The Buffalo Bills Depth Chart: A Geopolitical Roster in a Cold Zip Code By Our Man on the Thruway, filing from somewhere between Reykjavík and Rochester The first thing you notice, squinting at the Bills’ depth chart from a hotel bar in Luxembourg, is how it reads like a NATO seating chart that met an…
Teslaa Lions: When Detroit Meets the Serengeti in the Age of Electrified Hubris By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk NAIROBI—Just when you thought the global supply-chain circus had run out of fresh acts, a pride of actual lions wandered into Tesla’s new “GigaSavanna” battery-materials depot on the Kenyan side of the Maasai Mara last week, electrocuted…
The Global Racing Order: How NASCAR’s Top-10 Became a Geopolitical Mood Ring By Our Man in the Paddock, nursing a lukewarm Belgian lager and existential dread When the latest NASCAR Cup Series standings dropped this week, the United States treated it like a casual Tuesday at the Waffle House: loud, carb-heavy, and vaguely apocalyptic. Meanwhile,…
Asheboro, North Carolina—population roughly 26,000, median income politely described as “aspiring,” and home to the North Carolina Zoo, which proudly advertises itself as “the world’s largest natural-habitat zoo,” a phrase that sounds suspiciously like a dating-app bio—has become an improbable litmus test for whether globalization can be bothered to remember the small print on the…
Austin vs Sporting KC: A Microscopic Derby in a Macroscopic Mess By Dave’s Far-Flung Football Correspondent, somewhere between Reykjavík and regret The world is busy immolating itself—Arctic ice shelves auditioning for the role of “ice cube,” crypto bros discovering that gravity is still legal tender, and half the planet’s leaders locked in an eternal game…
Only Murders in the Building Season 5: The Arconia Goes Global and Humanity Learns Nothing By the time the elevator cables snap in Episode 1, viewers from Lagos to Lima have already cracked the case on Reddit, TikTok, and whatever encrypted app is fashionable in Minsk this week. Season 5 of Hulu’s geriatric Scooby-Doo fever…
**The Great American Oval: How NASCAR’s Playoff Standings Became a Global Morality Play** In a week when the UN Security Council couldn’t agree on the definition of “cease-fire” and the Arctic registered its first 30 °C day, the planet nevertheless paused—if only for the length of a fuel run—to ask: who the hell is leading…
Denny Hamlin Is the Last American Export That Still Runs on Leaded Nostalgia By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk PARIS—On any given Sunday, while half the planet doom-scrolls through tariff wars and the other half wonders whether Brussels will ration olive oil, somewhere in the Carolinas a man in a fireproof onesie mashes a throttle…
The Pyrenees’ Best-Kept Punchline: Andorra as Metaphor, Microstate, and Tax-Haven Theme Park By Dave’s Locker International Desk Most maps treat Andorra like an ink blot on the French-Spanish border—an accidental Rorschach test the world collectively ignores. Yet look closer and this 468-square-kilometer smudge is a perfect satire of the 21st-century order: a country with no…
The Empire’s Tennis Ball: How US Open Champions Quietly Rule the World By a correspondent who once got food poisoning at Arthur Ashe and still blames capitalism NEW YORK—Every September the United States dutifully stages its fortnightly imperial coronation disguised as a sports tournament. The US Open crowns a new sovereign of string and neon,…
Green Bay’s Roster Shuffle: A Cheesehead Saga Reverberating from Lagos to Lhasa By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large (currently hiding in a Reykjavik bar where the Wi-Fi is stronger than most governments) If you think the annual reshuffling of the Green Bay Packers roster is just a provincial footnote in the American sports coliseum, congratulations—you have successfully…
The Curious Case of Ben Johnson: How a Sprinter Still Outruns the World’s Moral High Ground By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk There are moments in global history that feel like cosmic punch-lines, and the fall of Ben Johnson is one of the few that keeps giving—like a re-gifted fruitcake laced with stanozolol. Thirty-six years…
