Ben Rortvedt: The Accidental Geopolitical Constant in a World Falling Apart By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between a drone strike in the Red Sea and another celebrity tequila launch, Ben Rortvedt—backup catcher, career .190 hitter, owner of a name that sounds like a Scandinavian flat-pack shelving unit—keeps turning up on Major-League rosters like an unexplained…
Adelita Grijalva and the Global Art of Being Politically Unfireable By Our Correspondent in the Department of Schadenfreude Studies Tucson, Arizona—If you’ve never heard of Adelita Grijalva, congratulations: you have successfully avoided American local politics, a pastime that ranks somewhere below competitive taxidermy on the international glamour scale. Yet Ms. Grijalva’s recent re-election to the…
The Curious Case of Erika Kirk’s Parents: A Global Parable of Fame’s Collateral Damage By Dave’s Locker International Desk When the algorithmic winds first carried the name “Erika Kirk” across the planet, the world reacted the way it always does: by immediately Googling “Erika Kirk parents.” Within twenty-four hours, the query had trended in Lagos,…
The phrase “golden knights” once conjured images of armored crusaders galloping toward Jerusalem, pockets heavy with Byzantine coins they definitely intended to give back. Today the same words are brandished by everyone from a U.S. Army parachute team (who spell it “Golden Knights” and land in stadiums rather than on peasants) to gleaming cryptocurrency funds,…
Jeopardy Today: A Planet-Wide Pop Quiz Nobody Studied For By our jaded foreign correspondent, still jet-lagged since 2016 GENEVA—Somewhere between the coffee that tastes like burnt passport stamps and the 3 a.m. cable news ticker, it dawns on me: the entire world has become one never-ending Daily Double. Only the stakes are actual nukes, supply…
**The New York Mets: America’s Glorious Monument to Globalized Mediocrity** In the grand theater of international affairs—where nuclear powers play chicken in the Taiwan Strait and climate change politely knocks on our collective door—there exists a peculiar American export that somehow captures the essence of our shared human condition: the New York Mets, that magnificent…
**Anthony Volpe: The Shortstop Who Proves America Still Exports Dreams Instead of Democracy** *From our international desk, where we watch American exceptionalism strike out in real time* The global village received another shipment of American mythology this week, packaged in pinstripes and delivered via a 22-year-old from Manhattan who apparently decided that $3.7 million wasn’t…
The name “Odyssey Sims” sounds like either a very expensive video-game package or a low-budget Greek cruise line, but it actually belongs to an American point guard whose passport stamps tell a far more interesting story than most State Department cables. While Washington and Brussels trade chilly communiqués about “rules-based order,” Sims has been quietly…
Ace Bailey and the Curious Global Afterlife of a 1930s Hockey Casualty By “Scoop” Delacorte, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk The first thing you notice, leafing through yellowing copies of the Toronto Star at the Hockey Hall of Fame’s basement archive, is how politely Canada once reported its on-ice manslaughters. “Bailey Sustains Severe Head…
**Earth 2.0: Now With 50% More Existential Dread** In what can only be described as the universe’s most expensive “I told you so,” astronomers have confirmed the discovery of K2-18b—affectionately dubbed “alien earth” by scientists who clearly missed their calling in marketing. This distant exoplanet, floating 120 light-years away in the constellation Leo, apparently harbors…
Somewhere between the fluorescent glow of a Long Island Walgreens and the flickering LED of a Tokyo gaming café, the name “Matt Cardona” still surfaces—an improbable passport stamp on the battered itinerary of global pop culture. To the uninitiated, he’s merely a professional wrestler who once moonlighted as a zombie, a YouTuber who unboxed action…
High Potential, Season 2, Episode 2: A Global Power Play Dressed Up as Office Farce By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Pacific There’s a moment, roughly twelve minutes into the second episode of the second season of *High Potential*, when Morgan, the hyper-literate janitor-turned-consultant, tells an Interpol attaché that “crime, like…
