From the Desk of Dave’s International Bureau, Somewhere Over the Atlantic— While COP29 delegates in Baku argued over commas in a footnote on methane, the real existential drama played out under portable LED masts in the American Midwest. Friday night in Iowa—population three million, hog-to-human ratio negotiable—high-school football scores flickered across the Twittersphere with the…
Tanner Scott and the Global Metronome of Baseball’s Arms Race By Dave’s Locker Correspondent in Exile, somewhere over the Atlantic The first time Tanner Scott’s slider detonated on international radar was not on ESPN’s highlight reel but on a grainy Taiwanese KBO stream that kept buffering like a Cold-War telex. Somewhere in Seoul, a bleary-eyed…
Joe Jonas: The Last American Pop Export Standing Between Us and Total Global Meltdown By Lila Verdier, Dave’s Locker International Desk (currently filing from a windowless press-cubicle somewhere over the Baltic) Back when the Arctic still had ice and Twitter was merely a hell-site instead of a geopolitical weapon, Joe Jonas was just another Disney-forged…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and the Seine-et-Marne, a pensioner is binge-watching Turkish telenovelas at 3 a.m., an Algerian student in Belleville is streaming the latest Korean zombie series on the same account as her cousin in Montréal, and a gilet-jaune protestor is catching up on “Squid Game” on his phone while waiting for the CRS…
Teair Tart: The 315-Pound Canary in the Global Coal Mine By Dave’s Locker, International Affairs Desk On paper, Teair Tart is just an American football player—a 6’2″, 315-pound defensive tackle who recently signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after stints with the Tennessee Titans and the Los Angeles Chargers. In practice, however, Tart has become…
Baltimore, Maryland – Somewhere between the crab-cake stands and the rusted-out steel cranes that once propped up an empire, the Orioles scored six runs last night. Six. A modest tally by the steroid-addled standards of modern baseball, yet in the grand bazaar of global affairs it landed with the discreet thud of a diplomatic cable…
The last time the planet’s collective pulse spiked in unison, it wasn’t the Fed raising rates or a North Korean missile test—it was the trailer for “The Beekeeper,” in which Jason Statham, age-melting like a budget Bond, detonates a call-center scam ring with the moral clarity of a man who’s never waited on hold with…
Vince Vaughn, the 6-foot-5 human reminder that the 1990s never really ended, has lately been spotted on diplomatic red carpets from Berlin to Bangkok. This is less a career pivot than a symptom of our times: when the world tilts toward chaos, it apparently appoints a fast-talking Midwesterner as its comic relief attaché. The man…
Tim Mayza: The Left-Arm Reliever Quietly Teaching the World That Pain Is Universal By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic TORONTO—While the planet busies itself with grander catastrophes—ballooning sovereign debt, glaciers filing for early retirement, and TikToks of cats lip-syncing to war-crime tribunals—Tim Mayza keeps reporting to work in the same…
From the marble lobbies of Dubai to the sweaty karaoke bars of Manila, the planet’s attention has lately pivoted—ever so briefly—from wars, viruses, and crypto-crash eulogies to a 24-year-old kid from Colleyville, Texas, who smashes baseballs as if personally offended by the laws of physics. Bobby Witt Jr., the Kansas City Royals’ shortstop-turned-overnight-geopolitical-emoji, just wrapped…
The Curious Global Dominion of Becky Lynch: How a Dublin Bartender Became an International Soft-Power Asset In the grand, tragicomic opera of geopolitics—where nuclear codes are entrusted to septuagenarians who confuse TikTok with a breath mint—it turns out one of the more reliable diplomatic pressure valves is a 5-foot-6 redhead from the Liberties who used…
BILLY BOB THORNTON: AMERICA’S SOUTHERN-FRIED EXPORT OF MENACE, MISANTHROPY, AND MISPLACED ROMANCE By the time you finish reading this sentence, Billy Bob Thornton will have been married in at least one additional time zone. The man who once wore Angelina Jolie’s blood in a vial around his neck has become, against all odds, the United…
