Marshall Manning – the very name sounds like a Pentagon program that was quietly cancelled once the invoices hit eight figures. Yet in the past 72 hours this previously un-Googleable American teenager has become the planet’s most unlikely Rorschach test. From Lagos trading floors to Seoul crypto cafés, everyone is projecting something onto the kid…
The Geopolitics of Glitter: Madison Square Garden as Planet Earth’s Loudest Embassy By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere above Section 412, nursing a US$17 bottle of water From the outside, Madison Square Garden looks like a brick-and-mortar shrug at the skyscraper orgy surrounding it—an unimpressive box that swallowed a city block and never…
Lenny Kravitz Is Still Wearing That Scarf, and the Planet Has Noticed From Montreux to Montevideo, the man once photographed exiting a Parisian hotel in eleven different shades of leather has become a low-grade global barometer—equal parts fashion Rorschach test and sonic nostalgia export. Thirty-five years after “Let Love Rule” tried (and failed) to) topple…
Lady Gaga’s World Tour: A Glitter-Soaked Pilgrimage Through the End Times by Dave’s Locker International Desk Rome, May 2024 – While the Colosseum’s stone arches quietly molder under a heat dome that would make Caligula blush, 65,000 Little Monsters in LED devil horns are screaming the bridge to “Bad Romance” at a pitch that could…
The Ballad of Conan Gray, or How a Texan Teen Became the Planet’s Shared Diary By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent In the same week that the Arctic Council admitted it can no longer find the Arctic and the IMF downgraded global growth to “eh, whatever,” Conan Lee Gray—age twenty-five going on eternal adolescence—released “Found Heaven,”…
Jim Kelly, the Buffalo Bills legend who once quarterbacked four consecutive Super Bowl defeats—surely the most heroic act of sustained disappointment in modern sport—died this week at 63. The world, hunched over its collective smartphone, paused for roughly the time it takes to scroll past a funeral tweet, then resumed doom-scrolling. Yet for those old…
Highmark Stadium: Where the World’s Problems Take a Commercial Break By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent, Nursing a Warm Beer in Orchard Park Somewhere between the rusting hulk of Buffalo’s old steel mills and the maple-lined cul-de-sacs where snowblowers outnumber children, Highmark Stadium rises like a concrete confession: we may not have fixed climate change, but…
Tate McRae and the Algorithmic Ballet of Global Stardom By Matteo “Grim Reaper” Ricci, Dave’s Locker Foreign Bureau If you’ve spent any recent evening doom-scrolling on a malfunctioning airport Wi-Fi in Jakarta—or, frankly, anywhere from Lagos to Lille—you’ve probably seen her: a 5’8″ Canadian in split-sole sneakers, executing a pirouette sharp enough to slice through…
The Buffalo Bills Depth Chart: A Geopolitical Roster in a Cold Zip Code By Our Man on the Thruway, filing from somewhere between Reykjavík and Rochester The first thing you notice, squinting at the Bills’ depth chart from a hotel bar in Luxembourg, is how it reads like a NATO seating chart that met an…
The Fastball That Flew Past Borders: How Aroldis Chapman Became the World’s Most Expensive Metaphor By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you ever wanted a single anecdote that explains why late-stage capitalism looks suspiciously like a 105-mph heater aimed directly at the strike zone of human dignity, look no further than Aroldis Chapman. The Cuban…
The Landman Cometh: How a Mild-Mannered Leasing Agent Became the World’s Most Wanted Middleman By Dave’s International Affairs Desk Mention the word “landman” in Houston and you’ll be offered a bourbon and a non-disclosure agreement. Whisper it in the Niger Delta and someone will check for drones. Say it at a Berlin climate summit and…
Isaac Teslaa: The Man Who Turned a Name Into a Global Punchline By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Pacific It began, as most modern absurdities do, on the internet. Isaac Teslaa—an unassuming Maltese accountant with a fondness for Excel macros and late-night doom-scrolling—posted a LinkedIn update last April that read, simply: “Considering a career pivot….
