Klint Kubiak: The Accidental Geopolitical Football By the time the rest of the planet learned how to pronounce “Kubiak” (it’s “KYOO-bee-ak,” not the sneeze-like “kuh-BYE-ack”), the 37-year-old offensive coordinator had already become a Rorschach test for whatever ailment your hemisphere happens to nurse. In Brussels he is evidence that the American meritocracy is terminal; in…
Kate Flannery, the red-haired hurricane disguised as an actor, has spent decades perfecting the art of looking like she’s about to spill state secrets in a dive bar at 2 a.m. From the perspective of anyone who’s ever watched global politics curdle in real time, Flannery’s career is less a résumé and more a case…
Ghost of Yōtei Reviews: When a Japanese Game’s Spectral Bugs Become a Global Morality Play By the time the sun rose over Helsinki, the Finnish speed-running collective “Perkele64” had already clipped through three walls and discovered that the titular ghost in Ghost of Yōtei was, in fact, an unpaid intern’s placeholder texture accidentally left in…
Law & Order: Global Franchise of Human Folly By our jaded foreign correspondent who has watched enough police procedurals to qualify for Interpol The original “Law & Order” cast—those Manhattan prosecutors who never misplaced a file and detectives who could find a moral in a donut—has become a sort of roving diplomatic corps for American…
The Diplomatic Incident You Can Wear: NFL Rivalry Jerseys as Soft-Power Sabotage By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over the Atlantic LONDON—Somewhere between the duty-free Toblerone and the tannoy announcing yet another delay to the 15:35 to Frankfurt, a man in a Dallas Cowboys jersey strode past me at Heathrow Terminal 3. Nothing…
The Cardinals Depth Chart as Geopolitical Barometer: How a St. Louis Spreadsheet Explains the Collapse of the Liberal Order By the time the latest Cardinals depth chart pinged across Bloomberg terminals in Singapore, oil futures in Rotterdam had already ticked up eleven cents. Coincidence? Perhaps. But in the grand, absurdist theatre of 2024, where a…
When a child vanishes in Florida and the cell-phone klaxon goes off, half the planet now hears the echo. The local “Amber Alert” that once fluttered on a lonely highway billboard has metastasized into a planetary phenomenon: push notifications ping in São Paulo coffee shops, LED tickers scroll in Tokyo train stations, and a bored…
Nolan McLean and the Curious Case of the Accidental Global Micro-Celebrity By Quentin “Q” Blackthorne, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker It began, as most twenty-first-century sagas do, with a shaky vertical video shot in a fluorescent-lit dorm hallway somewhere in the American Midwest. Within forty-eight hours, Nolan McLean—previously known only to his RA and the local…
The World Watches Marion County, Population 65,920, Like It’s the Last Honest Place on Earth By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, filing from somewhere with better coffee Marion County—nestled in that geopolitical afterthought known as “central Iowa”—has spent the last 170 years perfecting the art of looking irrelevant. Its biggest city is Pella, famous for windmills that…
The Mets and Cubs, two franchises whose combined existential angst could power a small European capital, met again last night in Queens for the kind of mid-season tilt that looks trivial on paper yet reverberates through global supply chains, foreign-exchange desks, and the fragile psyche of anyone who has ever worn a foam finger ironically….
The Curious Case of Blaine Milam: When Small-Town Texas Becomes the World’s Morality Play In the grand theater of global jurisprudence, where the Hague deliberates war crimes and Interpol chases cryptocurrency fraudsters across continents, the name Blaine Milam might sound like a typo. Yet here we are, watching a 31-year-old from the piney woods of…
Nobody Wants This Season 2: A Global Post-Mortem on the Show the Planet United in Rejecting By the time the closing credits rolled on the finale of Nobody Wants This, diplomats in five languages had already issued carefully worded statements distancing their governments from any knowledge of its existence. From Seoul’s fluorescent boardrooms to the…
