Nintendo Direct: The Planet Holds Its Breath While a Japanese Toymaker Reboots Our Collective Delusion By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk Kyoto, 6 a.m. local time: salarymen stumble off night trains clutching convenience-store coffee, commuters queue for bullet-train platforms, and a small island nation quietly steers the attention span of eight billion people. Elsewhere, the…
From Lagos to Lisbon, Chance the Rapper has become the polite global ambassador of American angst—an improbable export who somehow convinced the planet that existential dread pairs nicely with gospel choirs and a knit cap. While other U.S. artists hawk gilded despair, Chance peddles it in pastel packaging, a marketing coup that makes even the…
The Curious Case of Harold Fannin Jr., or How a Buckeye Tight End Became the Planet’s Newest Geopolitical Football By the time Harold Fannin Jr. caught his third touchdown against Kent State last September, satellites from three continents had already locked onto the 6-foot-4, 242-pound sophomore. Not because the NSA suddenly cares about MACtion, mind…
Rio de Janeiro—Early evening, and the Atlantic is doing that postcard trick where the sun melts into the sea like cheap margarine. Somewhere behind me, a vendor hawks caipirinhas to German influencers who will later post “good-vibes-only” captions while their home government debates whether sending Leopard tanks to Ukraine is still gauche. Brazil, ever the…
Larry Ellison and the Global Art of Owning Absolutely Everything By Dave’s Locker’s Senior Cynic-at-Large Somewhere between the ninth espresso and the tenth zero in his net-worth spreadsheet, Larry Ellison crossed the invisible line that separates “billionaire” from “minor deity.” The rest of the planet—those of us still fumbling for small change in the sofa—watched…
Cristiano Ronaldo, or “CR7” as the marketing necromancers insist on chanting, has transcended the humble status of “footballer” and now exists somewhere between a sovereign wealth fund and a planetary brand. From the gleaming duty-free corridors of Dubai to the fluorescent aisles of a Paraguayan supermarket where his face leers from boxes of sugar-coated cereal,…
Serbia vs England: A Balkan-Westminster Cage Match for the Age of Digital Panic By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, Belgrade–Heathrow Corridor Let us dispense with the polite fiction that a football match is merely twenty-two millionaires chasing bladder control issues across manicured grass. When Serbia and England collide—whether on a pitch in Gelsenkirchen or…
Trackhouse: The Racing Team That Took American Stock Cars on a World Tour and Won’t Apologize for It By “Globetrotting” Gregor Voss, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between a Miami nightclub and a Seoul karaoke bar, Trackhouse Racing decided that the best way to make NASCAR relevant again was to treat it like an indie…
Armenia vs. Ireland: The Friendly That Wasn’t—A Global Post-Mortem on a Football Match Nobody Wanted to Win DUBLIN—On a damp Tuesday evening in the Aviva Stadium, the Republic of Ireland and Armenia played out a 1-1 draw so gloriously mediocre that UEFA briefly considered awarding both teams negative points. The match was billed as a…
Kathmandu – It takes a special kind of optimism to balance a national budget when your country is wedged between two nuclear frenemies, your rivers are swelling with glacial tears, and your most reliable export is the occasional viral Sherpa meme. Enter Bishnu Prasad Paudel, Nepal’s freshly re-appointed Finance Minister, a man whose smile manages…
INEOS: How a Quiet Chemical Empire Became the World’s Loudest Sponsor of Everything ZURICH — Somewhere between the Rhine and the Clyde, INEOS has managed to turn industrial solvents into soft-power superglue. The conglomerate—founded in 1998 by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, a man who reportedly keeps a Gulfstream G650 for weekdays and another for weekends—now sponsors…
Mel Owens, the Former Linebacker Turned Global Metaphor, Tackles a World That Keeps Moving the Goalposts By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the hash marks of history and the hash-tags of Twitter, Mel Owens became more than a retired NFL linebacker with 73.5 career sacks and a law degree he actually uses. He has…
