Eastern Kentucky vs Marshall: Appalachian Grudge Match as Proxy Theater for the World’s Slow-Motion Collapse Dave’s Locker – International Desk HUNTINGTON, West Virginia – While COP28 delegates in Dubai were congratulating themselves on a lukewarm promise to maybe, possibly, think about phasing down fossil fuels “when convenient,” roughly 22,000 people wedged themselves into two decaying…
The World Holds Its Breath While South Carolina Argues Over a Football Score By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently sober enough to file copy from a bar with Wi-Fi that smells faintly of regret and onion rings. In a week when the Arctic belched out its hottest June on record, when a German bank quietly asked…
Match of the Day: A Global Spectacle, Sponsored by Existential Dread By Our Foreign Desk Correspondent, somewhere between the bar and the abyss LONDON—Somewhere in the bowels of Broadcasting House, the BBC’s flagship football digest rolls off the production line every Saturday night like a precision-guided missile aimed squarely at the nation’s collective sofa. But…
Sainsbury’s Argos: The Quiet British Invasion of Global Living Rooms By the time you finish reading this sentence, another Argos “Fast Track” van will have screeched away from a Sainsbury’s car park somewhere in the Home Counties, bound for a semi-detached house whose occupant just ordered a £39.99 air fryer at 2:17 a.m. in a…
Tudum: The Global Echo Chamber We Never Asked For If you’ve ever wondered what the sound of late-stage capitalism clearing its throat would be, Netflix has helpfully provided the answer: “Tudum.” A two-syllable onomatopoeic belch that now doubles as a fan-festival, streaming strategy, and, increasingly, a soft-power flex. Last week the traveling circus—equal parts trade-show,…
The BBC schedule, that timid spreadsheet of imperial nostalgia, still beams out from London with the solemnity of a butler announcing dinner. Yet what looks like a quaint list of “Gardeners’ World” and “Antiques Roadshow” is, in truth, a soft-power stealth bomber making nightly landings in 180-odd territories. While Washington exports aircraft carriers and Beijing…
The Global Gospel According to Six Little Numbers By “Lucky” Matteo Volkov, roaming correspondent and reluctant statistician Somewhere between the duty-free cigarette counter and the overpriced espresso machine at Istanbul’s new mega-airport, I watched a Kazakh oil engineer, a Filipino nurse, and a German backpacker queue for the same thing: a slip of thermal paper…
Fábio Carvalho: The €7 Million Footballer Who Reminds Us the World Is Still For Sale, Just at a Discount If you squint hard enough at Fábio Carvalho’s career trajectory, you can see the entire global economy refracted in miniature: a Portuguese kid born in Torres Vedras, polished in England, loan-dumped in Germany, and now hawked…
Big Papi, Global Papa: How David Ortiz Became the Dominican Republic’s Most Portable Export By the time David Ortiz finally decided to stop swinging the lumber in 2016—roughly one retirement ceremony after every other living legend—he had already transcended the quaint provincial pastime Americans still quaintly call “baseball.” From Santo Domingo barrios to Tokyo yakitori…
C.J. Baxter and the Portable Apocalypse: How One Kid’s Viral Playlist Became the Soundtrack to Civilizational Anxiety By Alistair “Grim” McTavish, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker In the grand, slow-motion car crash we politely call “the 2020s,” it usually takes a thermonuclear tweet or a surprise land war to make the entire planet synchronize its doom-scrolling….
The Global Gladiators: Alcorn State vs. Mississippi State and the Theater of the Absurd In the grand amphitheater of American college football—where unpaid laborers risk lifelong injury for the glory of institutions that pay their coaches in Gulfstream jets—Saturday’s pairing between Alcorn State and Mississippi State has somehow ricocheted onto the world stage. From the…
From the Souk to the Streaming Queue: Barbara Eden’s Accidental Diplomacy in a Post-Genie World By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats Somewhere between the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the latest TikTok cease-fire, a perky brunette in harem pants blinked into existence and never quite blinked out. Barbara Eden—actress, accidental soft-power envoy, and…
