Tate McRae at the 2025 VMAs: A Tiny Canadian Teaches the World to Panic in Sync By Dave’s Locker International Desk NEW YORK—On paper, the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards were just another late-summer pageant of sequins, corporate synergy, and the faint smell of desperation. In practice, they became the moment the planet realized it…
Dispatch from the Emerald City, Circa 2025: The Small Matter of One Julio Rodríguez and the Imploding World Beyond the Foul Poles By the time Julio Rodríguez stepped into the right-handed batter’s box on a soggy Thursday in Seattle—swinging his neon-pink bat like a man politely asking the universe for a brief cease-fire—global supply chains…
The American League West: A Pocket-Sized Empire in a World That Barely Notices Somewhere between the Strait of Hormuz and the Taiwan Strait, the planet’s most combustible shipping lanes hum with crude-oil tankers whose cargo value dwarfs the combined payrolls of the Houston Astros and Seattle Mariners. Yet if you scroll far enough down the…
SANTIAGO GIMÉNEZ AND THE ABSURD GLOBAL TRADE IN TWENTY-SOMETHING KNEES By Rufus Harding, International Football Sceptic, filing from a hotel bar that still thinks fax machines are cutting-edge. Somewhere on the map between NAFTA’s corpse and TikTok’s next viral dance, a 22-year-old Mexican striker named Santiago Giménez is busy proving that the world economy still…
Klarna’s Long-Awaited IPO: A Swedish Fairy Tale for the Age of Perpetual Debt Stockholm’s crisp spring air smells faintly of cardamom buns and, this week, of burning cash. Klarna, the buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) pioneer that taught the world to split the price of a pair of sneakers into four guilt-free installments, has finally filed to go…
Tonight, somewhere between the seventh re-watch of a Korean revenge thriller and the eighth doom-scroll through a European heat-wave montage, the Mega Millions drum will roll in Atlanta like a slot machine in purgatory. One-point-five-five billion dollars—give or take a rounding error that could bankroll the entire GDP of Vanuatu—will slosh from one plastic sphere…
**The Josh Naylor Phenomenon: How a Canadian Slugger Became Baseball’s Global Anxiety Mirror** In the grand theater of international sports, where nations pour billions into soft power projection and diplomatic flexing, sometimes the most profound geopolitical statements come from a 26-year-old Canadian wielding a maple bat in Cleveland. Josh Naylor, the Mississauga-born first baseman whose…
Better Call Saul, or How to Launder Your Reputation in Six Languages and a Fake Mustache By Our Correspondent Somewhere Over International Waters When the final credits rolled on Better Call Saul last year, the collective sigh of relief from global streaming services was almost loud enough to drown out the hum of crypto-mining rigs…
Ashlee Simpson and the Geopolitics of a Saturday-Night Snafu By our correspondent still recovering from 2004 PARIS—Every empire eventually faces its Suez moment: a live, televised humiliation so crisp that satellites beam the collapse of confidence into living rooms from Lagos to Lima. For the American behemoth known as “late-aughts pop culture,” that moment arrived…
The Curious Case of Harold Fannin Jr., or How a Buckeye Tight End Became the Planet’s Newest Geopolitical Football By the time Harold Fannin Jr. caught his third touchdown against Kent State last September, satellites from three continents had already locked onto the 6-foot-4, 242-pound sophomore. Not because the NSA suddenly cares about MACtion, mind…
When the World Ends, Bravo Will Still Be Green-Lighting Reunions by our correspondent in the last functioning embassy bar, somewhere between Reykjavík and oblivion Somewhere in the rubble of 2024, while governments topple, oceans acidify, and TikTok teenagers auction their bathwater as NFTs, one American man keeps the global living-room lamp on. His name is…
Willy Adames and the Glorious Futility of Loving Shortstops While Rome Burns Dave’s Locker – International Sports & Existential Dread Desk If you’ve been too busy doom-scrolling about the latest currency collapse or wondering which hemisphere will spontaneously combust first, you may have missed the fact that Willy Adames—yes, the Dominican shortstop with the swing…
