Riley Green’s “Damn Country Music” Isn’t Just for Alabama Anymore A dispatch from the frontlines of soft-power twang and algorithmic Americana By the time the first banjo lick of Riley Green’s latest single pinged a cell tower in rural Pickens County, it had already ricocheted through a 5G relay in Seoul, been Shazam-ed in a…
Geneva, Switzerland – In the chandeliered ballroom of the Hotel InterContinental, a Swiss fiduciary is explaining to a roomful of jet-lagged dentists why their life savings are now “tactically overweight” in Kazakh uranium. The dentists nod solemnly, as if receiving communion. Somewhere behind the coffee station, a Bloomberg terminal blinks red: U.S. debt ceiling crisis,…
The Giants Game, as the English-speaking world insists on calling it, returned again last week to remind us that even in an era of orbital supply chains and near-instantaneous financial collapse, humanity still finds comfort in watching very large men in very tight trousers try to move an egg-shaped object a few yards at a…
Wiz Khalifa: The Pittsburgh Piper Who Convinced the Planet to Stay High and Keep Smiling By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, Somewhere Over the International Dateline The first thing you notice, boarding any long-haul flight that still tolerates in-flight entertainment, is that Wiz Khalifa has become the unofficial soundtrack of altitude. Somewhere between the…
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the Quiet Rebellion of Global Cool By the time the Eurozone was debating its eighteenth austerity package and the Pacific was busy swallowing another micronation’s coastline, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was perfecting a step-back jumper so surgically smooth it could probably negotiate better trade terms than most G-7 delegates. The Oklahoma City guard—Canadian passport,…
The planet’s collective sofa has developed a deeper imprint. From Lagos laundromats live-tweeting Nigerian noir on cracked phones to pensioners in Riga bingeing Korean revenge operas between power cuts, the new movies dropping this week on the major streamers are less “content” than emergency rations for a species that has agreed, tacitly, to stay indoors…
Drew Barrymore: The Planet’s Favorite Child Star Turned Global Comfort Blanket By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, Drew Barrymore became the last universally acceptable American export—less carcinogenic than Coke, less bellicose than aircraft carriers, and somehow more soothing than the entire pharmaceutical aisle…
Gemini: The Heavenly Twins Go Global, Again By the time you finish this sentence, three new AI models will have been trained, two crypto exchanges will have imploded, and one astrologer in Mumbai will have blamed Mercury retrograde for all of it. Yet amid the perpetual churn of modernity, the word “Gemini” keeps bobbing to…
In the grand, gaudy casino of global baseball, where every slider is a geopolitical statement and every fastball a referendum on national virility, the name Luis Castillo keeps popping up like a bad penny—or, depending on your passport, a really good one. From the aluminum-roofed ballparks of the Dominican winter league to the corporate cathedrals…
Tyreek Hill Trade: A 4.24-Second Sprint Toward Global Absurdity By “Jet-Lagged” Javier Morales, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker ZURICH—Somewhere between the gnomes counting gold in Bahnhofstrasse vaults and the FIFA executives pretending to read ethics reports, the Tyreek Hill trade reached this Alpine fortress of neutrality and caused the only known spike in heart-rate among Swiss…
Michael Conforto: The Yankee-Scented Rebound the World Didn’t Know It Needed By Camila “Scout” Delgado, Chief Baseball Cynic, Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between Xi Jinping’s Belt-Road ribbon cuttings and the latest EU olive-oil shortage, the planet’s attention turned—however briefly—to a 31-year-old left-handed outfielder from Seattle who still looks like the kid who forgot his…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Champs-Élysées and a dimly lit sports bar in Lagos, the name Terrell Owens still triggers the same half-smirk: the universal facial expression that says, “Yes, I remember the popcorn, the push-ups, and the existential dread of being very good at catching leather in a collapsing empire.” From the vantage point of a…
