Bryce Harper: The $330 Million Poster Child for a Planet That Would Rather Watch Baseball Than Fix Itself By the time the news reached a rain-soaked café in Sarajevo, Bryce Harper had already been traded—by the algorithm, naturally. ESPN International’s push alert pinged every phone from Lagos to Lahore, informing humanity that a man who…
From the Fens to the Front Pages: Why a Red Sox Score Echoes Louder Than Bombs By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the North Atlantic BOSTON—While the rest of the planet debated grain-export corridors, submarine pipelines, and which autocrat has the shiniest table, a modest digit flickered across scoreboards from Lansdowne Street…
Joy Behar and the Global Echo Chamber: Why One Brooklyn-Born Comic Still Terrifies Dictators In the marble-lined lounges of Davos, where billionaires sip biodynamic water and pretend to read Piketty, the name that reliably curdles the oat-milk isn’t Putin, Xi, or even Elon in a particularly tweet-happy mood. It’s Joy Behar—yes, that Joy Behar—whose 81-year-old…
Friday night in Paris, and the EuroMillions draw is once again performing its miracle: for a few giddy minutes, the entire continent forgets about inflation, war, and the fact that most of us still can’t afford rent. Instead, 200 million people from Lisbon to Ljubljana lean toward their televisions, clutching tickets that are statistically more…
From the vantage of a rainy rooftop bar in Brussels—where the EU’s finest bureaucrats are currently arguing about the curvature of bananas—one might not expect the tremors of a baseball scandal in Houston to register on the Rich Bullshit Detector™. Yet Zach Cole, a name that sounds like a failed boy-band member turned tax attorney,…
Zach Cole, a name that surfaces in the digital muck with the same frequency as a pop-up ad for dubious crypto schemes, has quietly become a case study in how a single human can now ricochet across continents faster than most passports collect stamps. To the average reader in Lagos, Berlin, or Manila, Cole might…
Silence of the Lambs-Wool Cardigans: Hunting Wives Season 2 Arrives to Terrify the Global Subconscious Dripping onto screens like a Chardonnay spill on cream carpet, “Hunting Wives” Season 2 has become the international sleeper hit nobody’s embassy admits to binge-watching. Across four continents, diplomats’ spouses, arms-dealers’ girlfriends, and NGO directors alike are scheduling “late conference…
The Diamondbacks vs. Twins: A Global Tragedy in Nine Innings (or, How to Export Existential Dread in a Box Score) Let’s begin with the obvious: anyone who tells you a mid-season interleague tilt between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Minnesota Twins is “just baseball” clearly hasn’t tried to explain to a Jakarta ride-share driver why…
Falcons, Ferraris, and Futures Contracts: Saudi Arabia’s Grand Tour of the 21st Century By Dave’s Locker International Desk Riyadh—If you stand still long enough on the Kingdom’s freshly painted corniche, the tarmac itself will sprout a skyscraper. One moment you’re sipping cardamom coffee, the next you’re staring at a mirrored spire shaped—one can only assume—like…
The Cardinals versus Brewers rivalry is, of course, about the St. Louis Cardinals and the Milwaukee Brewers—two Midwestern baseball outfits whose annual skirmishes are dutifully filed by American networks under “regional passion play.” Yet step back half a planet and the same fixture looks less like pastoral Americana and more like geopolitical performance art. In…
Washington D.C. — Somewhere in the global hive-mind that passes for geopolitics these days, the ligaments of a 24-year-old quarterback have been elevated to the level of a minor diplomatic crisis. Jayden Daniels, the rookie whose jersey sales alone could prop up a small island economy, left FedExField on Monday night with a rib cartilage…
Met Office Issues Strong-Winds Warning; Rest of Planet Politely Stifles a Yawn By Our Man in the Jet Stream LONDON—On Tuesday the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office, the granddaddy of national weather services and still clinging to imperial measurements like a pensioner clutching a ration book, hoisted its yellow “be aware” flag for gusts that may—brace…
