Snow Falls in July: How One American Actress Became a Global Rorschach Test by our man in the cheap seats, Frankfurt When the name Brittany Snow first ping-ped across the international newswires last week—courtesy of a perfectly timed divorce filing in Los Angeles that landed during NATO’s summit in Vilnius—foreign correspondents from Lagos to Ljubljana…
Jim Harbaugh, Cosmic Jester of the Gridiron, Now Auditions for the Role of Emperor If you squint at the right angle, Jim Harbaugh looks less like an American football coach and more like a geopolitical weather pattern—an unpredictable low-pressure system that drifts from Michigan to Los Angeles to, rumor has it, any NFL capital whose…
Bailey Zimmerman, the 23-year-old from Louisville, Illinois (population 1,100, two stoplights, and an almost heroic commitment to corn), has somehow become the sonic passport stamp for a planet that can’t quite decide if it’s ending or just rebooting. His gravel-road baritone drifts from Lagos Uber speakers, Manila jeepneys, and Berlin U-Bahn headphones alike—proof that heartbreak,…
**WICKED PART 2: A GLOBAL PHENOMENON THAT PROVES HUMANITY’S ENDURING CAPACITY FOR MASS DELUSION** The international box office has spoken, and what it’s saying is rather telling about our collective state of mind. “Wicked Part 2” has enchanted audiences worldwide, grossing $1.2 billion across 75 countries and proving that nothing unites humanity quite like escapism…
The Jelly Roll Doctrine: How a Swirled Pastry Became a Geopolitical Metaphor By the time you finish this sentence, approximately 2.7 metric tons of jelly rolls will have been consumed somewhere between Jakarta and Jacksonville. That’s the kind of useless statistic international correspondents like me toss around to sound worldly while secretly Googling “what is…
Ariana Grande: The 5’3” Geopolitical Juggernaut in a Ponytail By Dave’s Locker International Desk If the Cold War was fought with missiles and manifestos, the 21st-century version is waged with perfume endorsements, TikTok choreography, and the high-pitched whistle note that can apparently be heard from Seoul to São Paulo. Ariana Grande, the Boca-Raton-born soprano who…
The Last Full-Contact Diplomat: Why the World Still Cares About Jim Brown, Dead or Alive By our man in the cheap seats of global memory Cleveland, Ohio, is not, by any stretch of diplomacy, a world capital. Its river once caught fire—twice—an achievement even Beirut politely calls déclassé. Yet when news of Jim Brown’s death…
Adrian Peterson and the Global Trade in Disposable Heroes By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere over the Mid-Atlantic PARIS—Because nothing says “universal human values” quite like a 38-year-old American running back still hawking his wares on the open market, Adrian Peterson has once again become an unlikely diplomatic incident. The NFL’s erstwhile MVP—whose…
Elijah Moore and the Global Trade in Disposable Humans By Pascal “Paz” Delacruz, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker International Desk CLEVELAND—Somewhere between the Cuyahoga River and the Sea of Japan, a 23-year-old wide receiver discovered that passports, Instagram followers, and 4.3-second 40-yard-dash times do not, in fact, grant diplomatic immunity. Elijah Moore’s offseason odyssey from the…
Buffalo, New York – Population: 278,000, Average January temperature: –3 °C, Collective blood-alcohol level on game day: incalculable. Thousands of kilometres away, the good citizens of Baltimore are busy convincing themselves that crab cakes and Old Bay seasoning constitute a personality. Between these two post-industrial monuments to American decline, an oval ball will be hurled…
Niagara Falls: The World’s Most Photogenic Glitch in the Geological Matrix By Dave’s Locker International Desk From the deck of the Maid of the Mist—now rebranded, of course, as “Mist-Xperience™ Premium Voyage: Poncho Included”—you quickly realize that Niagara Falls is less a waterfall and more a global congregation of humanity’s collective short attention span. On…
COLE BISHOP, THE ACCIDENTAL DIPLOMAT: HOW ONE AMERICAN SAFETY WITH A FRENCH NAME IS REDRAWING THE NFL’S GLOBAL MAP By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent (currently hiding from customs in a Reykjavik airport bar) It’s hard to find a more American export these days than the National Football League, that padded pageant of concussions and commercial…
