LOS ANGELES — Somewhere between the 7th-inning stretch and the next geopolitical crisis, the Dodgers and Phillies resumed their ancient ritual of bat-meets-ball, a pastoral pageant now beamed to 182 territories that haven’t known a pastoral day in their collective lives. From Kyiv bomb shelters to Lagos traffic jams, insomniacs toggled between BBC alerts and…
Shohei Ohtani just signed the most lucrative contract in human history—$700 million, give or take the GDP of a small island nation—and the global reaction has been refreshingly unified: everyone quietly Googled “How much is 700 million in my currency?” then stared into the existential abyss for a polite three seconds. From Tokyo trading floors…
Jackie Young and the Quiet Art of Winning While the Planet Burns A dispatch from the end-of-days desk, somewhere between the Eurozone and the next recession The name Jackie Young doesn’t scream geopolitics. It isn’t chanted in Davos corridors, whispered in Brussels backrooms, or hashtagged by tinfoil influencers predicting the collapse of fiat currency. And…
PARIS—While delegates at UNESCO politely clapped for yet another PowerPoint on “sport as soft power,” Skylar Diggins-Smith was 7,500 kilometers away in Dallas, draining a contested three over two defenders and reminding the planet that soft power sometimes wears size-10 Nikes and has a mean crossover. The box score will tell you she logged 25…
Phillies-Dodgers: A Globe-Trotting Tragedy in Nine Innings By our man in the cheap seats, filing from everywhere and nowhere Across six continents—Antarctica’s penguins wisely abstain—baseball fans woke to the news that the Philadelphia Phillies and Los Angeles Dodgers were renewing hostilities. At first glance it’s just another installment of America’s provincial pastime, a 162-game soap…
From the Banks of the Bosporus to the Beaches of Bali, the world has many pressing questions: will the BRICS dethrone the dollar, can COP agreements survive another American election cycle, and—most urgent—how did a 27-year-old Georgian with frosted tips and a podcast about “holy testosterone” become a diplomatic curiosity in six languages? Meet Chase…
**The Global Hailey Baldwin Phenomenon: How One Woman’s Name Became an International Symbol of Our Collective Existential Crisis** In the grand theater of human civilization, where nuclear powers play chicken over trade routes and climate scientists scream into the void, the international community has found its true north: obsessing over whether a 27-year-old model should…
Hailey Bieber as Global Weather Vane: How One Rhode-Slinging Influencer Became a Barometer for Late-Stage Capitalism ZURICH—On a rainy Wednesday, finance ministers from the G-20 huddled in a vaulted conference room debating how to keep supply chains from imploding. Half a world away, Hailey Bieber posted a 12-second clip of herself glazing a strawberry “glazed…
Phillies vs Dodgers: A Cosmic Reminder That Even Empires Need a Seventh-Inning Stretch By Our Man in the Dugout of History If you squint past the cheesesteak grease and the Santa Ana smog, tonight’s Phillies-Dodgers tilt looks less like a ballgame and more like two exhausted superpowers swapping war stories at the last functioning bar…
Cade Horton and the Quiet Export of American Disillusionment By “Marcello Vex,” Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk If you stroll into a sports bar in São Paulo at 2 a.m. on any given Wednesday, you’ll find financiers in Patagonia vests arguing about the Chicago Cubs’ latest pitching prospect with the same fervor they once…
From the Vatican to Caracas, every institution that once sold itself as a “beacon of moral clarity” is now under audit. So it feels almost quaint—like discovering a rotary phone in a TikTok star’s purse—that Leo Catholic High School still stands at 79th and Sangamon, a stubborn brick-and-mortar confession booth in Chicago’s South Side. While…
Minnesota: The Frozen Petri Dish Where the World Quietly Rehearses Its Next Act By the time your Boeing 787 bumps across the Mississippi, the cabin crew has already apologised to passengers from Lagos, La Paz and Lahore for a “little snow on the tarmac.” Little snow, in Minnesotan, means the airport is still visible. The…
