Jackie Chan Spills Across Borders Like Cheap Soy Sauce: A Global Love Affair with Controlled Chaos By Our Man in the Departures Lounge Somewhere over the Sea of Japan, half the passengers on JAL 005 are watching Rush Hour on seat-back screens, while the other half are scrolling TikTok clips of Jackie Chan dangling from…
Jessica Pegula: The Quiet Billionaire Who Turned Wimbledon into a Diplomatic Cocktail Party By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—If you squinted past the green-and-purple bunting at this year’s Roland-Garros, you could almost mistake Jessica Pegula for just another baseline grinder with a sponsorship patch and a dream. That, of course, is precisely the sort of…
Anthony Bourdain Was the Last Diplomat We Ever Sent Overseas—And We Didn’t Even Notice He Was Gone PARIS—Somewhere between a bowl of bun bo Hue in Saigon and a michelada in Tijuana, Anthony Bourdain convinced the planet that dinner could double as statecraft. While career ambassadors were busy stapling talking points to one another in…
Friday Night SmackDown: The World’s Loudest Diplomatic Cable By “Ringside” Rami al-Mansour, Senior Correspondent for Dave’s Locker, filing from a hotel bar in Riyadh where the Wi-Fi is faster than U.S. congressional ethics reform If you happened to tune into WWE SmackDown Live last Friday, you may have noticed something odder than Brock Lesnar’s new…
The Works: A Global Tour of Humanity’s Monuments to Itself There is a moment—usually around 3 a.m. in the departure lounge of a second-tier airport—when the seasoned traveler realizes that “the works” is not a single project, achievement, or apocalypse, but an endless buffet of human folly served on a planetary platter. From Dubai’s rotating…
Marvel, the corporate colossus that once sold ten-cent comics to kids who could still dream without pharmaceutical assistance, now stands as the planet’s most efficient exporter of spandex theology. From Lagos cineplexes to Siberian streaming queues, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become the lingua franca of a planet too exhausted to invent its own myths….
Green Man Festival: When the World’s Existential Dread Dresses Up in Face Paint and Wellies By Our Correspondent, still vaguely damp from last year Brecon Beacons, Wales – Somewhere between the sheep-scented mist and the biodegradable glitter, 25,000 humans have once again assembled to prove that collective anxiety can be marketed as a boutique experience….
PlayStation 5 Pro: A Console So Advanced It Can Render the Collapse of Civilization in 8K By the time the PS5 Pro rolls off its Shenzhen assembly line next month, four continents are already on fire—some literally, some only on social media. Sony’s marketing department, ever the optimists, calls the machine “the future of play.”…
Bill Burr, the Red-Faced Oracle of Our Global Meltdown By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—Somewhere between the 19th nervous breakdown of the Eurozone and the 47th Marvel spin-off trailer, Bill Burr has emerged as the unlikeliest cartographer of universal despair. The balding Bostonian—equal parts pit bull and philosophy major who got kicked out for heckling…
The Rookie: A Global Affair in Four Acts By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent (currently hiding from expense-auditors in an airport lounge) Act I – The Universal Script Every nation has its own dialect, but the word “rookie” translates the same everywhere: liability with potential. From the trembling Tokyo recruit bowing 15° too low, to the…
Zeynep Sönmez Is Not Your Feel-Good Sports Story—She’s the Canary in Tennis’s Coal Mine By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—If you blinked during the third round of Roland-Garros you might have missed her: a 20-year-old Turk with a backhand like a scimitar and a surname that looks like autocorrect’s revenge. Zeynep Sönmez dispatched the world…
Bhutan: The Last Himalayan Holdout in a World That Forgot to Breathe KATHMANDU—From the roof of the Druk Hotel in Thimphu you can see two things that no longer exist almost anywhere else: silence and stars. While the rest of the planet was busy turning itself into a 24-hour pop-up ad, Bhutan quietly kept its…
