Coaches Poll Top 25: How a List of American College Teams Quietly Became the World’s Most Watched Unofficial Geopolitical Barometer By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, somewhere between Gate 42 and Existential Dread PARIS—While delegates at the COP summit were busy arguing over whether the planet should be saved by Tuesday or by Thursday,…
The Geopolitics of a Pop-Up Stream: How Streameast Became the Twenty-First Century’s Floating Pirate Republic By R. D. “Rum-Runner” Delgado, Senior Correspondent for Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Copyright, the ghost galleon named Streameast drifts in and out of existence—there one Champions League Tuesday, vanished the next, only…
Atlanta’s Braves—today’s sacrificial offering to the baseball gods—step onto Truist Park’s manicured stage at 7:20 p.m. Eastern. In the grand ledger of global affairs, this single Braves game registers somewhere between “mildly diverting” and “utterly inconsequential,” yet the ritual still draws 41,000 carbon-based life forms, plus several million more beaming their anxiety through undersea cables…
Carolina Panthers Depth Chart: The Geopolitical Playbook Hidden Between the Hashmarks By “Vlad the Impaler of Sports Bureaucracy,” Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk The Panthers’ freshly minted depth chart dropped this week like a classified cable from the U.S. embassy in a midsize petro-state—full of euphemisms, passive voice, and the quiet understanding that someone, somewhere,…
Lithuania: The Baltic Hedgehog No One Expected to Have Spines VILNIUS—Somewhere between the amber stalls of the capital and the NATO listening posts that now dot its forests like paranoid mushrooms, the Republic of Lithuania has stopped being a footnote and started behaving like a geopolitical hedgehog—small, prickly, and surprisingly willing to roll into the…
Calais Campbell, the 6’8″ American football colossus whose very name sounds like a French port town hosting a discount mattress sale, has announced his retirement after 17 seasons of politely rearranging the spines of quarterbacks. While this might register as mere “sports news” in the parochial corners of U.S. cable television, the reverberations ripple outward…
Raiders Depth Chart: A Global Power Ranking of Hope, Hubris, and Third-String Linebackers By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats Las Vegas—The Raiders released their latest depth chart this week, a tidy Excel sheet that purports to map the hierarchy of 53 men who chase an oblong ball for money while wearing armor. To the…
The Red Arrows over the Tyne: Aerial Ballet in the Age of Apocalypse By the time the first lycra-clad pilgrim shuffled across the start line in Newcastle last Sunday, global positioning satellites had already logged four coup attempts, three wildfires, and one cryptocurrency collapse. Yet for exactly nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds, as nine scarlet…
Paramount Is the New Oxygen—We Just Haven’t Noticed the Price Hike Yet By L. Marchetti, roving correspondent, currently hiding from four different tax authorities PARIS—Over croissants that cost more per gram than enriched uranium, the French foreign minister declared climate change “paramount.” Twenty-four hours earlier, the CEO of a South Korean chip conglomerate called uninterrupted…
The Browns’ Depth Chart: A Global Power Struggle in Shoulder Pads By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent, still jet-lagged from Moldovan border traffic CLEVELAND—Somewhere between the Cuyahoga River and the Sea of Okhotsk, the Cleveland Browns’ depth chart has become the most democratic reading of American anxiety since the last Federal Reserve statement. On every continent…
**The Von Miller Doctrine: How a Pass Rusher Became America’s Most Reliable Export** *From the international desk, where we monitor America’s most successful cultural imperialism campaigns* The United States, that restless superpower that brought the world both jazz and drone warfare, has identified its latest soft-power weapon: a 35-year-old man who gets paid millions to…
In the grand, ever-unfolding tragicomedy of American football, the Washington Commanders’ depth chart is the latest act to be projected onto the global screen—like a dimly lit PowerPoint slide at a G-20 after-party. From the neon towers of Tokyo to the dusty cafés of Algiers, football obsessives and casual rubber-neckers alike now parse the same…
