Abdul Carter and the Great Global Head-Fake By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large (currently hiding in a hotel minibar) If you squint hard enough from the right angle, Abdul Carter begins to look less like a man and more like a 21st-century Rorschach test—one that every hemisphere is currently flunking. In Lagos they say he’s a crypto…
Cameron Skattebo and the Curious Economics of American Muscle in a Fractured World By L. M. Valdez, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker SÃO PAULO—While COP negotiators in Dubai were still arguing over commas in the final climate text, 5’9″, 215-pound Cameron Skattebo was 7,400 miles away, lowering his shoulder into a UCLA linebacker as if the…
MSC Cruises: The Last Floating Micro-Empire Before the Icebergs Melt By Matteo “Ports of Callous” Rossi, Foreign Correspondent at Large Somewhere between the Strait of Gibraltar and the existential dread of a warming planet, the MSC World Europa slid past the Rock with 6,762 souls aboard, each clutching a welcome piña colada and the faint…
Maria Taylor: The Broadcast Gladiator Who’s Quietly Reshaping Global Sports Media While We’re All Arguing Online PARIS—Somewhere between the 17th arrondissement’s artisanal baguette queue and the Seine’s latest floating rave, Maria Taylor is doing what the rest of us only pretend to: working across continents without melting into a puddle of existential dread. The American…
Walt Disney: The Cheerful Colonist Who Convinced the Planet to Pay for Its Own Fairy Tale By the time the first Eurostar disgorged its cargo of sugar-buzzed children at Marne-la-Vallée in 1992, the French had already surrendered—though not to Germans this time, but to a man who’d been dead for twenty-six years. Walt Disney, the…
New York, 24 March – Somewhere in the executive stratosphere of the National Women’s Soccer League, marketing executives are high-fiving over a fixture that sounds less like a football match and more like a Batman spin-off: Gotham FC versus Bay FC. Tonight, under the bruised sky of Harrison, New Jersey, two expansion-era Frankensteins will lurch…
Boca Juniors 3–1 Central Córdoba: A Tiny Earthquake in Buenos Aires That Registers on Seismographs in Singapore By the time the final whistle blew at La Bombonera last night, some 49,000 pairs of vocal cords had been reduced to the consistency of shredded beef. Boca Juniors had dispatched modest Central Córdoba with the kind of…
Carlos Correa, the shortstop who has packed more plot twists into one career than a telenovela writer on a caffeine bender, is once again the poster child for baseball’s globalized absurdity. From the scorched-earth winter of 2021-22—when the San Francisco Giants’ physical exam detonated his 13-year, $350 million deal faster than a crypto exchange in…
Travis Kelce: The Tight End Who Tightened Global Pop Culture’s Moral Waistband by “The Diplomatic Cynic,” Dave’s Locker foreign desk In the grand tapestry of human folly, certain threads shine brighter than others, glittering like disco balls at the apocalypse. Enter Travis Kelce: Kansas City’s 6’5″ security blanket for quarterbacks and, as of 2023, an…
Nantucket—an island whose name sounds like a sneeze and whose property prices make Swiss bankers weep—has quietly become the world’s most exclusive lifeboat. While the rest of the planet trades memes about climate apocalypse, the global elite have been rehearsing for it on this 14-by-3.5-mile sandbar 30 miles off Cape Cod. Their rehearsal, naturally, involves…
Globalization’s Favorite Wide Receiver: Juju Smith-Schuster and the Absurd, Borderless Theater of NFL Stardom By Our Correspondent in Five Time Zones Simultaneously Somewhere between a TikTok dance in Pittsburgh and a quiet endorsement deal in Lagos, Juju Smith-Schuster became the world’s most accidentally successful soft-power export since K-pop. The man has never filed a trade…
Kansas City, USA – While the planet’s attention oscillates between a war in Eastern Europe, a coup-of-the-week in West Africa, and whatever apocalyptic weather event is currently rearranging coastline real estate, it turns out the most reliably combustible flashpoint on Earth is still a patch of grass in Missouri where large men in plastic armor…
