Mike Evans and the Mirror He Holds Up to a World That Can’t Catch By the time Mike Evans’ latest one-handed, gravity-defying grab hits the highlight reels from Lagos to Lisbon, three things are already certain: (1) the Earth will keep turning, (2) Tom Brady will still be playing somewhere, and (3) at least one…
The Great North Run Starts at 10:40 BST—And the World Holds Its Breath (or at Least Pretends to While Refreshing Twitter) NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE — At precisely 10:40 British Summer Time this Sunday, 60,000 registered humans—plus several hundred opportunistic charity-costumed bananas—will shuffle across the Tyne Bridge in a ritual that looks suspiciously like a mass escape from…
**The Global Empire of Tiaras: How Disney Princesses Became the Most Effective Soft Power Tool Since the British Navy** While the world’s superpowers jostle for influence through trade wars and military posturing, a far more insidious force has been quietly colonizing the collective imagination of children across every continent: the Disney Princess Industrial Complex. From…
Jonas Brothers World Tour: The Last Helicopter Out of Saigon, But Make It Pop If you squint past the confetti cannons, the Jonas Brothers’ 2024-25 world tour looks less like a nostalgia cash-grab and more like a state-sponsored evacuation—only this time the choppers are branded by Pepsi and the evacuees are millennials clutching overpriced VIP…
Cillian Murphy, International Man of Muffled Dread By “Dublin via Geneva via Netflix” Correspondent The planet’s current favorite furrowed brow has done what no trade summit, no vaccine rollout, no cryptocurrency crash has managed: he’s convinced the entire globe to take a collective cigarette break and stare at the same screen. From Lagos living rooms…
**Fredericksburg: Where History Goes to Get Selfie-Sticked and Monetized** The international press corps has witnessed many peculiar American rituals—Super Bowl Sunday, Black Friday stampedes, the quadrennial democratic pageant they call “finding the least objectionable billionaire to govern us”—but few spectacles rival the anthropological wonder of Fredericksburg, Virginia, during tourist season. Here, in this colonial hamlet…
Mexico vs Japan: A Tale of Two Doomsdays Wrapped in a Baseball Jersey By Jorge “Jet-Lagged” Delgado, International Desk, Dave’s Locker In the grand casino of global affairs, nothing quite says “we’re all in this together” like watching two nations—separated by 11,000 kilometers of Pacific neuroses—slug it out over a stitched leather sphere. The 2023…
Anna Wintour, the bobbed sphinx of the Condé Nast elevator, has become less a magazine editor and more a floating exchange rate for global vanity. From Lagos to Lima, her name is whispered with the reverence otherwise reserved for tax havens or antibiotic-resistant bacteria—proof that influence, like dengue fever, can travel first-class. Every September, when…
When the London Underground coughs itself into another 48-hour industrial coma, the world does not exactly stop turning. Traders in Tokyo still open their screens, Lagos bus drivers still outrun physics, and São Paulo’s skyline keeps blinking like a gambler who knows the house always wins. Yet beneath the blasé shrug of globalization, the tube…
Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific, where the map turns from cobalt blue to a suspiciously Instagram-filtered turquoise, the Hawaiian archipelago is once again auditioning for the part of “Earth’s Paradise” in humanity’s fever-dream tourism reel. From a safe distance—say, a glass-walled lounge in Dubai or a commuter train snaking through Seoul—Hawaii looks like…
Angels Game: How a California Baseball Club Became the Global Poster Child for Bad Luck, Bad Law, and Very Bad PR By Dave’s Locker International Desk SANTA ANA, California—If you had “Angels” and “criminal negligence” in the same bingo card this year, congratulations: you’ve just won the geopolitical version of the Powerball. The Los Angeles…
HONOLULU—While European ultras were torching stadium toilets and Qatari sheikhs were gold-plating their private boxes, the University of Hawaii Rainbow Warriors spent Saturday night doing something far more subversive: playing earnest, mid-tier American football on the outer rim of civilization, 2,400 miles from the nearest conference rival and precisely one ocean away from anyone who…
