SHUTTER ISLAND, 1954 — Somewhere between the North Atlantic shipping lanes and the edge of collective delusion sits Ashecliffe Hospital, a red-brick fever dream that, depending on which passport you carry, looks like either America’s cutting-edge answer to post-war trauma or the world’s most expensive guilt spa for white men who couldn’t handle the 20th…
Learner Tien: The 17-Year-Old Who Just Check-Mated the Global Chess Order By Our Man in the Back Row with a Flask If you missed it, a Californian high-schooler named Learner Tien spent last week in Toronto politely eviscerating grandmasters who have spent more collective years on the game than most nations have existed. The FIDE…
Storm Warnings From the Met Office: How a Small Island’s Weather Alerts Became the Planet’s Canary in the Coal Mine By Dave’s Locker’s resident correspondent, filing from a damp bar in Reykjavík with free Wi-Fi and cheaper existential dread. LONDON—At precisely 08:47 GMT last Tuesday, the British Met Office issued a “Danger to Life” amber…
Nick Castellanos and the Decline of Western Civilization *A Field Report from the Bleachers of Geopolitics* There is, perhaps, no more reliable barometer of planetary anxiety than the Twitter timeline whenever Nick Castellanos lofts a ball into the right-field seats. One moment the feed is convulsing over a Supreme Court leak, a burning rainforest, or…
The planet’s favorite daily crossword-adjacent guilt trip, Connections, coughed up another grid on September 19, and—as usual—half the world pretended to be above such American parlor games while secretly screenshotting the answers. From Lagos to Lisbon, commuters swiped through the pastel puzzle, convinced that grouping four varieties of “things that melt” was a more productive…
The Curious Case of Teoscar Hernández: How One Man’s Bat Became a Geopolitical Barometer By the time Teoscar Hernández launched his 10th postseason home run into the Chavez Ravine gloaming last October, the baseball had already cleared three time zones, two trade agreements, and one very confused customs officer in Tijuana. To the casual eye…
From the marble colonnades of Rome to the air-conditioned cubicles of Canberra, the word “senator” still carries a faint whiff of toga parties and gravitas. In theory, a senator is the adult in the room, the institutional memory, the last line of defense between a twitchy head of state and the launch codes. In practice—well,…
The Batman: A Noir Valentine to a Planet That Prefers Superficial Heroes GOTHAM—Somewhere between the fall of Kabul and the rise of gas prices that could ransom a small monarchy, the world decided what it really needed was another re-telling of the Wayne trauma-industrial complex. Enter Matt Reeves’ “The Batman,” a three-hour meditation on sulk,…
**The Curious Case of Walker Buehler: America’s Baseball Casualty as the World Burns** While the planet grapples with climate negotiations that move at glacial speeds (ironically, the only things not melting), nuclear proliferation disguised as energy solutions, and economic systems that somehow make billionaires richer during pandemics, America has found its latest tragedy: a 30-year-old…
Bryan Adams, a Canadian who once screamed into a studio microphone until it surrendered the riff for “Summer of ’69,” has become an unlikely UN-approved cultural export. While diplomats in Geneva haggle over carbon credits and pretend PowerPoints are binding treaties, Adams is quietly doing what soft-power theorists only fantasize about: getting entire continents to…
**The Last Laugh: How Mel Brooks Became the World’s Favorite Court Jester in an Age of Dictators** In a world where authoritarian strongmen are staging a comeback like a bad 80s reboot, one 97-year-old Jewish comedian from Brooklyn has become an unlikely global icon of resistance. Mel Brooks, the man who taught us that “Springtime…
Rockies Without Borders By Our Man in the Cheap Seats It began, as most planetary absurdities do, with a humble typographical slip. Somewhere between the Denver Post newsroom and a sleep-deprived intern’s iPhone, the capital “R” in Rockies vanished, and the lowercase “rockies” were loosed upon the world. Within hours, #rockies was trending from Lagos…
