Henry Cavill: The Last British Export Standing Between Us and Total Cultural Collapse By the time you finish this sentence, another streaming service will have announced its own gritty reboot of something Henry Cavill once touched. The man has become less an actor and more a geopolitical constant, like the price of crude oil or…
Nia Jax and the Collapse of Distance: How a Polynesian Samoan Superstar Became a Global Rorschach Test By the time Nia Jax (born Savelina Fanene in Sydney, raised in Honolulu, billed from “The Irresistible Force”) power-bombed another petite opponent through a commentary table last week, the clip had already ping-ponged across seventeen time zones. A…
Liberty vs Mercury: A Global Cage Match Where the Referee Is Also Poisonous Dave’s Locker International Desk – 15 June 2024 If you squint at the planet from 35,000 feet, the current liberty-versus-mercury debate looks less like a principled standoff and more like a bar fight where everyone’s already been slipped a mickey. On one…
Reds Game: The Planet’s Newest Blood-Sport, Now Available in HD Somewhere between the 38th meridian and your mother’s Wi-Fi router, a baseball club wearing the color of unpaid invoices has become the global economy’s most reliable Rorschach test. The Cincinnati Reds—yes, those Reds, the ones whose payroll looks like a rounding error on a Bundesliga…
CLEVELAND—Somewhere between the rust-spotted skyline and the eternal optimism that Lake Erie refuses to drown, the Cleveland Guardians have quietly become the most geopolitically interesting nine innings on earth. To the average European, the name conjures images of stone-faced gargoyles and Brexit negotiations; to a Tokyo commuter it sounds like a new cyber-security protocol; to…
When the lights went up at the Cannes premiere of Moulin Rouge! in 2001, John Leguizamo—painted green, four-foot-tall, and dying of tuberculosis—was not the obvious candidate to become a walking Rorschach test for the planet’s shifting power dynamics. Yet, two decades later, the Colombian-American polymath has quietly become one of the most efficient export mechanisms…
Kevin Zavala and the Quiet Collapse of the Global Middle Class By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk (still waiting for our expense-account croissants to clear customs) Dateline: Everywhere and Nowhere—If you haven’t heard of Kevin Zavala yet, congratulations. Your algorithm has mercifully spared you another microscopic shard of the human mosaic now ricocheting around the planet’s…
Perth—population 2.2 million, give or take a few FIFO* miners who’ve lost track of what day it is—sits alone on the planet’s loneliest edge: closer to Jakarta than to Sydney, closer to the Antarctic research station’s lonely beer fridge than to Canberra’s warmer political ambitions. To the rest of the world, Western Australia’s capital is…
The World’s Longest IOU: A Global Tour of Government Borrowing, or How to Run Up a Tab in Every Time Zone By Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk If the planet ever files for collective bankruptcy, the hearing will be held in five languages, chaired by a Swiss accountant, and catered—on credit—by the same governments that…
Black Rabbit, Jason Bateman, and the Worldwide Art of Selling Nothing Very Loudly By Diego M. Salgado, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the Kremlin’s latest cryptic press release and TikTok’s newest dance craze performed on a melting glacier, Netflix dropped the trailer for “Black Rabbit.” The limited series stars Jason Bateman as a middle-aged…
DAVID LETTERMAN: AMERICA’S LATE-NIGHT EXPORT THAT TAUGHT THE WORLD HOW TO YAWN IN SARCASM By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Pacific The first time a bar in Reykjavík stayed open past 2 a.m. to simulcast “Late Night,” the locals thought Letterman’s gap-toothed grin was a US dental-insurance commercial. By the second…
Steven Merryday and the Planet-Sized Implications of One Stubborn Judge in Tampa By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, Nursing a Flat White and Existential Dread TAMPA, FLORIDA—From the air-conditioned gloom of a courthouse that smells faintly of toner and ambition, Senior U.S. District Judge Steven Douglas Merryday has, once again, reminded the world that…
