Drew Petzing: The Quiet American Export Who Might Just Save Your Sunday (or Ruin It, Depending on Your Jersey) In the grand bazaar of globalized misery—where trade wars, crypto meltdowns, and cruise-ship viruses are passed around like stale canapés—one modest export from Minnesota is currently doing more to unite and divide humanity than most UN…
Paris Johnson Jr. and the Great American Lineman Glut: A Dispatch from the Empire’s Edge By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere over the Atlantic In the grand bazaar of global geopolitics—where European pensioners haggle over gas prices and Chinese diplomats trade rare-earth minerals like Pokémon cards—few things feel as comfortingly parochial as an…
Monica Lewinsky: The Intern Who Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Wrong, Right, and Ridiculously Human PARIS—Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, a 22-year-old in a navy Gap dress unwittingly turned an Oval Office hallway into the set of a telenovela directed by Franz Kafka. Twenty-five years later,…
John Schneider and the Tractor-Pulled Collapse of the American Myth By Our Man in the Departures Lounge You may know John Schneider as Bo Duke, that grinning good ol’ boy who vaulted a Confederate-flagged Dodge across rural Georgia while CBS laughed all the way to the bank. What you probably don’t know is that, forty-five…
Plastic Sovereigns: How a Sliver of Laminated Debt Conquered the Planet By Our Correspondent Who Still Owes Dinner in Three Currencies In the predawn gloom of a São Paulo favela and the fluorescent glare of a Stockholm co-working space, the same ritual unfolds: a thumb hovers, a chip meets a reader, and a tiny electronic…
**From the Deep Freeze of Texas: How the Dallas Stars Became an Accidental Metaphor for Global Chaos** DALLAS—In a world where democracy teeters like a drunk on roller skates and the planet itself seems to be filing for divorce from humanity, the Dallas Stars have unwittingly become something far greater than a hockey team skating…
**The Global Implications of a Century-Old Curse: How the Chicago Cubs Became an International Metaphor for Human Futility** In the grand theater of international affairs—where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and billionaires race to colonize Mars while Earth burns—there exists a peculiar American institution that somehow captures the essence of global human suffering…
Chase Infiniti: When the Pursuit of Luxury Becomes a Global Blood Sport By Diego V. Ramírez, International Correspondent, somewhere between a Geneva motor show and a Dubai valet queue Somewhere on the A6 outside Frankfurt, a man in rimless glasses is doing 260 km/h in a graphite-colored Q50 Red Sport 400. Behind him, an unmarked…
Michael Carter, a name that sounds reassuringly bland—like beige wallpaper or a mid-tier accountant—has in fact become the latest human Rorschach test for a planet that can’t decide if it’s bored or terrified. From Brussels boardrooms to Balinese beach bars, the mere mention of “Carter” now triggers a Pavlovian cascade of takes, memes, and hastily…
Yankees Game: The Empire Strikes Out—A Global Postcard from the Bleachers By Matteo “Lefty” Rossi, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Bronx, NY — The first pitch leaves Gerrit Cole’s hand at 97 mph, a white blur against an overcast sky the color of an old passport. Seventy-five miles east, European futures tick downward on the rumor…
There are, at last count, 195 sovereign countries on the planet, give or take a rogue micro-state that changes flags every time the rent on its castle comes due. In every last one of them, grown men and women are currently arguing—over tea in Ankara, over mezcal in Oaxaca, over lukewarm lager in Leeds—about whether…
If the world were a Bond film, Peter Thiel would be the soft-spoken gentleman sipping a protein shake in the villain’s lair, quietly buying the volcano and re-branding it as a sovereign cloud-hosting zone. From Silicon Valley to Singapore, from Washington to Wellington, the German-born, New Zealand-naturalised, American billionaire drifts like a well-funded ghost—always present,…
