Andy Beshear: The Mild-Mannered Governor Who Accidentally Became a Global Barometer for Sanity By the time the rest of the planet noticed, Andy Beshear had already spent three calm years governing Kentucky—a state internationally famous for bourbon, horse racing, and a stubborn refusal to pronounce its own name correctly. In most countries, a second-term governor…
Borderlands 4: A Post-Truth Loot-Shooter for the Age of Perpetual Crisis By “Dusty” Diaz, filing from a bullet-scarred internet café in Tijuana The planet is on fire, supply chains are auditioning for a Beckett play, and yet the biggest global release this quarter is—drum-roll on an empty ammo box—Borderlands 4, Gearbox Software’s latest carnival of…
From Lagos to Lisbon, Chance the Rapper has become the polite global ambassador of American angst—an improbable export who somehow convinced the planet that existential dread pairs nicely with gospel choirs and a knit cap. While other U.S. artists hawk gilded despair, Chance peddles it in pastel packaging, a marketing coup that makes even the…
McDonald’s: The Empire That Salted the World By—Our Correspondent Who Has Eaten More Filets-O-Fish Than Is Medically Advisable Somewhere between the Volga and the Mekong, the same aroma of reheated fryer fat drifts through the air, as recognizable as the opening riff of “Smoke on the Water.” It is the perfume of McDonald’s, the golden-arched…
McDonald’s Near Me: A Dispatch from the United Caliphate of the Golden Arches By Our Man in Anywhere, Earth Type “McDonald’s near me” from a rooftop in Cairo, a rain-soaked tram in Glasgow, or the back of a tuk-tuk weaving through Jakarta’s diesel dusk and the same cartographic genie appears—pin-dropping a promise of identical salt,…
Freddie Freeman and the Geopolitics of First Base By Our Man in the Dugout, currently exiled to a Marriott in Singapore where the mini-bar charges more than the GDP of Tuvalu. The planet reels from inflation, drought, and the creeping suspicion that every push-notification is a ransom note for our attention. Meanwhile, Freddie Freeman—first baseman,…
The Dodgers—those perennially over-funded denizens of Chavez Ravine—currently sit atop the National League West like a bored oligarch atop a yacht, lighting Cuban cigars with the hopes of 29 other franchises. From the outside, the standings look tidy: first place, best run-differential on the planet, payroll roughly equivalent to the GDP of Fiji. But zoom…
**Sloane Stephens: The Accidental Diplomat of a Burning World** In the grand theater of global chaos, where nations weaponize trade routes and algorithms radicalize teenagers with the efficiency of a Swiss watch, Sloane Stephens continues to hit fuzzy yellow balls across a rectangle—an act that somehow still matters to billions of humans who’ve agreed this…
San Francisco, a city where the fog rolls in thicker than the average tech CEO’s sincerity, hosts a baseball franchise whose global footprint is oddly disproportionate to the sport’s worldwide popularity. The San Francisco Giants—originally the New York Gothams, because nothing says “major leagues” like a Victorian anxiety attack—now sit at the nexus of American…
Somewhere along the fault line between the Pacific and existential dread, the San Francisco Giants are clinging to a .500 record like a drunk tourist clutching a cable car rail—equal parts determination and denial. Across the globe, people who couldn’t find Oracle Park on a map are nonetheless affected by the orange-and-black’s flirtation with mediocrity,…
Dispatch from the Department of Global Eyebrow Affairs: How Eugene Levy Became the Planet’s Last Reliably Unifying Asset By Marcel “Marbles” Delacroix, Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent, currently in self-imposed exile from polite society It is late May, 2024. The Arctic Council is hurling snowballs at itself over drilling rights, the European Central Bank is printing…
Tokyo, Wednesday, 3:14 a.m. local—while most of the planet was doom-scrolling itself to sleep, Nikon slipped the Zr onto the world stage with the quiet confidence of a sushi chef unveiling a new blade. No pyrotechnics, no influencer orgy on a rented yacht—just a compact, retro-styled mirrorless body that looks like it should come with…
