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…
The Cheap Thrill Is Gone: How Poundland’s Slow Death Mirrors the Collapse of the Post-War Bargain Across the British high street, the fluorescent lights of Poundland are flickering out like cheap candles at a state funeral. Another 150 stores—roughly one in six—will shutter by Christmas, joining the 800 already boarded up since 2018. If you…
The Curious Case of Marshawn Lynch, or How a Man Who Refused to Speak Became the Loudest Voice in the Room By Our Correspondent Somewhere over Greenland Somewhere between the 50-yard line and the end zone, Marshawn Lynch decided that silence could be weaponized. While the rest of the planet was busy screaming itself hoarse…
The Border That Isn’t: How Nicaragua and Costa Rica Invented a Cold War for the TikTok Age By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk SAN JOSÉ—For the uninitiated, the San Juan River looks like any other sleepy tropical waterway—think lazy crocodiles, overworked herons, and the occasional backpacker who’s read too much Lonely Planet. Yet this 200-kilometre ribbon…
The NFL’s Thirty-Two Flags: How a Provincial Pastime Conquered the Planet and Forgot to Apologize By Correspondent M. A. “Mac” Guffin, filing from a hotel bar in Singapore that still thinks the Super Bowl is a plumbing fixture. When the Kansas City Chiefs lifted their third Lombardi Trophy in February, fireworks crackled over Manila, Lagos,…
From a safe distance of 4,000 miles and several failed revolutions, the world watches America’s latest export of precision anxiety: Justin Tucker, the Baltimore Ravens’ resident field-goal necromancer. While lesser nations measure progress in GDP or UNESCO heritage sites, the United States has calibrated its self-worth to the arc of a leather ellipsoid booted by…
Jason Kelce and the Global Theater of Linemen: How One Bearded American Gladiator Explains Everything There comes a moment—usually around 3 a.m. in a Berlin hostel kitchen—when a French backpacker, two Korean crypto-traders, and a Canadian on a gap year discover they share a single cultural reference point: the bearded, bare-chested, beer-sloshing demigod known as…
Jordan Peele’s horror is the only American export that terrifies both Beijing’s censors and Davos’ keynote speakers—proof that fear, like debt, is borderless. While Washington still pretends soft power means jazz diplomacy and Marvel post-credit scenes, Peele quietly weaponized popcorn anxiety into a global mirror. The result? A Ugandan film student in Kampala cites Get…
Karol G and the Globalization of Reggaeton Guilt By Dave’s Locker, International Desk In a world where half of Europe is re-nationalizing its energy grids and the other half is busy banning TikTok, Colombia’s Carolina Giraldo—known to Spotify, Interpol, and your downstairs neighbor as “Karol G”—has quietly become a one-woman IMF for the Spanish-speaking pop…
