The Newsreader: Global Mouthpiece, Local Punching Bag, Universal Mirror If you listen closely at 3 a.m. in any capital city, you can almost hear the same voice repeating itself in 24 languages: “Good evening, wherever the hell you are.” The newsreader—once a stately uncle in horn-rimmed spectacles, now a caffeinated hologram with perfect hair—has become…
Adele at the Super Bowl: Britain’s Finest Export Sings the Empire Blues to 120 Million Glazed Eyes By the time the first Dorito hit the carpet in Lagos and the last lukewarm samosa was microwaved in Mumbai, Adele Adkins—our collective national sob-story—had already converted the Super Bowl into the world’s most expensive open-mic therapy session….
STRAKA: A CURIOUS CZECH WORD THAT FLEW THE COOP AND NEVER LOOKED BACK By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Prague, 3:17 a.m.—The night tram rattles past the National Theatre, and somewhere between the clatter of iron wheels and the last-call slur of tourists, a lone pigeon strafes an outdoor café. A Czech grandmother hisses “Straka!” and…
Houston, We Have a Banana: How a Circus in Cleats Became Soft-Power in a Collapsing World By Dave’s Locker International Desk The Savannah Bananas, baseball’s answer to a sugar-rush fever dream, have landed in Houston for a three-night engagement at the Daikin Park carnival grounds—formerly known as Minute Maid Park before a multinational HVAC conglomerate…
In the grand, tragicomic opera of late-stage capitalism, where every scrap of human endeavor is monetized and repackaged as content, even a college football game between the Houston Cougars and the Oregon State Beavers can be dressed up as a geopolitical inflection point. So let us oblige, dear reader, and peer through the haze of…
Patrick Cantlay, the taciturn Californian who currently occupies that curious intersection of athletic excellence and corporate ambivalence, has become our planet’s improbable barometer for late-stage capitalism’s slow-motion meltdown. While European pension funds hemorrhage over ESG golf tournaments and Chinese streaming services decide whether Cantlay’s glacial pace constitutes subversive performance art, the man himself keeps cashing…
The planet’s most reliable diplomatic channel these days isn’t Geneva, Vienna, or even that soulless Marriott in Riyadh with the 24-hour hummus bar. It’s a paddock in Kentucky where a 1,200-pound quadruped with the IQ of a damp sponge is currently deciding whether to sign a free-trade agreement by trotting clockwise or counterclockwise. Welcome to…
Mikey Lewis: The Miniature Messiah of Hull Who Accidentally Became a Global Emblem of Late-Stage Capitalism By the time the sun rose over the Mariana Trench, Mikey Lewis—Hull FC’s 22-year-old stand-off with the cheekbones of a Renaissance cherub and the acceleration of a Tokyo bullet train—had already been meme-ified on three continents. In Manila, jeepney…
ASUS ROG Ally X: The Handheld That Thinks It’s a Console, a PC, and a Cry for Help Bylines from Taipei, Redmond, Lagos, and the back row of economy class Somewhere over the Pacific, 39,000 feet above humanity’s collective Wi-Fi anxiety, the ASUS ROG Ally X just finished downloading the day-one patch for Palworld. The…
Weather Forecast: A Global Séance Where Everyone Pretends the Future Still Obeys Us By Lila Moreau, International Desk PARIS—At 05:47 CET, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) supercomputer in Reading, England, coughed up its daily oracle: scattered showers over the Ruhr, a Saharan dust plume aimed at Marseille, and the obligatory “unseasonable warmth”…
Seiya Suzuki’s Grand Global Experiment: How One Ballplayer Became a Test Tube for Late-Stage Capitalism It takes a special kind of optimism—or masochism—to sign a five-year deal with the Chicago Cubs in the middle of a pandemic, but Seiya Suzuki did exactly that in March 2022. While the rest of us stockpiled canned beans and…
Strasbourg FC: The Alsatian Canary in Football’s Global Coal Mine By Dave’s Locker European Correspondent (currently hiding from the Yellow Vests in a half-timbered bar) The world is busy rehearsing its next apocalypse—trade wars, AI uprisings, the return of fascism as a lifestyle brand—yet somewhere between the Rhine and the Vosges, a modest French club…
