Mateo Chávez and the Beautiful, Doomed Dream of the Global Everyman By our correspondent in the departures lounge of a half-built airport that will never open MEXICO CITY—Somewhere between the mariachi-themed Starbucks and the fourth immigration checkpoint, Mateo Chávez became an international metaphor. The 37-year-old Mexico City street-vendor—who owes his new fame to a seventeen-second…
Ryan Howard, the Sultan of Swing-and-Miss, Still Haunts Ballparks from Caracas to Canberra By Dave’s Locker International Desk There’s a moment—usually in the bottom of the 7th, when the beer lines shorten and the scoreboard goes politely berserk—when every ballpark outside the United States seems to summon the ghost of Ryan Howard. In Seoul, the…
Baseball, that pastoral relic of 19th-century American leisure, still manages to ricochet across the planet every October like a drunken satellite. This week the Philadelphia Phillies—those perennial bridesmaids in red pinstripes—have clawed their way atop the National League East, and the reverberations are being felt from Caracas to Seoul. Why should a city famous for…
The Name That Quietly Rules the World By Our Correspondent in Transit Between Time Zones Somewhere above the North Atlantic, seat 14B is occupied by a mid-level trade attaché who still believes his job matters. Somewhere below, a container ship named *MSC Crawford* glides past Gibraltar carrying 19,000 units of everything from Ukrainian sunflower oil…
Balogun: The Global Bazaar Where Everyone Haggles Over the Future By Our Man with a Hangover in Three Time Zones ISTANBUL—Try explaining “balogun” to a jet-lagged German trade attaché who thinks it’s a new crypto coin. You’ll watch his pupils dilate when he realises it’s actually the planet’s biggest informal market—an open-air, cash-only Disneyland stretching…
Tegucigalpa and Managua have never been accused of modesty, but even by Central-American standards their latest pas de deux feels like geopolitical cabaret performed on a stage made of termite-riddled balsa. While the rest of the planet obsesses over whether an American president can remember which continent he’s bombing, the strip of land between the…
Charlie Sheen: A One-Man Sanctions Regime the World Keeps Negotiating With By “Lucky” Lucinda Marín, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The name Carlos Irwin Estévez—better known to Interpol, hotel security cameras, and late-night subtitle writers as Charlie Sheen—functions as a sort of transnational Rorschach test. To Los Angeles he is an errant sitcom warhead; to Bangkok…
Kelsey Mitchell: The Canadian Cyclist Who Pedaled Past Geopolitics and Into Global Daylight By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—While the rest of us were doom-scrolling through the collapse of another cease-fire and the latest crypto-scam, a 30-year-old from Sherwood Park, Alberta quietly outsprinted the planet’s fastest women on two wheels. Kelsey Mitchell’s keirin gold at…
Emilio Estevez: The Last Suburban Guerrilla in a Franchise-Burned World By Luisa “Lu” Moreau, Geneva Bureau Chief, Dave’s Locker GENEVA—In the age when every cinematic universe expands faster than a hedge-fund bonus, Emilio Estevez remains the cinematic equivalent of a Swiss canton that never joined the EU: stubbornly sovereign, faintly alpine, and politely allergic to…
Mark Ruffalo: The Accidental Superpower the World Has to Live With By Dave’s Foreign Bureau Chief, still jet-lagged in Copenhagen Somewhere between the red carpets and the climate summits, Mark Ruffalo mutated from affable character actor into a one-man NGO with excellent cheekbones. While other Hollywood exports sell protein powder or failed streaming services, Ruffalo…
Flight Radar: The World’s Most Polite Panopticon Somewhere over the Black Sea, a Boeing 737 freighter named “Rainbow Unicorn” is ferrying 42 tons of cut-price Lithuanian cucumbers to Riyadh. At 04:17 UTC you can watch it on FlightRadar24, sandwiched between a Qatar Airways A350 bound for São Paulo and a Russian business jet whose owner…
Argentina’s Blue-and-White Circus Rolls On, Trailed by Ghosts, Goalposts, and Global Schadenfreude By “Bitter” Bill McAllister, Senior Correspondent, Buenos Aires Bureau (currently working from a bar that claims Maradona once sneezed on table 9) In most countries, football is a sport. In Argentina it is an ongoing, slightly unhinged national therapy session that the rest…
