Jacory Croskey-Merritt and the Quiet Weaponization of an American Name By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic The first time a European customs officer squints at the passport of Jacory Croskey-Merritt, two things happen. First, the officer silently congratulates himself for correctly guessing the traveler’s nationality before the blue cover even…
Cruzeiro vs. Atlético-MG: When an Obscure Brazilian Derby Suddenly Becomes the Planet’s Thermometer By our man in the cheap seats with a diplomatic passport and a hangover RIO DE JANEIRO — Somewhere between the third drone strike update from the Red Sea and the latest AI-generated apology from a tech CEO, the world took a…
Blue Labour’s Globe-Trotting Cassandra: Why Maurice Glasman Haunts Every Populist, From Detroit to Doha By our man in the departure lounge If you’ve never heard of Maurice Glasman, congratulations—you’ve been sleeping more soundly than most of the world’s political consultants. The mild-mannered academic from London Metropolitan University has become the ideological Typhoid Mary of post-liberal…
The Global Court Jester: How Jerry “The King” Lawler Became Wrestling’s Last Universal Punchline By Dave’s Foreign Desk Cairo, 3:14 a.m. local time—while the Nile glugs past like a bored bartender, a taxi driver in a faded Undertaker T-shirt is replaying on his cracked phone the 1982 bout in which Jerry Lawler pile-drove comedian Andy…
Google Maps Goes Dark: A Global Existential Crisis in 404 Kilometers By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent, somewhere between lost and not-amused Lagos, 07:14 a.m. WAT – A city of 21 million people collectively discovers that the blue dot has vanished. On the mainland, danfo drivers argue over whose cousin studied geography in 1997. Island bankers…
Lunchtime in Annapolis, Maryland, and a battalion of midshipmen march past the statue of the ur-naval hero John Paul Jones—who, in true American fashion, got famous by failing to sink anything British until the French lent him a decent boat. The scene could be 1845 or 2024; only the smartphones tucked inside starched sleeves betray…
Chelsea Wolfe and the Apocalypse That Never Arrived By Our Correspondent in a Bunker Somewhere Over the Pacific The name Chelsea Wolfe has been echoing across the globe this week, ricocheting from Berlin klezmer clubs to Filipino karaoke bars with all the subtlety of a drone strike. What began as a niche American musician posting…
Washington Metro: The World Watches While America’s Subway Becomes a Global Cautionary Tale by Ignacio “Nacho” Valdez, International Correspondent-at-Large Rome has the Colosseum, Paris has the Louvre, and Washington, D.C. has WMATA: a living exhibit where commuters shuffle past melted cables, gaping platform pits, and the occasional flaming escalator—all while the planet takes notes. In…
Charleston White, the self-styled “reformed gang member turned motivational menace,” has become America’s latest export of weaponized outrage—one part TED Talk, two parts Jerry Springer, and entirely too loud for the fragile sensibilities of the civilized world. While U.S. audiences binge his viral clips like junk food, the rest of the planet watches with the…
The Accidental Geopolitics of Panna Udvardy Or How a 24-Year-Old Hungarian with a Two-Handed Backhand Became a Soft-Power Weapon in a World That’s Already on Fire By the time Panna Udvardy hoisted the Bogotá Open trophy last April, most of the northern hemisphere was busy doom-scrolling through grainy satellite pictures of a stalled 40-mile Russian…
Austin Ekeler’s Stat Sheet: The Micronation of Productivity in a Collapsing Empire By Our Man in the End Zone, somewhere between bankruptcy court and the red zone DATELINE – Somewhere over the Atlantic, 2:47 a.m. GMT. While European bond yields perform their daily cliff dive and the yen continues its sad karaoke rendition of “My…
In the grand geopolitical chessboard, where Beijing buys ports like children collect trading cards and Silicon Valley titans trade privacy for market share, one must look to Amherst, Massachusetts, to understand how the empire really sustains itself—through parking tickets, artisanal ramen, and a quiet, almost British refusal to acknowledge anything unpleasant. The University of Massachusetts…
