Orca Wiesblatt and the Global Hockey Hangover By C. M. “Mordant” Malin, roving correspondent for Dave’s Locker The name alone sounds like a Bond villain’s pet project—Orca Wiesblatt, equal parts cetacean menace and Austrian surname—but it actually belongs to a 23-year-old Canadian winger who just signed his first one-way deal with the San Jose Sharks….
The Gates Scholarship: A Golden Ticket in a World Where Most Kids Still Can’t Afford the Chocolate Bar By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Let us begin with the obvious: if you’re reading this in a refugee tent outside Gaziantep, a tin-roof classroom in rural Uttar Pradesh, or a cyber-café in Lagos where the power cuts every…
Peyton Houston, a name that sounds like a failed fusion restaurant in a gentrifying suburb, has become the planet’s latest Rorschach test. To the casual observer, he is merely an American tech entrepreneur who promised to “re-wire the global mind” with an app that converts your carbon footprint into NFTs—because nothing says planetary salvation like…
Joe Manchin, the Senator from a state most foreigners mistake for western Virginia, has spent the last few years perfecting a very particular art form: looking like the last adult in the room while quietly setting the room on fire. From Brussels to Beijing, policy watchers have learned to read his frown lines the way…
NASA Announces Life on Mars: Planet Earth Reacts Like a Kid Who Found Out Santa’s Real, Then Immediately Asks Who Gets the Mining Rights By the time the first tremor hit the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the rover’s panoramic selfie—complete with a polite, lichen-like organism waving what appeared to be a pseudopod—had already been memed into…
**The Last Patch of Green Before the End: Preston Park as the World’s Final Warning** In the grand tapestry of global absurdities, where billionaires rocket themselves into space while their employees urinate in bottles, and governments spend trillions on weapons they pray never to use, Preston Park stands as a 63-acre middle finger to human…
The EU: A 27-Nation Group Therapy Session the World Can’t Leave Brussels, Belgium – If the planet were a dysfunctional family reunion, the European Union would be the cousin who keeps renegotiating the seating chart while the house is on fire. Twenty-seven countries—give or take one melodramatic ex-member sulking on the lawn—have voluntarily locked themselves…
**Dow Today: A Global Barometer of Hope, Hype, and Human Folly** NEW YORK—While the Dow Jones Industrial Average flirted with yet another arbitrary numerical milestone this morning, approximately 7.9 billion humans across the planet continued their daily struggle to eat, breathe, and pay rent. But let’s focus on what really matters: thirty carefully selected American…
ASML: The Tiny Dutch Firm Holding the World Hostage—One Nanometer at a Time By Hans van der Kloot, Senior Correspondent, The Hague Veldhoven, Netherlands—If you squint hard enough at a map of Europe, you’ll find ASML’s headquarters wedged between a cow pasture and an IKEA. From this pastoral setting, the company quietly decides whether your…
Pastor Frederick Haynes III has spent three decades turning Dallas’s Friendship-West Baptist Church into a pulpit that moonlights as a geopolitical weather station. From there he tracks storms that most American preachers prefer to ignore: Gaza rubble, Haitian debt, South African shack settlements, and the curious habit of U.S. tax dollars to fertilize foreign dictatorships…
Kelly Services: The Global Temp Agency That Makes Capitalism Feel Like a Waiting Room With Fluorescent Lighting By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Shanghai and São Paulo Kelly Services began life in 1946 as a Detroit stenographer-for-hire outfit charmingly named “Russell Kelly Office Service.” Seventy-eight years later it has metastasized into a multinational H.R. vending machine,…
**The Global Court Jester: How Sonia Sotomayor Became the World’s Accidental Diplomat** While Washington obsesses over whether Supreme Court justices should be able to count to nine without taking their shoes off, the rest of the world has discovered something peculiar: Sonia Sotomayor has become America’s most unlikely export since the McRib. From the favelas…
