Cardi B’s Whirlwind Tour: A Global Fever Dream in the Age of Late-Stage Capitalism By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between the customs queue at Charles de Gaulle and the duty-free Dior counter, an exhausted customs agent stamped yet another passport belonging to a dancer on Cardi B’s entourage. The agent—who once dreamed of being…
Costco’s New Shopping Hours: A Global Power Play in the Aisle of Civilization By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent, somewhere between the rotisserie chickens and the abyss SEATTLE—In a move that has sent shockwaves through suburban cul-de-sacs from Tacoma to Tbilisi, Costco Wholesale has tweaked its opening schedule by a staggering thirty minutes. Effective immediately, doors…
Rockets, Roulette, and the Global Cult of RKLB: How a New Zealand-Born, California-Listed Launch Firm Became the World’s Favorite Orbital Casino By the time the bell rings in New York, half the planet is already staring at a ticker symbol that sounds like a sneeze: RKLB. Rocket Lab USA—born in Auckland, headquartered in Long Beach,…
**The Global Cult of BBAI: When Surveillance Becomes the World’s Hottest Commodity** In a world where privacy has become as quaint as a rotary phone, BigBear.ai Holdings Inc. (BBAI) has emerged as the poster child for our collective surrender to the surveillance state. The Virginia-based company, whose name sounds suspiciously like a cuddly dystopian teddy…
# Philadelphia Phillies Highlights: A Global Perspective on America’s Pastime and the Theater of the Absurd The Philadelphia Phillies, a baseball team named after female horses yet represented by a bell-wielding founding father, continue to defy both logic and expectations in a world where logic itself seems to be on an extended sabbatical. While the…
Ban vs Afg: The World Watches Two Letters Decide the Fate of Eleven Men and 38 Million Others By Our Man in Every Airport Lounge from Dubai to Doha When the International Cricket Council (ICC) scheduled “BAN vs AFG” for the T20 World Cup, the acronym looked like a typo for a Balkan trade dispute….
In the grand theatre of geopolitics, nothing screams “late-stage empire” quite like two nations—each with a per-capita GDP smaller than the average Silicon Valley intern’s coffee allowance—being pitted against one another on the world’s most conspicuous stage. Bangladesh versus Afghanistan is not merely a fixture on the cricket calendar; it is the latest episode in…
Sean Clifford and the Geopolitics of a Backup Quarterback By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over the Atlantic The name Sean Clifford does not, at first blush, rattle the chandeliers at the UN or trigger emergency sessions of the G7. He is, after all, a 25-year-old American football player who was selected 149th…
From Kiev to Kyoto, district attorneys are rarely the stuff of diplomatic cables. Yet in the spring of 2024, Fulton County’s Fani Willis has become the unlikely protagonist in a morality play that is being binge-watched from Brussels to Bangkok. While her name still sounds to European ears like a cheerful budget airline, the reverberations…
IREN Stock: The World Learns to Love a Battery-Powered Lottery Ticket By the time you finish this sentence, IREN’s ticker will have flickered somewhere between a green smile and a red grimace on three continents. The Australia-based lithium-ion recycler—née “Neometals,” reborn with a name that sounds like an IKEA desk lamp—has spent 2024 ricocheting from…
Riley Green’s Tour: How a Red-Dirt Bard from Alabama Accidentally Became a Global Soft-Power Asset By Dave’s Locker, Foreign Bureau There are moments—rare, fleeting, and usually soundtracked by steel guitar—when the American South leaks into the wider world, and the wider world, baffled, decides it likes the taste. Enter Riley Green, the former University of…
Rugby: The World’s Most Polite Blood-Sport By Dave’s Locker International Desk If there is a single pursuit that proves human beings will ritualise anything short of nuclear war, it is rugby: a game invented when an English schoolboy allegedly picked up a football in 1823 and thought, “Let’s add concussions.” Two centuries later, that boyish…
