Jim Nantz: The Last Gentleman Broadcasting to a Planet on Fire By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between the azaleas of Augusta and the smoldering remains of what used to be the rules-based international order, Jim Nantz sits in a CBS compound that resembles a minor principality, calmly introducing the Masters as though Vladimir Putin…
Coldwater ITV: The Streaming Platform That Made the Arctic Circle Trending By the time the first teaser trailer for Coldwater ITV dropped, half the planet was already doom-scrolling through a heatwave and the other half was busy stockpiling tinned beans for the next geopolitical plot twist. Into this planetary fever dream marched a modestly funded…
Royal Flush: How Prince Andrew Became the World’s Most Expensive Cautionary Tale By Our Special Correspondent in the Cheap Seats LONDON—When Buckingham Palace announced last month that HRH The Duke of York had been “relieved of his remaining patronages,” the collective sigh of relief from British embassies from Brasília to Bangkok was almost strong enough…
West Nile Virus: A Global Mosquito’s Grand Tour By the time you finish this sentence, roughly 47 new humans will have been bitten by mosquitoes. One or two of them—depending on the neighborhood and the state of local sanitation budgets—might be welcoming West Nile virus (WNV) into their bloodstream. The virus, discovered in Uganda’s West…
The Mask That Went Global: How a 5’6″ Luchador from Tijuana Became the World’s Smallest Soft-Power Superpower By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, humanity decided its cultural ambassadors would no longer be violinists or Nobel laureates but a man in a sequined balaclava…
From Lagos to London, Mbilli Has the Whole World Counting—And Wondering Why We Still Bother By: L. Martínez, Senior Cynic-at-Large, Dave’s Locker In the beginning—according to whichever tired mythology you still half-believe—humans invented numbers to keep track of yams, goats, and the neighbors they were plotting to murder. Fast-forward a few millennia and the humble…
Marc Anthony, the salsa colossus who once crooned “Vivir Mi Vida” to stadiums full of people who’d paid triple-digit ticket prices for the privilege of crying in public, has become an unlikely barometer for the planet’s emotional weather. From Dubai’s brand-new climate-controlled beach clubs to the favela sound systems of Rio, that brassy trumpet intro…
DeMarcus Cousins: The 6’11” Metaphor for a Planet That Can’t Keep Its Best Pieces Together By our man in the cheap seats, Dave’s Locker Global Bureau PARIS—On a rainy Tuesday evening, in a bar just off Rue de Paradis, a Frenchman, a Senegalese street-vendor, and an Australian backpacker are watching grainy YouTube clips of DeMarcus…
Samford vs Baylor: A Microscopic Gladiator Match in the Coliseum of American Overreach By L. Marchetti, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk Somewhere on the rolling, chemically-enhanced grass of Waco, Texas—an otherwise forgettable dot on the map notable mainly for its enthusiastic relationship with firearms and Dr Pepper—Samford University will attempt to mug Baylor University…
RANGERS SCORE: WHEN A GLASGOW FOOTBALL RESULT BECOMES A GEOPOLITICAL BAROMETER By the time the final whistle confirmed Rangers’ 3-1 victory over Benfica at Ibrox, the score had already ricocheted through global markets, diplomatic back-channels and at least one hastily convened crisis meeting in an air-conditioned room in Doha. From Wall Street to Warsaw, traders,…
PARIS—Across every time zone, from the frost-laced windows of Helsinki to the sweat-slicked balconies of Bangkok, the same five green and gray squares lit up at the stroke of midnight. The word was “MANGO.” Not “peace,” not “bread,” not even “taxes”—just an innocuous tropical fruit that now stands as today’s Wordle answer, and therefore, by…
Everton vs Aston Villa: A Timeline of Two Cities, Three Continents, and One Very British Neurosis ≈600 words It began, as so many of the modern world’s ills do, with a telegram. On 22 September 1888, a flustered clerk in the Liverpool Post Office tapped out the score—Everton 2–2 Aston Villa—to a bemused colonial administrator…
