Chip Kelly and the Global Gospel of Hurry-Up Capitalism By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS — Somewhere between the 15th arrondissement’s stubborn cigarette haze and the fluorescent glow of a Buffalo Wild Wings streaming Pac-12 After Dark, Chip Kelly keeps sprinting. Not literally—his knees filed an injunction years ago—but philosophically. While the rest of the…
Al Davis, the late czar of the Oakland Raiders, never held elected office, never commanded armies, and—astonishingly—never learned how to use e-mail. Yet his silhouette still looms across the planet like a stubborn smog cloud, proof that the most durable empires are sometimes stitched from shoulder pads and bad attitude. From the dockyards of Naples…
Brock Bowers’ Knee Becomes an Unwilling Diplomat By the time the news had ping-ponged from Athens, Georgia, to Athens, Greece, the anterior cruciate ligament of one 20-year-old American football prodigy had already achieved what most career diplomats only fantasize about: uniting the planet in a single, synchronized wince. From a smoky sports bar in Buenos…
Elle Fanning and the End of the American Empire, as Told from a Café in Sarajevo By “International Correspondent Who’s Given Up on Pretending to Be Optimistic” Sarajevo, 07:14 a.m. CEST — A thick Bosnian coffee hisses on the table, the kind that once fortified Ottoman viziers and now fuels NGO interns who still believe…
Dakota Fanning and the Quiet Apocalypse of the American Child Star By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent (currently self-exiled in a Reykjavik basement where the northern lights can’t find me) If you squint through the smog of 2024, Dakota Fanning still looks exactly like the prophesied Last Good Kid—blonde, polite, preternaturally articulate, the sort of child you…
Cameron Heyward: The Last Man Standing in a League Bent on Self-Immolation By our man in the cheap seats, Brussels Bureau Let us begin with the obvious: Cameron Heyward is a very large human paid to run into other very large humans on behalf of a city whose river once caught fire. This is, on…
Mason Taylor and the Quiet Collapse of the Borderless Résumé By Dave’s Locker Global Correspondent If you squint at LinkedIn long enough, every Mason Taylor on earth starts to look like the same politely smiling algorithmic ghost. The name itself could be the default setting on a factory-fresh passport: Mason—solid, vaguely colonial; Taylor—an occupation that…
The Curse of the Pass-Rusher: How Harold Landry Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Going Sideways by Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—In most time zones the name Harold Landry still registers as “that guy who sacks quarterbacks for Tennessee,” a useful but hardly epochal résumé line. Yet on five continents his recent off-season melodrama—domestic violence…
Fever vs Mystics: A Global Temperature Check on the World’s Oldest Rivalry By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent, Somewhere Between the Equator and Existential Despair If you spent last night doom-scrolling past floods in Bangladesh, forest fires in Canada, and whatever Elon Musk just renamed this week, you might have missed the latest installment of “Fever…
From Manila to Madrid, the arena lights dim to a conspiratorial hush just before the three-point line becomes a geopolitical fault line. Enter Wardell Stephen Curry II, a 6’2″ Californian with the diplomatic passport of a rock star and the jump shot of an intercontinental ballistic missile. While lesser mortals debate tariffs and troop deployments,…
Eugenio Suárez and the Curious Elasticity of National Heroes Dave’s Locker – International Desk | 8 June 2024 If you squint at a map of the Americas, you might notice that Venezuela—birthplace of Eugenio Suárez, third-baseman turned planetary metaphor—has roughly the same shape as a broken baseball bat. Coincidence? Perhaps. But it’s the kind of…
Connor Heyward: The Accidental Geopolitical Metaphor Running Through a Tackle PARIS — Somewhere on a practice field in Pittsburgh, a 6-foot, 230-pound fullback—listed, charmingly, as “tight end” on official rosters—named Connor Heyward just pancaked a linebacker and, in so doing, unwittingly illustrated the entire 21st-century world order. Allow me to explain before your eyes glaze…
