Steelers vs. Vikings: A Sunday Night Proxy War for the Fraying Global Order By Eduardo V. “Ev” Morales, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker NORTH AMERICA—Somewhere between the Great Lakes and whatever’s left of the Rust Belt, two football tribes will collide on Sunday night. To the untrained eye, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Minnesota Vikings are…
North Carolina: The World’s Favorite Overachieving Backwater By Pascal “Pax” Delacorte, International Correspondent at Large RALEIGH—If the planet were a high-school reunion, North Carolina would be the once-overlooked kid who now shows up in a rented Tesla, quoting Latin and smelling faintly of both artisanal bourbon and litigation. From the outside, this oblong patch of…
Austin vs Real Salt Lake: When Two Clubs Try to Matter in a World That Barely Notices By the time Q2 Stadium’s floodlights flickered on last Saturday, the global attention economy was already busy elsewhere. COP28 delegates were arguing about whether to set the thermostat at 1.5 or 2 degrees of civilizational suicide, the Houthis…
Tampa Bay Lightning: The World Watches a Sun-Drenched Hockey Dynasty and Pretends to Care By “Global” Gerry Van der Zalm, filing from the last functioning airport bar with Wi-Fi The Tampa Bay Lightning have now won so many Stanley Cups that the trophy’s handlers keep a spare crate of sunscreen in the cargo hold—an oddly…
Straka Golf and the Quiet Globalization of a Very Loud Game by Dave’s Locker International Desk If you were anywhere near the Algarve last spring, you might have mistaken the muffled thuds for distant artillery. They were, in fact, the sound of Austrian Sepp Straka—world-ranked somewhere between “household name” and “who?”—driving Titleists into Portuguese cork…
South Dakota vs. North Dakota: A Cold-War Rehearsal on the Frozen Prairie By Diego “Frostbite” Valdez, Senior Cynic-at-Large From the vantage of Ulaanbaatar—or, frankly, anywhere with functioning central heating—watching South Dakota and North Dakota square off feels like witnessing two identical twins argue over whose freckles are more symmetrical. Yet, in the grand theatre of…
Duluth, Minnesota—population 86,000, annual snowfall measured in existential dread—has spent the last four days pretending the planet isn’t busy rehearsing for the apocalypse. The 48th Duluth Fall Festival wrapped Sunday night with the traditional release of biodegradable lanterns that promptly drifted into Canadian airspace, causing NORAD to scramble two CF-18s and at least one very…
Getafe vs. Levante: A Microscopic Clash in the Macrocosm of Late-Stage Football Capitalism By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent, still wearing yesterday’s cynicism MADRID—On a Tuesday night so bland even the pigeons looked bored, Getafe and Levante jogged out at the Coliseum Alfonso Pérez to contest a La Liga fixture that felt less like a football…
The planet’s last respectable mirage, the word “oasis,” has been dragged out of the sand again. This time it is not a lonely clump of date palms luring thirsty caravans, but a British reunion tour—five middle-aged men from Manchester who once convinced the world that sneering and tambourines were a philosophy. Tickets for Oasis Live…
The Works: A Global Tour of Humanity’s Monuments to Itself There is a moment—usually around 3 a.m. in the departure lounge of a second-tier airport—when the seasoned traveler realizes that “the works” is not a single project, achievement, or apocalypse, but an endless buffet of human folly served on a planetary platter. From Dubai’s rotating…
London, England – Somewhere between the third scone and the fourth cup of tea, the United Kingdom’s Met Office issued yet another yellow warning for rain, a meteorological advisory so routine that bookmakers now refuse to take bets on whether it will appear before the Queen’s face on a ten-pound note. From the vantage point…
Crushed Ore, Crushed Hopes: Rockies vs Giants and the Global Metaphor Nobody Ordered By “Rocky” Ricardo Serrano, International Correspondent-at-Large, Denver by way of Guadalajara, Reykjavik, and a suspiciously overpriced airport sushi bar In a world where sovereign debt clocks spin faster than a Shohei Ohtani slider, it is oddly comforting—if clinically delusional—to watch grown millionaires…
