Márton Fucsovics, the tennis journeyman from the Hungarian plains, is living proof that the world’s most individual sport can still be a referendum on geopolitical karma. While Wimbledon’s strawberries wilt under Brexit paperwork and Wimbledon’s strawberries wilt under Brexit paperwork, Fucsovics has quietly become the last Eastern-European standing who still plays like communism collapsed last…
Fernando Tatís Jr.: The $340 Million Smile the World Needed—Until It Didn’t by Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk Santo Domingo, DR — There are only two reliable exports coming out of the Caribbean these days: rum strong enough to disinfect surgical instruments and baseball prodigies who make your 401(k) look like a swear jar. Fernando…
A Chivas Game, Three Continents, and the Gentle Art of Global Self-Deception By L. Castellanos, Senior Correspondent, Somewhere Between Guadalajara and the Existential Void GUADALAJARA—On a night when the cicadas sounded suspiciously like unpaid interns complaining about overtime, Club Deportivo Guadalajara—known to the world simply as “Chivas”—took the pitch for what newspapers will dutifully call…
Victoria Mboko’s World Tour: How One Canadian Teenager Is Quietly Redrawing the Map of Soft Power By Our Jaded Correspondent on the Periphery of Relevance PARIS—While most 18-year-olds are perfecting the art of ghosting recruiters and pretending to read Sartre, Victoria Mboko has been busy issuing geopolitical IOUs. The Canadian tennis prodigy—currently ranked somewhere between…
Tallahassee, Florida – In the grand casino of global culture, where nations gamble on oil futures, semiconductor supremacy, and the next TikTok dance, the release of a college-football schedule might appear as charmingly parochial as a parish bake sale. Yet when Florida State University—those garnet-and-gold merchants of controlled violence—dropped its 2024 slate last week, the…
Ohio State vs Washington: When a College Football Game Pretends to Matter to the World HOUSTON—In a cavernous stadium the size of a small principality, two American collegiate armies will collide Monday night while the rest of Earth politely pretends to watch. The “College Football Playoff National Championship” pits the Ohio State Buckeyes against the…
Houston, We Have a Problem—And It’s Wearing Scarlet Helmets Dispatches from the Margins of the American Coliseum By the time the University of Houston Cougars lined up against their latest over-matched non-conference sacrificial lamb, the global temperature had ticked up another 0.0003 °C, a container ship the size of lower Manhattan was wedged sideways in…
Zac Gallen, Fastball Diplomat of the Apocalypse By Dave’s Locker Foreign Service (Mental Health Optional) Somewhere in the Sonoran Desert, a 28-year-old Floridian with the hair of a 1980s tennis prodigy and the temperament of a man who’s read too much Camus is throwing a baseball hard enough to make radar guns question their life…
A Dispatch from the Commonwealth: “Virgina Football” and the End of Global Innocence By L. Valenti, International Correspondent at Large Dateline: Somewhere over the Atlantic, Wi-Fi sputtering like a third-tier referee’s whistle. It began, as all modern scandals do, with a typo. Somewhere between a hastily drafted press release and the algorithmic digestive tract of…
Kahleah Copper, Export-Grade Swagger: Why a 6’1″ Guard From North Philly Now Dictates Exchange Rates in Istanbul and Mood Swings in São Paulo By Dave’s Locker Global Bureau I. Passport Noir In the grand, slightly mildewed ledger of American cultural exports—sandwiched between KFC and drone diplomacy—women’s basketball occupies a quiet, subversive footnote. Enter Kahleah Copper,…
Kiké Hernández and the Global Theater of Utility: A Utilityman for an Age of Generalists by our correspondent in the cheap seats, somewhere between the left-field foul pole and existential dread Somewhere in the Fenway Park grandstands—where the beer is $15, the hot dogs are $8, and the existential dread is complimentary—Enrique “Kiké” Hernández just…
Sharks in the Time of Cholera: How a Hockey Team in California Became the World’s Most Relatable Failure By the time the San Jose Sharks skated into the SAP Center last week—fresh off yet another first-round playoff exit that felt like déjà vu in teal—the global temperature had already risen another 0.03 °C, a Russian…
