Houston, We Have a Banana: How a Circus in Cleats Became Soft-Power in a Collapsing World By Dave’s Locker International Desk The Savannah Bananas, baseball’s answer to a sugar-rush fever dream, have landed in Houston for a three-night engagement at the Daikin Park carnival grounds—formerly known as Minute Maid Park before a multinational HVAC conglomerate…
Taylor Swift’s Latest Countdown: The Planet Holds Its Breath While Rome Burns (and Streams) DAVOS—At 3 a.m. Geneva time, the Federal Reserve’s overnight swap line with the Bank of Japan flickered; traders, like everyone else, were refreshing Swift’s website instead of the yen. A digital egg-timer—five pastel vault doors, each ticking down to unspecified revelation—has…
The Ryder Cup Scoreboard: A Global Thermometer for Western Civilization’s Grip on Sanity By Our Correspondent in the 19th-Hole Bar, Somewhere over the Atlantic If you squint at the Ryder Cup scoreboard just right, it starts to resemble the Dow Jones—only with fewer bailouts and slightly more tartan. Every two years, a patch of otherwise…
Bears, Bombers, and the Bering Strait: Russian Jets Over Alaska Remind the World the Cold War Has Excellent Brand Recall By Our Correspondent Who Once Mistook a MiG for a Migrating Goose ANCHORAGE—Somewhere between the salmon canneries and Sarah Palin’s former backyard, NORAD’s radar operators had a moment of déjà vu this week: four Russian…
Country to Country 2026: A Global Hoedown Where Apocalypse Meets Banjo By Our Correspondent, filed from an undisclosed airport lounge with suspiciously sticky floors Somewhere between Reykjavik and Riyadh, the marketing department for Country to Country 2026 has decided the world is finally ready for a three-day, multi-continental yee-haw, complete with corporate-branded Stetsons and carbon…
Paramaribo, Suriname – If the planet ever needed a cautionary tale about the seductive power of forgetting, it could do worse than this sliver of equatorial rainforest wedged between the Atlantic and three countries that pretend it isn’t there. Roughly the size of Georgia (the U.S. one, not the Caucasian one everybody suddenly remembers when…
PARADISE LOST IN TRANSIT: Hawaiian Airlines as the World’s Most Expensive Metaphor By our Honolulu-to-Hell correspondent Touch down at Daniel K. Inouye International and the first thing you notice—after the lei that smells like a rental-car air-freshener and the humidity that clings like a bad alimony agreement—is that Hawaiian Airlines has quietly become the global…
Managua, Nicaragua – Tuesday, 4:07 p.m. local time, which in this city means the sun is already staging its daily coup against any concept of punctuality. From the cracked balcony of the Crowne Plaza, you can watch the volcano Momotombo smolder like a chain-smoker who’s read too many climate reports and decided to keep puffing…
From thirty-thousand feet, the Miramar Air Show looks like the world’s most expensive light-switch rave. F/A-18 Super Hornets pirouette above San Diego’s sun-bleached suburbs, leaving contrails the color of bruised peaches, while toddlers in aviator sunglasses cheer from folding chairs that cost more than the GDP of Tuvalu. The scene is quintessentially American—equal parts county…
Breeze Airways: The Boutique Airline That Turns Jet Lag Into a Morality Play By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, Somewhere Between Existential Dread and Gate C7 The planet’s newest boutique carrier, Breeze Airways, began life in 2021 with all the innocence of a freshly stamped passport. Founder David Neeleman—serial aviation midwife behind JetBlue, Azul,…
Ghost of Yotei: A Spectral Sequel That Haunts the Planet While Pretending to Save It By the Foreign Desk, somewhere between a bullet train and a bar tab TOKYO—In the year when glaciers file for early retirement and the S&P 500 trades on thoughts and prayers, Sucker Punch Productions has gallantly decided what the world…
ULA’s Latest Launch: A Firework Display for a Planet Already on Fire By [REDACTED], Senior Space Correspondent, somewhere between the Kármán line and the breakfast buffet CAPE CANAVERAL—Another Tuesday, another column of white-hot money clawing its way past Florida’s thinning ozone layer. United Launch Alliance—those Boeing-Lockheed love-children who bill taxpayers the way boutique hotels bill…
