England Women vs India Women: A Cricket Match That Somehow Matters to the Entire Planet By the time the first ball is bowled at Lord’s on Friday, roughly 1.6 billion people will be pretending—some more convincingly than others—that the outcome of a women’s limited-overs match between two ex-colonies is the single most consequential event since…
Storm Season, Global Edition: When Clouds Go Full NATO By the time the first thunderclap rattled windows in Lagos last Tuesday, meteorologists from Geneva to Jakarta were already nodding with the weary recognition of parents watching the same toddler throw the same tantrum on a different continent. The thunderstorm—once a quaint meteorological footnote somewhere between…
Billie Eilish’s latest tour has become the planet’s most efficient grief-delivery mechanism since the invention of the push-notification. Across five continents, 92 dates, and roughly 2.3 million ticket holders who each paid the equivalent of a month’s rent in Jakarta or a weekend in Zurich—depending on which hemisphere’s inflation index you favor—the 22-year-old pop nihilist…
Eric Church’s 2024 tour—blandly christened the “Outsiders Revival” despite being bankrolled by Live Nation, Pepsi, and a constellation of hedge funds—kicked off in Nashville last month and will soon drag its coliseum-sized honky-tonk across three continents. To the casual observer it’s just another American country singer hauling 300 tons of steel truss, LED panels, and…
DALLAS — City of Perpetual Sunburn and Global Metaphor By Our Man in the Departure Lounge (still tasting barbecue in his dreams) Let us begin, dear international reader, with a confession: nobody outside Texas is entirely sure whether Dallas is a city, a television franchise, or a cautionary tale that escaped its cage. From the…
Let it go, they said. The planet promptly did—melting glaciers, rising seas, and a thousand TikToks of toddlers belting out the same three notes in thirty-two languages. Somewhere in that planetary karaoke bar stands Idina Menzel, Broadway’s favorite ice queen turned accidental geopolitical weather event, still slightly stunned that a power ballad about repression became…
Robert Irwin, the 20-year-old scion of Australia’s most famous khaki-clad clan, has spent the last few weeks on a world tour that looks less like conservation and more like soft-power diplomacy with reptiles. From the red carpets of Los Angeles to the marble corridors of the European Parliament—where he recently handed a bearded dragon to…
Illenium Sphere: When the World Stops Orbiting Reality and Starts Revolving Around a DJ’s Beach Ball By Rufus “No Fixed Address” Halstrom, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the collapse of the Turkish lira and the re-election of Argentina’s favorite economic crash-test dummy, humanity decided that the most pressing geopolitical question was: “How big can…
Netflix House: The World Checks into a Theme Park While the Planet Burns By Diego “Still Streaming” Serrano, International Correspondent DALLAS—In the same week that Antarctic sea ice hit a record low and the UN politely begged humanity to please stop setting things on fire, Netflix unveiled its newest capital expenditure: two “Netflix Houses,” 100,000-square-foot…
Maryland: The Crab Cake Republic Quietly Running the World While Everyone Argues About Texas In the grand geopolitical theater, Maryland is the understudy who never forgets a line and occasionally steals the show while the leads are busy having a nervous breakdown. Wedged between the Potomac’s toxic nostalgia and the Chesapeake’s slow-motion ecological suicide, this…
Below Deck, Above Reproach: How Luxury Yachts Became Floating Metaphors for a Planet Going Down with All Flags Flying By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker The term “below deck” once conjured salt-stained romance: coiled ropes, rum rations, and the faint possibility of a mermaid with a decent dental plan. Today it triggers a Pavlovian reach for the…
Pittsburgh Penguins: How a Rust-Belt Ice Rink Became the UN of Frostbite and Fortune By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Global Desk Somewhere on a reclaimed steel-town slab of concrete, penguins—actual flightless birds in formalwear—would freeze their tail-feathers off. The Pittsburgh Penguins, however, just keep waddling into every geopolitical hotspot wearing skates. To the outside world, the…
