Chad Powers Goes Global: How a Mustachioed Quarterback Is Quietly Re-Writing Soft-Power Playbooks COPENHAGEN—Somewhere between a NATO summit and the latest climate meltdown, the planet has discovered its newest diplomatic weapon: a 27-year-old American wearing wrap-around shades and a fake mustache that looks like it was stolen from a 1970s adult-film extra. “Chad Powers,” the…
Panama: Where the World Goes to Park Its Dirty Laundry By Santiago “Santi” Vargas, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The first thing you notice when you land in Panama City is how aggressively new everything looks. Skyscrapers erupt like chrome mushrooms after a rainstorm of offshore cash. The second thing you notice is that half the…
Ethan Hawke: The Last American Leading Man Who Still Reads Books on Airplanes *By Our Jaded Foreign Correspondent in a Departure Lounge Somewhere Between Reykjavík and Regret* The planet tilts, currencies collapse, and TikTok teaches teenagers to perform open-heart surgery in fifteen seconds flat, yet Ethan Hawke persists—loping through film festivals from Sarajevo to Santiago…
The 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City were billed as a celebration of human excellence, a moment when the planet’s finest athletes gathered in Utah to glide, spin, and occasionally face-plant for the greater glory of their flag-bearing overlords. From the vantage point of 2024—after two decades of pandemics, populist coups, and the slow-motion…
Cupertino, California – The iPhone 17 was unveiled yesterday beneath an LED sky the color of a corporate sunrise, and within minutes the planet performed its annual synchronized swoon. From Lagos to Lahore, Berlin to Bogotá, the same ritual unfolded: thumbs hovering above “Add to Cart,” credit-card limits quietly recalculated, and a billion screens refreshed…
Phillies Magic Number: When a Baseball Stat Becomes the Planet’s Faint Pulse By the time most of the world had finished doom-scrolling news of yet another currency free-fall and a renegade super-typhoon doing donuts in the Pacific, a quiet, almost quaint phrase began trending on English-language timelines from Lagos to Lahore: “Phillies magic number.” For…
**The Beautiful Game’s Ugly Stepsister: CONCACAF Qualifiers and the Theater of the Absurd** While the world obsesses over UEFA’s glitzy Champions League and South America’s passionate derbies, there’s a corner of global football that operates like a fever dream scripted by a committee of bureaucrats, cartel accountants, and that one uncle who insists he could’ve…
The Global Apple: A Fruit, a Brand, and a Metaphor for How We Keep Getting Bitten By the time you finish this sentence, 1.2 million actual apples will have been eaten somewhere on Earth—mostly by schoolchildren who didn’t want them and adults who convinced themselves the daily one keeps the oncologist away. Meanwhile, 7,000 digital…
Knives Out: A Global Affair in Which Everyone Is Guilty By Our Correspondent Who Has Already Checked the Silverware Drawer GENEVA—The phrase “knives out” once conjured up quaint English country houses, thunderclaps, and a Belgian sleuth fussing over egg-temperature. Today it is less parlour game and more planetary blood sport. From the South China Sea…
Rockies vs Dodgers: A Ballgame for the End of the World By Diego “Flight Risk” Morales, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker DENVER—Somewhere between the thin air that makes baseballs fly like drunken drones and the smog that makes sunsets look like a Dario Argento film, the Colorado Rockies hosted the Los Angeles Dodgers last night. On…
Dave’s Locker – International Desk 3 June 2024 Red Sox vs Athletics: A Microscopic Battle on a Planet That’s Already on Fire By the time the first pitch left Brayan Bello’s hand in Oakland, the Nikkei had slipped another 400 points, a cyclone was politely rearranging the coast of Bangladesh, and somewhere in Brussels a…
Stockholm Syndrome, Global Edition: Watching the World Argue Over a 20-Year-Old Who Still Can’t Legally Rent a Car in Most U.S. States By Dave’s International Affairs Desk The planet’s most famous truant is at it again. Greta Thunberg, whose 2018 “Skolstrejk för klimatet” began as a solo cardboard protest outside the Swedish parliament, has now…
