The Curious Case of Mohammed Alakel: A Portrait in Global Inconvenience By Our Correspondent in Somewhere-With-Wi-Fi Let us begin with the obvious: Mohammed Alakel is not, strictly speaking, famous. His name does not trend on the same algorithmic hamster wheel that recently elevated a raccoon eating cotton candy in a Tokyo subway to the rank…
DraftKings: How a Boston Start-Up Turned the World’s Oldest Vice into a Stock Ticker By our correspondent, still recovering from last night’s “risk-free” bet on Peruvian llama racing BOSTON—MASSACHUSETTS, USA—It began, as most moral panics do, with a PowerPoint deck. Somewhere around 2012, three guys who looked like they still got carded at Applebee’s convinced…
Bryan Woo and the Global High-Fastball Conspiracy By Our Man in the Left-Field Bleachers Somewhere between the panda-sized traffic jams of Jakarta and the espresso-fueled insomnia of Milan, a 24-year-old right-hander from Oakland—population: whatever’s left after the rent—has become the planet’s most unlikely export. Bryan Woo, Seattle Mariners’ sophomore flamethrower, currently owns a WHIP lower…
Shohei Ohtani and the Global Gladiator Circus By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere between Narita and Chavez Ravine The planet’s most profitable form of organized anxiety—Major League Baseball—has finally found its messiah, and wouldn’t you know it, he speaks perfect Japanese, swings like Babe Ruth, and pitches like someone who’s read the collective…
Yaoundé, Cameroon — Somewhere between the Gulf of Guinea and the Sahel’s latest geopolitical migraine lies Cameroon: a nation that has perfected the art of being simultaneously indispensable and invisible. While the rest of the planet argues over whose election is the most rigged or whose inflation is the most “transitory,” Cameroon keeps a low…
Dispatch from the Edge of the Pacific: A Giants Game as Geopolitical Theater Dave’s Locker International — 18 June 2024 Somewhere between the 38th parallel’s nuclear jitters and the 17th parallel’s traffic jams, the San Francisco Giants will today attempt to hit cowhide spheres into McCovey Cove while the rest of the planet pretends to…
América 2–1 Guadalajara: A Football Score That Echoes Louder Than a Narco-Drone in a Mariachi Bar By Dave’s Locker’s Drinks-Expense Correspondent, somewhere between a mezcal hangover and a geopolitical migraine If you missed last night’s Clásico Nacional in the Estadio Azteca, congratulations—you successfully dodged another round of performative nationalism masquerading as sport. América beat Guadalajara…
DeMarcus Cousins: The 6’11” Metaphor for a Planet That Can’t Keep Its Best Pieces Together By our man in the cheap seats, Dave’s Locker Global Bureau PARIS—On a rainy Tuesday evening, in a bar just off Rue de Paradis, a Frenchman, a Senegalese street-vendor, and an Australian backpacker are watching grainy YouTube clips of DeMarcus…
Milano-Cortina 2026: The Last Winter Games Before the Thaw By the time the Olympic cauldron sputters to life in the Dolomites, the planet will have endured another 1,800-odd days of record-breaking heat, two more COP summits that achieve less than a kindergarten show-and-tell, and roughly 1.4 billion TikTok videos of cats skiing on cardboard. Welcome…
Toluca vs Puebla: When Two Mexican Towns Turn a Soccer Rivalry into a Global Parable of Inflation, Emigration, and Existential Despair By the time the whistle blew last Saturday night, Estadio Nemesio Diez looked less like a football ground and more like a Hieronymus Bosch painting sponsored by Coca-Cola. Smoke from illicit flares mingled with…
Toluca to Puebla: The 120-Kilometer Fault Line Where Mexico Explains the Planet to Itself By Our Man in the Middle of Somewhere Every country keeps a stretch of asphalt that functions as its emotional ECG strip. The United States has I-95, France has the périphérique, and Mexico, bless its melodramatic heart, has the 95D from…
Boston College vs Stanford: A Duel of Jesuit Guilt and Silicon Valley Optimism on the World’s Most Expensive Stage By Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Pacific Let us begin with the obvious: a football game between Boston College and Stanford is not, by any sober metric, a seismic event. It will not move the Shanghai…
