Robert Irwin, the 20-year-old scion of Australia’s most famous khaki-clad clan, has spent the last few weeks on a world tour that looks less like conservation and more like soft-power diplomacy with reptiles. From the red carpets of Los Angeles to the marble corridors of the European Parliament—where he recently handed a bearded dragon to…
Carrie Ann Inaba and the Global Choreography of Soft Power By Marisol “Lucky” Vega, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker It is 3:17 a.m. in Singapore, the hour when even the durian vendors are asleep, yet a WhatsApp group of Filipino choreographers is dissecting last night’s Dancing with the Stars finale with the solemnity of a G-7…
**The Ballad of Puebla-Pachuca: When Mexican Football Mirrors Our Global Existential Crisis** In the grand theater of human folly, where nations rise and fall like tide-tossed sandcastles, there exists a peculiar spectacle that somehow captures our collective predicament with startling accuracy: a Liga MX match between Puebla and Pachuca. Yes, dear reader, while the world’s…
Jordan Chiles, the American gymnast whose bronze medal in Paris is now entombed in bureaucratic amber, has become an international Rorschach test. From the cafés of Bucharest to the izakaya of Tokyo, people aren’t debating whether she stuck her landings; they’re arguing who gets to keep the moral high ground this week. The Court of…
Dow Jones Today: Because One Sickly Index is Apparently Enough to Give the Whole Planet Heartburn By our correspondent in the departure lounge of a half-empty world NEW YORK—The Dow Jones Industrial Average coughed, sneezed, and briefly flat-lined this morning, proving once again that 30 arbitrarily picked American companies can still give the other 7.9…
Five Time Zones East of Somewhere, abc.com Still Refuses to Die By “International” Correspondent, passport stamps blurred by bureaucracy There is a moment, usually around 3:17 a.m. local time in whichever godforsaken airport lounge you’ve washed up in, when the Wi-Fi handshake finally succeeds and the landing page of abc.com blinks awake like a drunk…
Kayla McBride and the Quiet American Art of Global Soft Power By the time Kayla McBride drilled her fourth three-pointer in a single EuroLeague quarterfinal—an act that sent Istanbul’s Ülker Sports Arena into a polite, socially-distanced frenzy—half the planet was already asleep, dreaming of everything except women’s basketball. Yet somewhere in Lagos a barista checked…
Monte Morris and the Quiet Art of Not Destroying Civilization: A Global Dispatch By the time you finish this sentence, three governments will have changed hands, two crypto exchanges will have imploded, and one influencer will have declared war on the concept of breakfast. Somewhere in the middle of that maelstrom stands Monte Morris, 6-foot-2,…
Michael Bublé: The Last Crooner Standing Between Earth and the Void By Dave’s International Desk, sipping flat prosecco in Terminal 3 Somewhere above the Sea of Japan, Air Canada flight 003 is running out of gin and—more critically—patience. The in-flight entertainment system has frozen on Michael Bublé’s Christmas special, looping an endless close-up of the…
Rio de Janeiro, Wednesday, 3:14 a.m. local time—while half the planet was doom-scrolling about another regional war, the other half was watching Fluminense and Lanús chase a silver-plated bauble across the Maracanã grass. The 2023 Copa Libertadores final was, on paper, nothing more than a South American football match; in practice it was the latest…
A Black-Sheep Passport: Satou Sabally and the Absurd Arithmetic of Statelessness By L. V. Mercier, roaming correspondent, currently somewhere between Frankfurt’s tax-free schnitzel and Istanbul’s overpriced baklava When the German Federal Ministry of the Interior announced last week that Satou Sabally—Berlin-born forward for the Dallas Wings and MVP-caliber irritant to WNBA defenses—had been granted a…
The Grand Hotel Status Quo ——————————————— Room service with a side of existential dread Across the planet, a new hospitality brand is quietly over-booking itself. There is no points program, no mint on the pillow, and the nightly rate is paid in trauma rather than Amex. Welcome to the asylum hotel: that curious halfway house…
