From the banks of the Ohio, a polite Midwestern roar rises, and the rest of the planet—busy stockpiling canned beans for the next geopolitical hiccup—barely notices. Yet Louisville volleyball, that tidy constellation of 18-to-22-year-olds who still believe in hydration and pre-game playlists, is quietly staging a small coup on the order of things. While the…
Selena Gomez’s Waistline Shrinkage: A New Chapter in the Great Global Panic About Women’s Bodies by Matteo Vargas, International Desk Paris—Somewhere between the collapse of the Sahel, the re-routing of the world’s grain through Russian artillery lanes, and Elon Musk’s latest plan to monetise the concept of Tuesday, humanity has paused to ask the truly…
Tina Charles, the 6’4″ walking referendum on American exceptionalism, has just reminded the planet that gravity remains a negotiable concept—provided you possess a 34-inch vertical and a passport thick enough to double as body armor. While the rest of us were busy doom-scrolling through supply-chain memes and energy-crisis cosplay, Charles quietly collected her fourth EuroLeague…
The Eternal Press Conference An International Dispatch on Palestine, or How to Hold a 75-Year-Long Vigil for a Map By the time you finish reading this sentence, another minister in some distant capital will have declared that the “two-state solution remains the only viable path.” Meanwhile, the cartographers of the Levant have long since given…
Major League, Minor Morals: How the World’s Most Expensive Circus Keeps Re-Exporting American Exceptionalism By Ignacio “Nacho” Vega, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker PARIS—On a drizzly evening in the 15th arrondissement, a bistro TV flickers between Ligue 1 highlights and the Yankees-Red Sox tilt. The French patrons, who pretend to disdain anything louder than a mime,…
Corinthians vs. Athletico-PR: A Microcosm of the Planet’s Slow-Motion Meltdown By the time the ball is kicked on Sunday in São Paulo, the United Nations will still be debating whether “climate catastrophe” is too alarmist a term, another crypto-exchange will have “misplaced” a few hundred million dollars, and somewhere in the Pacific a container ship…
From the banks of the Potomac to the backrooms of Davos, one man’s Brooklyn vowels now echo like a geopolitical starter pistol: Senator Charles Ellis “Chuck” Schumer, the human embodiment of American legislative gridlock—and, paradoxically, the only person who can still make it move. Watching Schumer twist arms in the U.S. Senate these days feels…
**Seth Rogen: The Stoner King Who Conquered the World (and Nobody Stopped Him)** In a world teetering on the brink of environmental collapse, where democracy faces its midlife crisis and billionaires treat space travel like a weekend getaway, one man has achieved what diplomats and defense contractors never could: global unity through the universal language…
Shrimp: The Tiny Crustacean Steering the Planet They arrive pink, curled, and eerily compliant on cocktail platters from Dubai to Detroit, but the global shrimp economy is anything but docile. Beneath the cocktail sauce lies a supply chain so tangled it could double as a hostage negotiation: mangroves in Indonesia become fish-meal in Norway, which…
Citizens of the world, gather round: an American baseball stadium in Philadelphia has coughed up the latest iteration of “Karen”—that globally contagious strain of middle-class entitlement—proving once again that pandemics need not be viral to go planetary. While Ukrainians dodge artillery and Sudanese queue for water, the most urgent dispatch from the City of Brotherly…
The Last King of Cable: Bill O’Reilly’s Global Afterglow By our man in the departure lounge, still waiting for the apocalypse They say every empire exports its worst habits first. If that’s true, Bill O’Reilly was the 21st-century equivalent of sending smallpox-infected blankets overseas: a loud, indignant comforter stuffed with self-certainty and manufactured grievance. From…
Ted Cruz: The World’s Favorite Cartoon Supervillain By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—From the banks of the Seine, where waiters still refuse to serve Freedom Fries, Ted Cruz looks less like a U.S. senator and more like a recurring character in a prestige drama about the decline of empires. To Europeans who’ve spent the last…
