Sarah McLachlan and the Global Export of Wistful Melancholy ————————————————————- Somewhere between a UN peacekeeping convoy and a container ship of tear-stained Kleenex, the British Columbian soprano has become Canada’s most reliable soft-power weapon. Sarah McLachlan’s voice—equal parts lullaby and guilt trip—now drifts through taxicabs from Lagos to Lahore, duty-free lounges in Dubai, and boutique…
Fresh: The Last Luxury Good Humanity Still Pretends Isn’t Rotting By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between the Arctic Cold Chain and a Bangkok Street Cart PARIS—At 4:47 a.m. on the Rungis wholesale floor, a crate of strawberries is declared “extra-fresh.” The label is printed in seven languages, none of which mention that the berries were harvested…
In the wee hours between Wall Street closing and the Nikkei opening, two professional baseball clubs from the American Midwest—geographic trivia that still baffles most of the planet—met under Queens’ sodium lights to decide precisely nothing. The New York Mets and the Chicago Cubs, franchises whose combined payroll could refinance a small Balkan republic, squared…
Typhoon vs Hurricane: A Global Spin on Humanity’s Favorite Spin Cycle By “Marina Monsoon,” Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Weather-Industrial Desk If you’ve ever watched a weather map and wondered why the apocalypse is spelled “typhoon” in Tokyo, “hurricane” in Houston, and “just another Tuesday” in the Philippines, congratulations—you’ve stumbled onto the most expensive game of…
The Fenway Flea Market vs. The Rogers Centre Souk An International Dispatch on Red Sox vs. Blue Jays, or How Baseball Became a Metaphor for Late-Stage Everything By the time the first pitch left Brayan Bello’s hand in Toronto on Tuesday night, traders in Singapore were already pricing aluminum futures off the over/under on Vladimir…
Dancing With the Stars Time: A Global Pas de Deux Between Apocalypse and Distraction By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the melting Arctic and the latest cryptocurrency collapse, humanity has decided that 8 p.m. on a Monday is the perfect hour to watch moderately famous people attempt a paso doble. Welcome, dear planet, to…
White Sox vs. Yankees: A Glorious Proxy War for Everything Wrong with the Planet By Diego Branco-Chen, Senior Correspondent Tokyo—On the surface, it’s just another Tuesday night in Major League Baseball: the Chicago White Sox, a franchise whose last championship predates the fall of the Berlin Wall, versus the New York Yankees, the team your…
Tampa Bay’s Strip-Mall Spartans versus Baltimore’s Post-Industrial Songbirds: A Dispatch from the Edge of the Empire By the time first pitch is thrown at whatever the Rays are calling their ballpark this fiscal quarter, the Earth has already spun through three currency crises, two surprise elections, and one quietly abandoned climate target. Yet 30,000 Floridians…
Pirates vs Reds: A Global Bloodletting in Technicolor From the vantage point of a hotel bar in Singapore—where the air-conditioning hums like a guilty conscience and the barman pours watered-down Manhattans with the solemnity of a UN peacekeeper—it becomes clear that the eternal struggle between Pirates and Reds is less a baseball rivalry and more…
Killian Hayes and the Existential Comedy of Global Hype By our man in Geneva, nursing an espresso and a grudge against optimism GENEVA—On the surface, the name Killian Hayes is merely an entry in the NBA’s ever-expanding ledger of “promising Europeans who may or may not pan out.” Yet from the vantage point of a…
Smoke Signals from the Suburbs: Mission BBQ and the Global Quest for Authentic Americana By Dexter “Grill Marks” Malone, Senior Correspondent (and occasional charcoal inhaler) Somewhere between the strip-mall mattress outlet and a vape shop that promises “discreet shipping,” Mission BBQ unfurls its star-spangled banner of smoked meats like a Pentagon briefing in sauce form….
Oklahoma Schedule: A Provincial Time-Table Reverberates Through the World’s Nervous System By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—While the rest of humanity frets over drone-dropped missiles, crypto crashes, and the inexplicable return of low-rise jeans, a modest PDF labeled “Oklahoma Schedule” has quietly detonated across global supply chains, TikTok algorithms, and at least three European parliaments….
