The AL Wild Card standings, that most American of scoreboards, are currently being scrutinized by baseball fans from Tokyo to Tegucigalpa with the intensity usually reserved for cryptocurrency charts or North Korean missile trajectories. Because let’s face it—when your own local economy is circling the drain like a poorly thrown slider, watching millionaires chase a…
The Postcode Lottery Isn’t Just a Game—It’s the World’s Quietest Form of Aristocracy by Dave’s Locker International Desk Picture this: you’re born in 90210, postcode of swimming pools and televised existential dread. Your cousin, meanwhile, enters the world in 48201—Detroit—where the only pools are potholes deep enough to drown a midsize sedan. Same passport, same…
Aric Almirola: The Cuban-American Whose 200-mph Commute Became a Global Parable By the time Aric Almirola eased his No. 10 Stewart-Haas Ford into retirement at the end of last season, he had logged exactly 460 starts in NASCAR’s top flight—roughly the distance from Havana to Pyongyang if you could drive on water and had a…
Georgia vs. Tennessee: A Front-Row Seat to the Collapsing American Experiment By the time you read this, the American South—land of honey-baked pride and insulin-resistant hospitality—will have served up another football game so grandiose that foreign diplomats briefly mistake it for a military parade. Georgia versus Tennessee, a rivalry whose history is measured not in…
Charlie Sheen Turns 59: A Global Reckoning on the Persistence of Bad Boys and Their Bank Accounts Dave’s Locker International Desk – June 2024 PARIS — Somewhere high above the Atlantic, the private-jet Wi-Fi flickered just long enough for the cabin crew of a Gulfstream G650 to miss the push-alert: “Charlie Sheen turns 59.” By…
John Daly’s Global Hangover: How a Chain-Smoking Arkansan Became the Patron Saint of Every Nation That Hates Rules PARIS—At 7:12 a.m., while the rest of France was nursing a civilizational migraine over pension reform, John Daly was already on the breakfast patio of Le Bristol, Diet Coke in one hand, Marlboro in the other, telling…
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and the Mirage of Multilateral Hope By Our Man in Geneva, nursing a lukewarm espresso and an even colder view of humanity Somewhere between the drone of the UN Human Rights Council’s afternoon session and the faint smell of over-boiled cafeteria broccoli, I found myself streaming the latest episode of…
Movies Streaming This Weekend: A Global Guide to Sitting Very, Very Still By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently self-isolating in a hotel whose minibar is more expensive than the GDP of Tuvalu It is Friday afternoon somewhere—probably in Kiribati, the first nation to greet the weekend—and billions of humans are preparing for the same heroic act:…
Randy Orton and the Global Theater of the RKO: How One Man’s Elbow Drop Became a Universal Language By Our Correspondent, still nursing whiplash from a decade spent watching the world body-slam itself GENEVA—While diplomats in this city exhaust themselves rearranging commas in sanctions documents, a 43-year-old from Knoxville, Tennessee, has quietly achieved what the…
Noah Fifita and the Great Pacific Quarterback Pipeline: How a 5’10 Hawaiian Kid Became a Geopolitical Sleeper Agent By the time Noah Fifita dropped a 40-yard dime on national television last Saturday, three continents were already arguing about him on Reddit. That’s the new math of college football: one Samoan-Hawaiian kid from Anaheim who still…
**When Gotham Met the Wave: A Tale of Two Cities and One Global Game** The world watched with bated breath last weekend as Gotham FC faced San Diego Wave in what international observers are calling “the match that proved Americans finally discovered football wasn’t just something you throw.” From Tokyo taprooms to Lagos viewing parties,…
**The Accidental Oracle of Our Absurd Age: How an Alabama Basketball Coach Became a Global Rorschach Test** In the grand theater of human folly, where we collectively pretend that sports matter more than war crimes and that a basketball coach’s job prospects somehow constitute international news, one must pause to marvel at the peculiar phenomenon…
