The last time the world cared this much about tigers and marlins in the same breath, a Bond villain was monologuing. Yet here we are, watching the Detroit Tigers and Miami Marlins wage a proxy war over the soul of professional baseball, while the rest of the planet politely pretends to follow the score. From…
Astros vs Braves: A Global Power Outage Disguised as a Baseball Game By Diego Serrano, Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Houston, Texas – Somewhere between the first pitch and the last corporate-sponsored wave, the Astros and Braves reminded the planet that even in an age of intercontinental hypersonic missiles and algorithmic romance, two groups of overpaid…
Katya Kuropas: The Zelenskyy In-Law Who Accidentally Became Geopolitical Clickbait By Our Correspondent, somewhere between a Kyiv bunker and a Mediterranean yacht slip The world has many pressing questions—climate tipping points, supply-chain apocalypse, whether Elon Musk will eventually buy the moon—but this week the chattering classes have instead latched onto Katya Kuropas. For the uninitiated,…
The World According to Taylor, or How One Pop Star Became a Soft-Power Superpower By Dave’s Locker International Desk While diplomats in Geneva were busy politely disagreeing over whose war crimes were more regrettable this week, the real multilateral summit was unfolding on a stage in Buenos Aires. Taylor Swift—yes, that Taylor Swift—was simultaneously crashing…
Arizona vs Kansas State: A Dust-Bowl Derby for the Age of Global Collapse By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Pacific The world’s longest-running reality show—American college football—returns to its regularly scheduled desert melodrama this Saturday, as the Arizona Wildcats host the Kansas State Wildcats in a contest so regionally specific it…
WrestleMania 43: The Empire of Spandex Returns to Terrify Diplomats Everywhere By Diego “The Guillotine” García – senior correspondent, still jet-lagged in three languages Lincoln, Nebraska – The world’s most flamboyant geopolitical summit, otherwise marketed as WWE WrestleMania 43, touched down last night in a cornfield-cum-stadium that locals optimistically call “The Octagon of Dreams.” One…
Yankees vs. Red Sox: How a Provincial Grudge Match Accidentally Became the World’s Longest-Running Reality Show By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, two American baseball clubs—one dressed like conservative undertakers, the other like over-caffeinated Christmas elves—managed to convince the planet that their private…
Call it what you will—maritime banditry, state-sponsored larceny, or the world’s most depressing sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean—but the latest flare-up in the Red Sea has resurrected the hoary binary of pirates versus nationals. Except this time the eye patches are optional and the flags all claim to be legitimate. From the Gulf of…
Gary Player, the Black Knight of the fairways, has spent nine decades swinging clubs and scolding the rest of us for not doing enough sit-ups. Born in 1935 on a South African cattle farm so remote it probably didn’t get the memo about apartheid until the late nineties, Player has become the planet’s most peripatetic…
Indiana State vs Indiana: A Heartland Grudge Match as Viewed from the International Cheap Seats By Dave’s far-flung correspondent, nursing jet-lag in a Frankfurt airport lounge that smells of bratwurst and regret. To the rest of the planet, the spectacle unfolding in Terre Haute this weekend looks like two American institutions squabbling over a basketball…
Kansas City, USA – Somewhere on the edge of the American prairie, two baseball clubs whose names sound like an undergraduate seminar on political philosophy—the Kansas City Royals and the Philadelphia Phillies—are presently locked in what the locals insist on calling a “World Series.” This is adorable. In the grand bazaar of global sport, where…
Kareena Kapoor: Global Soft-Power in a Size-Zero Sari By Our Man in Mumbai (and Everywhere Else with Wi-Fi) There is a moment, somewhere between the seventh Instagram reel and the algorithmic abyss, when the planet collectively pauses to watch a Bollywood actress sip iced coffee on a balcony in Bandra. That actress is usually Kareena…
