Anthony Banda and the Borderless Brotherhood of Disposable Left Arms By Marisol Vargas, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk Dateline: Everywhere and Nowhere—Somewhere between the cracked bullpen benches of Phoenix and the fluorescent-lit hotel lobbies of Seoul, Anthony Banda is presently warming up. Again. The itinerant left-hander has been optioned, designated, outrighted, traded, waived, and…
Sun News, Earth Blues By our roving cosmic correspondent, still hung-over from last night’s aurora The Sun has been making headlines again—always a bit of a narcissist, that 4.6-billion-year-old ball of plasma. From Delhi’s smog-choked rooftops to Reykjavík’s geothermal spas, the latest “sun news” is that our star has entered a more exuberant phase of…
Jonathan Groff: The Unlikely Global Export America Never Put on a Tariff List PARIS—While Washington and Beijing slug it out over semiconductors and soybeans, another U.S. product is slipping through every customs checkpoint unmolested: Jonathan Groff. Yes, the man who once asked the world if it wanted to build a snowman has quietly become the…
Luciano Darderi: The Quiet Italian Who Accidentally Became Tennis’s Newest Metaphor for Global Chaos By Matteo “No One Invited Me To The G7” Rossi If you blinked somewhere between the war in Gaza and the latest crypto-bro meltdown, you might have missed the moment an unseeded 22-year-old from Tandil, Argentina—who grew up speaking Italian at…
When Rappler, the Philippine digital news site founded by Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, announced yet another court date last week, the global press corps barely flinched. We’ve seen this tango before: government subpoenas, sudden tax cases, the slow bureaucratic garrote—democracy’s version of death by a thousand paper cuts. From Berlin to Buenos Aires, editors simply…
Am I the Drama? A Geopolitical Self-Interrogation Played Out in 195 Seats at the U.N. By the time you finish reading this sentence, at least six governments will have tweeted the phrase “Am I the drama?”—three ironically, two in panicked self-defence, and one because the social-media intern thought it sounded hip in English. What began…
**The 9.76-Second Diplomat: How Fred Kerley Became the World’s Fastest Metaphor** In a world where nuclear threats trend alongside TikTok dances, it’s almost quaint that a man running in a straight line for less than ten seconds can still make the planet collectively gasp. Yet here we are, watching Fred Kerley—a 28-year-old Texan who looks…
**The Global Arithmetic of Heartbreak: How a Teenager’s Diary Became a Multi-Million Dollar Empire** In the grand casino of modern capitalism, where trauma is currency and vulnerability trades at premium rates, 18-year-old d4vd has managed to parlay bedroom heartbreak into a net worth that would make small-nation treasury ministers weep into their spreadsheets. The Houston…
# The Ballad of Erica Wheeler: How a Forgotten Folk Singer Became the World’s Most Accidental Revolutionary *From our international correspondent who still owns a functioning cassette player* GENEVA—While the world’s nuclear powers were busy updating their apocalypse apps and billionaires were racing to see who could reach space with the smallest carbon footprint, something…
The Boys Season 5: A Mirror Held Up to a World Already Smirking at Itself By Diego “Black-Mirror-on-a-Budget” Valenzuela It’s fitting that Amazon’s blood-spattered satire returns just as the planet’s real superheroes—central bankers, tech oligarchs, and whichever oil prince bought another Premier League club—finish their annual dress rehearsal for moral bankruptcy. Season 5 of The…
Copenhagen, Wednesday night: while most of Europe argued about gas prices that rise faster than a teenager’s heart-rate on TikTok, Clara Tauson was quietly dismantling another seeded opponent in Linz. If you blinked, you missed it—much like the continent’s once-vaunted welfare states, the match was gone before the espresso cooled. For the uninitiated, Tauson is…
The phrase “vaccines near me” has become a tiny, pleading prayer muttered into glowing rectangles everywhere from Lagos to Lisbon. It is typed in 47 languages, auto-corrected into oblivion, and translated by algorithms that still think “Sinovac” is a Chinese boy-band. Yet behind the banal search bar lies a planetary morality play: a scramble for…
