Barcelona–Dux Logroño: A Microscopic Derby With Macro-Cosmic Baggage by our man on the Iberian beat If the universe is indeed indifferent, it must have chuckled last weekend when tiny Dux Logroño—population 150,000, budget roughly the price of Lionel Messi’s left foot—gate-crashed the Camp Nou to contest a league match against the celestial behemoth that is…
Tampa Bay Rays versus Chicago Cubs: a pairing that sounds less like a playoff preview and more like an eco-tourism brochure gone rogue. Somewhere an endangered Florida manta glides past the ivy-strewn bricks of Wrigley, wondering why its name is being invoked in a contest featuring grown men chewing sunflower seeds at industrial scale. Yet…
Russian Drones in Poland: Or, How to Lose a Drone and Win a War of Innuendo By Dave’s Foreign Desk, somewhere between cynicism and the Schengen Zone WARSAW, 05:47 local time—Residents of the Polish village of Żerdź thought the 3 a.m. fireworks were just another Friday-night gender-reveal party gone Slavic. They were half-right: the explosion…
Batman, Brand, and the Bleak Ballet of Global Fame: Robert Pattinson’s Accidental Geopolitics By “Gravedigger” G. M. Alonso, filing from the last airport lounge still serving warm beer PARIS—Somewhere above the Atlantic, Robert Pattinson is probably trying to sleep in business class while the rest of us mortals doom-scroll through cascading crises. The man once…
Simone Biles and the Global Collapse of the Superhuman Myth By our correspondent in a city that still believes medals cure inflation Somewhere between Tokyo’s cardboard beds and Paris’s bedbug-ridden mattresses, Simone Biles decided that a quadruple twist with a side of existential dread was one trick too many. The planet, already short on heroes,…
Rod Stewart, the gravel-voiced troubadour of post-war Britain, has spent six decades proving that polyester doesn’t biodegrade and neither does celebrity. From the smoky pubs of Swinging London to the permanently-lit atriums of Dubai’s five-star hotels, his career is a living fossil—part cautionary tale, part lucrative museum piece—wheeled out whenever global capitalism needs a soundtrack…
Amtrak: How a Rust-Belt Railroad Became the World’s Most Expensive Metaphor From the bullet-train penthouses of Tokyo to the velvety sleepers of the Moscow–Paris route, the planet has more or less agreed on what a national rail service should do: move citizens quickly, cheaply, and without the existential dread that accompanies a middle seat on…
Kelvin Gastelum, A Microcosm of the Planet’s Perpetual Underdog Story By Eduardo “The Jet-Lagged Prophet” Morales, international desk, Dave’s Locker Somewhere in São Paulo a taxi driver is replaying Gastelum’s left hook on loop between WhatsApp memes. In a Seoul PC-bang, a kid toggles between League of Legends and a pirated UFC 236 stream just…
Noah Wyle and the Last ER: How One American Actor Quietly Became the Global Hospital’s Patron Saint of Controlled Chaos By the time most of the planet had locked its doors in March 2020, Noah Wyle—once television’s most over-qualified pediatric ER resident—was in Amman, shooting a refugee-camp miniseries that nobody outside the Arab world had…
Bamako, the capital whose name sounds like a late-night jazz riff but whose mornings smell of diesel, dust, and unfiltered ambition, sits on the Niger River like a card player who’s already shown his hand too many times. In the global imagination, Mali is either a red blob on the Foreign Office map or the…
Bishkek – population roughly the same as Tucson, elevation slightly higher than Denver, and geopolitical relevance that keeps Washington, Beijing, and Moscow awake in shifts. To the casual atlas-flipper it’s just a vowel-heavy smudge between steppe and Tian Shan, yet this modest capital has become the world’s most polite knife-fight: all blades politely concealed beneath…
Salman Ali Agha and the Quiet Art of Surviving the Spotlight By our South-Asia bureau, nursing its third Nescafé of the morning Karachi, 3 a.m.—While the rest of the planet doom-scrolls through another geopolitical migraine, a 25-year-old in a green blazer is quietly shouldering Pakistan’s most volatile export: hope. Salman Ali Agha, the latest “next…
