The San Diego Padres, a baseball franchise named after Catholic friars who preferred sandals to spikes, have improbably become a Rorschach test for the late-capitalist West. From a café overlooking the Bosphorus, where I’m nursing a Turkish coffee and an existential headache, the Padres’ recent spending spree—roughly the GDP of Montenegro—reads less like roster construction…
Chicago PD: America’s Favorite Copaganda Goes Global By our bruised-but-still-breathing foreign correspondent If you’ve ever wondered what the United States exports after steel, software, and self-delusion, look no further than “Chicago P.D.”—the Dick Wolf juggernaut now sprinting across 200-odd territories like a steroid-fueled patrolman chasing a teenager over a graffiti-tagged fence. From Lagos living rooms…
Will Smith, Dodgers, and the Accidental Metaphor for a Planet That Swings at Everything When news broke that the Los Angeles Dodgers had signed reliever Will Smith—no, not that Will Smith, the other one, the one who throws 95-mph sinkers instead of televised slaps—global reaction was swift, multilingual, and predictably unhinged. Tokyo sports bars erupted…
Blake Snell and the Collapsing Empire of Baseball’s Middle Class By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—From the banks of the Seine, where café philosophers argue whether existential dread pairs better with a Bordeaux or a baguette, one may peer across the Atlantic and behold an American pitcher named Blake Snell—two syllables now shorthand for late-capitalist…
Dream vs Sun: The Global Cage Match Nobody Signed Up For by Marcello V. DeSilva, International Correspondent, Somewhere Between Jet-Lag and Existential Dread The opening bell rang in Riyadh at 3 a.m. local, but the fight was already on every screen from Lagos laundromats to Tokyo taxis: the Dream—slick, filtered, eternally 23—versus the Sun—unlicensed, unfiltered,…
**Houston, We Have a Problem: How the Astros Standings Became a Global Barometer for American Decline** While the citizens of Houston obsess over whether their beloved Astros will clinch another playoff berth, the rest of the planet watches with the detached fascination of spectators at a slow-motion train wreck—except the train is carrying the entire…
Austin Wells: The $300 Million Cabin Boy of Global Capitalism By the time you finish this sentence, some algorithm in Singapore will have already placed a micro-bet on whether Austin Wells will sneeze during batting practice. Such is the velocity of modern celebrity: one week you’re a polite 24-year-old from Sacramento who happens to hit…
The Mariner’s Paradox: How One Rain-Soaked Baseball Club Became the World’s Quietest Metaphor From the 23rd-floor press box of T-Mobile Park—where the Pacific Northwest drizzle drifts sideways like a reluctant apology—you can almost hear the planet shrugging. Down on the emerald rectangle, the Seattle Mariners are doing what they have done for most of the…
Perseverance’s Red-Planet Road Trip: A Global Vanity Mirror in 4K The latest postcard from NASA’s Mars rover—complete with sweeping drone footage and a selfie that would humble any influencer—arrived this week with the usual fanfare: breathless headlines from Houston, congratulatory tweets from Jakarta, and, somewhere in the Kremlin, a stony silence thick enough to slice…
Mexico City, population 9.2 million on paper and 22 million if you count the smog particles with voting rights, has always been the place where the future lands early and overstays its welcome. While Berlin still argues about rent caps and New York discovers e-bikes, CDMX has already beta-tested them, crashed them, and turned the…
Mark Levin’s Voice Travels Farther Than His Passport Ever Will By Our Correspondent in a Café that Still Accepts Cash, Somewhere East of the Atlantic PARIS—Somewhere in the 14th arrondissement, a retiree from Normandy is muttering about “constitutional originalism” while buttering a baguette. The culprit? A YouTube algorithm that, in its infinite wisdom, decided a…
When the FBI’s own agents start suing their employer, the world’s brass bands pause mid-parade. In 2024, eleven current and former FBI employees filed a class-action in Virginia claiming the Bureau’s disciplinary system is “arbitrary, Kafkaesque, and marinated in political spite.” Translation: the guys who normally serve subpoenas are now on the receiving end, and…
