A 6’6″ Floridian with a fastball that could puncture the ozone layer lands in Pittsburgh and the planet tilts—imperceptibly, of course, yet just enough for the international baseball-industrial complex to recalibrate. Paul Skenes, the freshly drafted LSU ace whose surname sounds like a Scandinavian crime series, is the latest proof that the United States still…
Thursday Night Football: The Gladiator Hour When America Clocks Out and the Planet Clocks In From the glass towers of Singapore’s trading desks to the damp bunkers of London’s insomniac financiers, a curious ritual unfolds every autumn Thursday at 1:20 a.m. local time. The Dow has long since snored its closing bell, the Nikkei is…
Yankees Games: A Global Ritual in the Cathedral of Late Capitalism By Our Man in the Bleachers (and Occasionally in the Bar) Somewhere between the first ceremonial pitch and the seventh-inning stretch, the Bronx becomes the temporary capital of the world. Diplomats in bespoke bomber jackets forget trade-war talking points; hedge-fund emirs in Italian loafers…
Elizabeth McGovern: The Accidental Geopolitical Barometer No One Ordered By Our Disillusioned Foreign Correspondent, Somewhere Between Dubrovnik and Despair It takes a special kind of historical irony that an actress best known for playing a kind-hearted countess in a fictional English manor is now the most reliable metric we have for measuring the West’s moral…
The Wheel Keeps Spinning—Whether You’re Watching or Not By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Jakarta and Johannesburg The studio lights in Culver City, California, still blind the next contestant who can’t pronounce “quesadilla,” but the real wheel of fortune hasn’t stopped on any soundstage since 1975. It keeps rolling, gathering passport stamps, sanctions, and the occasional…
Canelo vs Crawford Time: When the World Sets Its Alarms for Two Men Punching Each Other in Vegas By Santiago “Sam” Delacroix, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker If you’ve ever wondered what global unity looks like, forget the UN General Assembly—set your phone to 4 a.m. in Lagos, 11 a.m. in Moscow, and 5 p.m. in…
David Muir, the immaculate-haired baritone who materializes nightly on American screens like a hologram from a better-behaved timeline, has become an unlikely export. While U.S. viewers treat his World News Tonight as a civic sacrament—somewhere between prayer and pharmaceutical ad—audiences abroad increasingly see Muir as the last functioning appliance in a house whose wiring is…
Jasmine Crockett and the Curious Art of Making America Watch Congress Again By “Marcello Sang-froid,” Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk DALLAS—Somewhere between the first NATO summit that ran out of coffee and the last G-7 dinner where everyone pretended to like the host’s risotto, a freshman Democrat from Texas has figured out how to…
PARIS — Somewhere on the Left Bank, an aging diplomat stubbed out a Gauloise and muttered, “They’re putting the guy who wrote the Twitter thread into Hoover’s old chair.” He wasn’t wrong. The Senate’s 51–49 confirmation of Kash Patel as the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is less a changing of the…
Opendoor, the American digital flipper that will buy your house faster than you can say “negative equity,” has been quietly exporting its algorithmic appetite for other people’s drywall across the planet. What started in Phoenix—because, of course, the city most famous for mirages would spawn a real-estate unicorn—now stalks listings from Toronto to Tel Aviv….
The Red Sox–Athletics tilt has always been a quaint sideshow of American provincialism—two teams named after socks and accountants, respectively, playing a children’s pastime while the planet burns. Yet on Wednesday night in Oakland, as the smoke from Canada’s record-breaking wildfires drifted south like an apologetic surrender note, the game acquired the faint whiff of…
The Quiet Bureaucrat with the Planet in His Briefcase By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk When the Director of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation takes the podium these days, the live feed is carried on every continent except Antarctica—and even the penguins have requested the transcript. That is…
