The NL Wild Card: A Pocket-Sized Apocalypse on the Edge of the Atlantic By the time you read this, the National League Wild Card game will already be over, its winners basking in champagne and its losers consoling themselves with merchandise discounts and the grim certainty that nothing else they do this year will matter….
Oregon vs Northwestern: A Gridiron Rorschach Test for the Apocalypse By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, Somewhere Over the Pacific If you squint hard enough from thirty-five thousand feet, Saturday’s Oregon-Northwestern skirmish looks less like a football game and more like a polite, padded referendum on which flavor of decline the planet prefers. Out…
Nico Iamaleava and the Geopolitics of a 19-Year-Old’s Arm Dave’s Locker – International Desk When the University of Tennessee’s freshman quarterback Nico Iamaleava uncorked a 55-yard rope against Virginia last weekend, satellites in low-Earth orbit probably flinched. Not because the football threatened their orbital paths—although at this point the Pentagon is probably running the math—but…
**The Accidental Diplomat: How Kumail Nanjiani Became Pakistan’s Most Effective Cultural Export (Whether He Wanted To Or Not)** *From Dave’s Locker International Bureau* Kumail Nanjiani’s journey from Karachi to Silicon Valley’s favorite everyman represents perhaps the most successful soft-power operation Pakistan never intended to launch. While diplomats in Islamabad wrestle with geopolitical headaches and IMF…
The Curious Case of UCLA’s Latest Patriarch: Or, How a Basketball Coach Became a Geopolitical Chess Piece LOS ANGELES—Across the Pacific, Tokyo’s Nikkei dipped 0.8 percent on Tuesday morning after rumors that UCLA had narrowed its coaching search to two men and a houseplant named Brad. In London, the BBC paused its rolling coverage of…
Friday-night stadium lights in Tulsa may look like the same small-town spectacle you can find from Texas to Timbuktu, but zoom out a little and you’ll notice the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association (OSSAA) football season is quietly staging a global morality play—complete with imported drones, European sport-tech investors, and the sort of geopolitical symbolism…
Dodgers vs. the Planet: How a Wednesday Night in Chavez Ravine Quietly Became a Referendum on Everything By the time the first pitch slices through the Los Angeles smog at 7:10 p.m. local time—an hour that translates, depending on your longitude, to the wrong side of dawn in Seoul, elevenses in London, and that awkward…
Zion National Park: America’s Grand Canyon for People Who’ve Already Instagrammed the Grand Canyon By Diego Serrano, International Desk – Dave’s Locker The tour buses roll in at dawn, disgorging their cargo of jet-lagged humanity like a UN summit on jet lag. Dutch hikers in clogs, Chinese newlyweds wielding selfie sticks the size of javelins,…
Kai Who? How a 21-Year-Old from the Bronx Became the UN’s Most Effective (and Unpaid) Cultural Attaché By Our Correspondent, still recovering from the algorithmic whiplash NEW YORK—While the Security Council was busy drafting another strongly-worded sigh about Gaza, a kid who still gets ID’d at R-rated movies managed to unite India, Brazil, and South…
From the cheap seats of history, it’s always the quiet ones who end up scribbling in the margins of global ledgers. Enter Patrick Bailey—an unassuming 38-year-old civil servant from Wellington who, until last Tuesday, was best known inside New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for color-coding spreadsheets and an uncanny ability to source flat whites…
Headline from the Apocalypse’s Sports Desk: Humanity, having successfully weaponized climate, currency, and cat memes, now turns its restless gaze to—of all things—UCLA football. Somewhere between the melting Arctic and the latest crypto-cult, the search for a new Bruins coach has become, improbably, a geopolitical Rorschach test. Let us begin in São Paulo, where a…
Bad Bunny Bites Back: When a Latin Pop Star Becomes the World’s Punching Bag By Our Correspondent Who Has Already Booked Therapy for 2025 San Juan, Puerto Rico – Somewhere between the reggaetón beat drop and the next geopolitical meltdown, Bad Bunny—neighborhood kid Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio—managed to offend three continents, two billionaires, and one…
