The Global Countdown to Westeros: How House of the Dragon Season 3 Became the World’s Most Expensive Collective Therapy Session Winter, that old reliable PR agent for existential dread, is still coming. Yet from the frostbitten suburbs of Helsinki to the sweat-glazed favelas of Rio, humanity has decided the best use of its remaining fossil-fuel…
From the glassy towers of Seoul’s Gangnam district to the favelas of Rio, the name “Young Thug” has become a sort of Rosetta Stone for the universal language of legal theatre. In October 2023, Atlanta’s Fulton County courthouse—already famous for hosting the 2020 election-interference circus—rolled out a sequel: the YSL RICO trial. Abroad, the case…
UC Davis vs Washington: A Rumble on the Pacific Rim That the Rest of the World Pretends Doesn’t Matter—But Actually Sort of Does By Our Correspondent, filing from a hotel minibar somewhere between LAX and Narita To the 7.8 billion humans who weren’t invited, the NCAA women’s volleyball regional semifinal between UC Davis and the…
Dodgers Game Today: How a Ballpark in Chavez Ravine Quietly Hosts the World’s Most Expensive Geopolitical Morality Play The first pitch at Dodger Stadium is scheduled for 7:10 p.m. Pacific Time, which—depending on which international clock you worship—translates to 03:10 tomorrow in Kyiv, 11:10 a.m. in Seoul, and the exact moment a London commodities trader…
Billie Piper and the Great British Export Crisis: How One Actress Became a Global Rorschach Test for National Identity LONDON—While the pound sterling continues its graceful swan-dive off the Brexit cliff and the nation’s top diplomatic strategy appears to be “keep calm and blame the French,” Britain has managed one reliable export: Billie Piper’s face….
From an altitude of 37,000 feet somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, the phrase “Texas Rangers” sounds less like a baseball franchise and more like a geopolitical Rorschach test. To the Japanese businessman nursing a second sake beside me, it evokes memories of the 2010 World Series—his first live game at Tokyo Dome, where the only thing…
U of A Football: How a Desert College Team Became a Soft-Power Proxy in the Great American Decline By Dmitri Volkov, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker TUCSON—On a planet where glaciers retreat faster than Russian conscripts and the global south negotiates BRICS membership while the north binge-streams apocalypse dramas, the University of Arizona Wildcats still run…
Across the planet, “ranger” is less a job description than a Rorschach test. Say it in Nairobi and you picture a Kenya Wildlife Service officer politely asking an irate elephant to please not flatten the minister’s convoy. Whisper it in Warsaw and it conjures a camouflaged forest ghost monitoring Belarusian drones for the EU’s nervous…
Baltimore’s Birds, Beijing’s Bargains, and the Global Currency of Orange Plumage By Our Feathered-Beat Correspondent, Somewhere between the Chesapeake and the Chang Jiang If you thought orioles were merely a mid-table MLB franchise whose biggest export is overpriced crab-cake sandwiches, kindly adjust your binoculars. The word “oriole” is currently flapping across borders faster than a…
Dodgers: The Art of Slipping Away, From Tokyo Tax Shelters to Mediterranean Deck Chairs By Our Correspondent, Still Counting the Empty Seats GENEVA—The word “dodger” once evoked muddy Brooklyn baseball and the crack of post-war innocence. Today it is a cosmopolitan chameleon, changing its accent in every time zone. In Hong Kong it answers to…
In the grand theater of global sport, where nations still pretend that victory on a diamond, pitch, or court somehow elevates their GDP, Eugenio Suárez has become an unlikely case study in the economics of despair. While the world’s central banks play whack-a-mole with inflation and diplomats trade strongly-worded postcards, Suárez—currently the Seattle Mariners’ third-base…
Lindsay Lohan: The World’s Favorite Cautionary Tale, Now Available in Multiple Languages By Our Correspondent Who Has Watched Civilizations Rise and Fall Faster Than Her IMDb Starmeter VIENNA—While the UN Security Council spent last week debating whether a grain corridor in the Black Sea counts as a “strategic success” or merely “lunch,” Lindsay Lohan quietly…
