Lynx vs Fever: A Tale of Two Temperatures and One Very Confused Planet By Dave’s Locker International Desk (still wearing a hazmat suit “just in case”) Let us begin with the obvious: somewhere in the last decade the natural world decided that satire was obsolete and hired itself out as a headline writer. Case in…
DENVER, Colorado—The Mile-High City’s weather forecast this week reads like a ransom note Mother Nature scribbled on the back of a bar napkin: 70°F on Monday, 7 inches of snow by Wednesday, and a 30% chance of existential dread by the weekend. To the average Coloradan this is merely Tuesday; to the rest of the…
Brazil vs Bolivia: A Quiet Derby for the Soul of South America By: Our Man in a Hammock with Wi-Fi RIO DE JANEIRO—While the rest of the planet was busy measuring the global recession in crypto-converted lattés and wondering whether World War III will be fought on TikTok, Brazil and Bolivia spent last week conducting…
Portugal: Europe’s Charming Afterthought That Keeps Accidentally Mattering By the time most foreigners remember Portugal still exists, the rest of Europe has already moved on to its next collective panic attack. Yet like a polite guest who shows up late but brings excellent wine, Lisbon keeps slipping back into global relevance just when the room…
Manila, Philippines – At the precise moment delegates in Glasgow were pledging to phase out coal, the Philippines was quietly signing yet another 20-year sweetheart deal to import more of the black stuff. This, in a country already blessed with enough sunshine to tan the entire planet and enough wind to blow every politician’s promises…
If Earth were a half-finished jigsaw puzzle abandoned on a coffee table, New Zealand would be the pristine piece still in the box—edge intact, colors un-smeared, quietly wondering why everyone else looks so dog-eared. To the rest of the planet, Aotearoa is the last kid picked for dodgeball who turns out to be annoyingly good…
The Pacific’s latest mood swing—Hurricane Kiko, a name that sounds more like a trendy Tokyo café than a Category-4 air punch—skimmed past Hawaii this week with the polite indifference of a tourist who realizes the luau is overpriced. From Sydney to São Paulo, the collective global reaction was a shrug that registered on seismographs: another…
# The Last Free Men: How 1.6 Million Mariners Keep Your Avocado Toast from Being a Lie Somewhere between the 20-knot winds of the Drake Passage and the diesel fumes of the Singapore Strait, the modern world still depends on a caste of sun-blasted nomads who haven’t updated their LinkedIn since dial-up. Meet the 1.6…
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…
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…
Lakeside Fire: A Global Bonfire of the Vanities By Our Correspondent Who Has Packed Three Go-Bags and Counts Evacuation Drills as Cardio Lake Como, 03:14 a.m. local time. The flames licking the pastel façades of George Clooney’s preferred brunch strip are, of course, terribly photogenic—so much so that a CNN crew is already live-streaming the…
The View from Everywhere By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, 34A, Altitude 36,000 ft The phrase “the view” used to mean something quaint—an expanse of terraced vineyards, a cathedral spire, maybe your neighbor’s questionable taste in swimwear. Now it is a global Rorschach test: what you see depends on which apocalypse you subscribed to….
