Robinson, a name that until last week meant precisely nothing to 99.97 percent of the planet’s eight-billion-strong audience, has now managed the improbable feat of becoming a minor irritant in the digestive tract of the global news cycle. From the glass towers of Singapore to the tin-roofed newsrooms of La Paz, editors have been…
Dan Marino: The Last American Gunslinger Who Couldn’t Outrun Globalization By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, Dan Marino became a living fossil—an artifact of a time when a quarterback could still be mythologized without a passport, a…
When Mariah the Scientist announced her modestly titled “The Experiential Tour,” the collective yawn from the northern hemisphere was almost loud enough to drown out the stampede of passport-clutching Gen-Zers in Lagos, Jakarta, and São Paulo. After all, a 24-year-old alt-R&B singer from Atlanta promising “an immersive, genre-bending odyssey” sounds like the 400th such pledge…
Claressa Shields Is Still Punching Gravity in the Face, and the Rest of Us Are Just Catching Up By the time Claressa Shields stepped off the plane in Riyadh last October—yes, the same desert megacity that now hosts heavyweight pageants between YouTubers and pensioners—she had already rewritten the atlas. Flint, Michigan, population 80,000 and falling…
The Green, White, and Red Canary in the Global Coal Mine By Our Man in Mexico City, nursing a mezcal and a migraine On paper, the Mexican flag is a tidy tricolor rectangle—green, white, red—bracketed by an eagle, a serpent, and an improbably heroic cactus. In practice, it is the world’s most cheerful-looking panic button….
Tyler Robinson, the 24-year-old data analyst from Omaha whose name you didn’t know last week, is now the planet’s most efficient geopolitical Rorschach test. A leaked internal memo he wrote—three pages, bullet-pointed, cheerfully color-coded—has ricocheted from a sleepy Nebraska cubicle to the marble corridors of Brussels, the fluorescent warrens of Beijing’s Zhongnanhai, and the WhatsApp…
Como vs Genoa: A Provincial Derby That Explains Why the World Is Still a Mess by “Il Professore” – Dave’s Locker’s Balkan bureau chief, currently on sabbatical in a lakeside bar tabacchi Lake Como’s Sunday residents—Russian oligarchs in floating villas, German tax exiles in electric speedboats, and a solitary Swiss banker who still thinks fax…
Married at First Sight: A Global Game of Matrimonial Roulette Somewhere between arranged marriage and Tinder, humanity has decided the most efficient way to find lifelong commitment is to skip the “lifelong” part and jump straight to the altar. The franchise Married at First Sight—spawned in Denmark, franchised to 35 territories, and currently providing emotional…
