Cinema, the art form that once asked us to sit in the dark and pretend the world made sense, is now the planet’s most reliable export of delusion. From Lagos to Lapland, humans still queue—online or in the rain—to watch other humans pretend the rent is paid and the planet isn’t on fire. Call it…
Ricky Pearsall and the Global Theatre of a Single Gunshot By Matteo “Grimly Amused” Rossi, International Desk, Dave’s Locker SAN FRANCISCO—Somewhere between the sourdough tourists and the algorithmic fog, a 23-year-old wide receiver named Ricky Pearsall took a bullet to the chest on a Saturday afternoon. The shot was allegedly fired by a 17-year-old who,…
Saints Game: A Global Ritual Where Hope and Despair Share a Bowl of Gumbo By Pascal “Pax” Moreau | International Desk, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the Tigris and the Thames, between the favelas of Rio and the K-pop karaoke bars of Seoul, the world pauses for the Saints Game. In New Orleans the cathedral bells…
Hozier, Global Prophet of the Post-Apocalypse Blues By “Foreign Desk” Dave, filing from everywhere Wi-Fi still works So the world is on fire—literally, if you live in Greece, California, or the bit of Canada that forgot snow was a thing—and into this planetary barbecue strides a soft-spoken Irishman with a guitar and the voice of…
Bryce Harper: The $330 Million Poster Child for a Planet That Would Rather Watch Baseball Than Fix Itself By the time the news reached a rain-soaked café in Sarajevo, Bryce Harper had already been traded—by the algorithm, naturally. ESPN International’s push alert pinged every phone from Lagos to Lahore, informing humanity that a man who…
Lisbon, 9 April — In the grand tapestry of global events, where nuclear submarines play hide-and-seek in the South China Sea and central bankers rehearse their lines about “transitory” inflation, a modest football match at the Estádio da Luz somehow elbowed its way onto the world stage last night. Benfica versus Santa Clara, a fixture…
PARIS—Somewhere between the second encore of “Stonehenge” and the moment Nigel Tufnel tries to coax extra volume from an amp that already goes to eleven, it hits you: This Is Spinal Tap is not merely a 1984 mock-rockumentary about three pasty Brits in perilously tight trousers. It is the Rosetta Stone for every multinational boondoggle…
Whoopi Goldberg’s Net Worth and the Quiet Rebellion of $60 Million A dispatch from the borderless republic of celebrity finance PARIS—Somewhere between the iron-clad vault of the Banque de France and the neon glare of a Lagos betting kiosk, sixty million U.S. dollars sits wearing a purple crochet beret and cracking jokes about flatulence. That,…
London, the city that once ruled a quarter of the planet and now can’t rule its own plumbing, stands as the world’s most charming contradiction. While other former imperial capitals have gracefully retired into museum pieces—Vienna sipping coffee, Istanbul smoking hookah—London insists on remaining relevant through sheer bloody-mindedness and an economy based entirely on Russian…
From the vantage point of a rickety café terrace in Sarajevo—where bullet-pocked walls still tell 1990s bedtime stories—watching Tomi Lahren’s latest TikTok rant pop up on a cracked iPhone feels like cultural whiplash served with extra foam. One moment, locals debate EU grain tariffs; the next, a blonde commentator in Dallas is yelling that the…
The Knicks Abroad: How a New York Basketball Punchline Became a Universal Metaphor for Hopeless Devotion By Special Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk NEW YORK—From the vantage point of a rooftop bar in Hong Kong, the Knicks look almost noble. Their orange-and-blue jerseys glow on flat-screens above the harbor, a flickering totem of New York…
Pedro Pascal, the Chilean-born actor who now looks permanently exhausted in eight different time zones, has become the first truly global celebrity of the post-hope era. From Seoul subway ads hawking The Last of Us to Berlin bus shelters promising “more daddy issues than you can fit in a Bundesliga stadium,” Pascal has achieved that…
