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…
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM—AND A PARADE They used to say everything in Texas was bigger. Having spent the last decade filing dispatches from shrinking post-industrial towns, flooded Pacific atolls, and European capitals that now double as open-air museums to their own relevance, I can confirm: Houston is still enormous, still sweating, and still acting…
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,…
Nancy Mace and the Fine Art of Global Schadenfreude By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere east of the Potomac and west of the Yangtze There are moments—rare, shimmering, and vaguely nauseating—when a single U.S. congresswoman can make the entire planet lean in like it’s binge-watching a prestige drama. Enter Representative Nancy Mace, Republican…
The word “peacemaker” used to come with a halo and a résumé full of Nobel Prizes. These days it travels with a heavier carry-on: bodyguards, nondisclosure agreements, and a suspicion that the halo might be plated, not solid. From Geneva to Gaza, from the South China Sea to a Zoom breakout room in Brussels, the…
Tony Hawk, the man whose name now serves as a shorthand for everything from skateboards to NFTs to the existential dread of being recognized but not *really* recognized, has quietly become one of America’s most successful cultural exports since the invention of the blues and the accidental global domination of Starbucks. While diplomats haggle over…
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…
They say baseball is America’s pastime, but try telling that to the 1.4 billion Indians glued to their phones for IPL highlights, the Dutch retirees betting their pensions on Honkbal in Almere, or the Cuban government apparatchiks who still haven’t figured out how Randy Arozarena slipped out of their grasp and into global folklore. From…
The Ballad of Eric McAlister: One Man’s Midlife Crisis as a Mirror to a Planet on Fire By our jaded Paris correspondent, nursing a third espresso and counting the days until the next “once-in-a-generation” crisis Eric McAlister, 47, former logistics manager from Des Moines, has become the latest unwitting protagonist in the world’s longest-running tragicomedy:…
