**The Genetic Time Bomb That Doesn’t Need a Passport** *How Huntington’s disease quietly reminds the world that biology is the ultimate xenophobe* If you drew a map of Huntington’s disease prevalence and held it up to the light, you’d notice something grimly democratic: the blotches of color land on Caracas as comfortably as they do…
**The Global Yawn: How One Phillies Loss Became the World’s Most Insignificant Tragedy** While the planet burned through another Tuesday with its usual cocktail of geopolitical tantrums and environmental self-harm, Philadelphia’s baseball team managed to transform a simple athletic contest into a masterclass in collective disappointment. The Phillies’ 7-3 surrender to the Mets wasn’t merely…
WNBA Teams: America’s Quiet Exports of Hope, Hubris, and Hustle By “Rusty” Valdez, Senior Continental Drifter, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Beneath the fluorescent hum of a half-empty Las Vegas arena, the Aces are busy reminding the rest of the world that the United States still manufactures something besides grievance and microchips: jump-shooting women who can…
**The Great British Account Raid: When Tax Collectors Go Full International Spy Thriller** While the world obsesses over AI apocalypses and cryptocurrency meltdowns, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has quietly pioneered a delightfully retro approach to tax collection: the digital equivalent of kicking down your door and emptying your pockets. The HMRC’s newfound power to…
Tiafoe: The Accidental Diplomat in Tennis Whites By Dave’s Locker International Desk Paris, Rome, Melbourne, Shanghai—wherever a fluorescent ball is smacked across a rectangle of manicured lawn, the name “Tiafoe” now floats in the humid air like a rumor you can’t quite verify. Frances Tiafoe, 26, American, son of Sierra Leonean immigrants, is no longer…
**The Global Arithmetic of Hope: How MLB Magic Numbers Capture Humanity’s Desperate Need for Certainty** While the world burns—figuratively in the geopolitical sense and literally in places like California and the Mediterranean—roughly thirty million Americans have spent September obsessively checking magic numbers, those mathematical life rafts that determine when their favorite millionaires can safely pop…
The World According to Goodman A Planetary Dispatch on the Man Who (Almost) Became a Unit of Measurement When the newsroom telex rattled in with the subject line “John Goodman,” half the interns assumed it was another crypto-currency—some algorithmic stable-coin pegged to the price of a Big Lebowski Blu-ray. The other half, more cynically seasoned,…
Blockchain: The Digital Fidget Spinner the World Won’t Put Down By Hugo Marquez, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere in a fluorescent-lit room in Zug, Switzerland, a man in ergonomic shoes is sipping a single-origin espresso and congratulating himself for putting land-registry deeds on a tamper-proof ledger. Meanwhile, in Lagos, a bus driver is scanning a…
Tillie Amartey and the Great British Export Boom Nobody Ordered By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, Somewhere Over the North Sea LONDON—While the rest of the planet argues over whose submarine is louder and which hemisphere gets to keep the last polar bear, Britain has quietly pivoted to its most reliable post-imperial commodity: photogenic…
**Global Markets Rally on Hope, Caffeine, and Thin Air** *By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from Watching Tokyo Open at 3 a.m.* LONDON—Stock markets from Mumbai to Manhattan staged a synchronized pirouette higher today after investors collectively decided that the world is, in fact, not ending this week. The epiphany arrived somewhere between a slightly-less-awful-than-expected German…
Live Nation: The World’s Largest Ticket Monopoly, Now Playing in 40+ Countries and One Very Guilty Conscience By [REDACTED], Senior Correspondent, currently in the nosebleeds PARIS—On any given night, somewhere between the Seine and the Sumida River, a teenager is discovering that the “convenience fee” on her €85 Billie Eilish ticket costs more than her…
Joe Mixon and the Universal Art of Getting Away With It By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats of Human Morality From the air-conditioned press boxes of Dallas to the sweat-soaked living rooms of Lagos, the Joe Mixon story is less about a 5-foot-10 running back than about the planet’s favorite blood sport: watching someone…
