Big Brother Schedule: A Global Timetable of Surveillance and Shrugs By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker From the moment a bleary office worker in Seoul taps his metro card at 07:13 to the second a São Paulo street vendor’s face is silently catalogued by a passing patrol drone at 19:47, the planet now keeps a synchronized appointment…
Dominion Power: A Global Game of Musical Chairs, Now With Higher Stakes and Fewer Seats By the time you finish this sentence, some new micro-dominion will have been declared—perhaps a crypto fiefdom in the South Pacific, a cloud-based nation-state run from a WeWork in Lisbon, or Elon Musk’s latest satellite swarm politely informing the International…
Padres vs Mets: The World Watches Two Cities Fight Over a Piece of Leather Like It’s 1492 From the rooftop cafés of Istanbul to the fluorescent-lit call centers of Manila, humanity took a synchronized coffee break Wednesday night to tune in to a ceremonial duel between San Diego and New York. On the surface, it…
BREAKING: The trailer for “Housemaid” has landed, and—mirabile dictu—it’s already trending harder than a crypto exchange in free-fall. From Manila dorm rooms to Manhattan co-working pods, viewers are pressing replay like their emotional wellbeing depends on it. Why? Because nothing unites the planet quite like watching someone else scrub a stranger’s bidet while silently plotting…
ATHLETICS VS RED SOX: A GLOBAL POWER STRUGGLE PLAYED OUT ON A PATCH OF GRASS IN MASSACHUSETTS By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the North Atlantic Boston, USA – Somewhere between the artisanal clam chowder stands and the inflatable Wally the Green Monster dolls, the Athletics and the Red Sox squared off…
Lance Twiggs, a name that sounds like a rejected Bond villain’s alias, has quietly become the planet’s most efficient human weather system. While the rest of us were doom-scrolling through viral dance videos and arguing over whether a dress was blue or gold, Twiggs—a 34-year-old freelance supply-chain choreographer from Des Moines—has been orchestrating cargo routes…
Guardians vs Tigers: A Global Metaphor in Cleats By Dave’s Locker’s Resident Foreign Correspondent-at-Large The moment the Cleveland Guardians and the Detroit Tigers took the field last night in Comerica Park, the world did not stop spinning, oil markets did not tremble, and no heads of state called emergency sessions—yet, in the grand tradition of…
THE LONGSHIP’S BENCH: How the Minnesota Vikings Depth Chart Explains the Fate of Nations By our correspondent in the frozen press box, where coffee tastes of regret and recycled hope. MINNEAPOLIS—Somewhere between the ninth circle of US cable sports and the first circle of Scandinavian despair, the Minnesota Vikings have released their 2024 depth chart….
Dancing on the Precipice: How a Sparkly Ballroom Show Became a Geopolitical Barometer By the time the glitter settles on the latest season of “Dancing with the Stars,” more international treaties have been negotiated on that parquet than in most Geneva conference rooms. From the Kremlin-green room where Russian influencers rehearse cha-chas between sanctions, to…
The Copa Libertadores, South America’s annual festival of exquisite skill and occasional stadium arson, has once again staggered onto the global stage like a sleep-deprived samba dancer—equal parts rhythm and menace. From the glass-walled boardrooms of UEFA to the fluorescent glare of a Lagos sports bar, the tournament flickers across television feeds as proof that…
UFC 322: When the World’s Favorite Blood-Sport Becomes a Geopolitical Rorschach Test By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Las Vegas, Nevada — Somewhere between the Strip’s holographic Elvis impersonators and the slot machines that now accept crypto, the T-Mobile Arena hosted UFC 322 last Saturday night. To the untrained eye it was merely two dozen human pit-bulls…
Redmond’s Empire: How a Seattle-Area Software Firm Accidentally Became the Operating System for Planet Earth If you squint at the globe just right, you can almost see the Microsoft logo pulsing from every major city like a low-battery indicator on humanity itself. From Lagos to Lahore, from São Paulo to Stockholm, the same ribbon-windowed OS…
