Raheem Mostert and the Mirage of the American Dream, Observed from 34,000 Feet Above the Atlantic By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between Shannon and Reykjavik, the seat-back screen froze on a looping NFL highlight: Raheem Mostert slicing through the Cowboys’ defense like a tax lawyer through a loophole. The cabin lights dimmed, the flight…
The Cult of “Prime” – How One Word Became a Global Status Symbol, Dystopian Membership Card, and Possibly a Religion They say Latin is dead, but in 2024 the lingua franca of power, convenience, and mild existential dread is a five-letter English word that once merely meant “first in order.” From São Paulo to Seoul,…
The Ballad of Dion Dawkins: How One Large Man in a Helmet Quietly Explains the Collapsing World Order by Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the radioactive sushi headlines out of Fukushima and the latest cryptocurrency implosion in Montenegro, a 6-foot-5, 320-pound American offensive tackle named Dion Dawkins is shoving strangers for a living in…
Fever vs Dream: A Global Scorecard as the Thermometer Beats the Metronome By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between a Sweat Patch and a REM Cycle Geneva, 03:42 a.m.—The World Health Organization has stopped counting sheep; they’re now counting fevers. Meanwhile, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs insists that dreams remain a “vital soft-power…
RIOT FEST 2025: THE WORLD’S LARGEST GROUP THERAPY SESSION, SPONSORED BY EVERYONE WHO STILL OWES STUDENT LOANS By Luka Varga, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Chicago, Illinois – In a year when half the planet’s coastlines are negotiating new real-estate deals with the ocean, Riot Fest 2025 arrived like a three-day ransom note written in distortion…
From the orchards of Normandy to the rooftop gardens of Singapore, a new pollinator has checked in—one that arrives by drone propeller and leaves behind a QR-code receipt instead of pollen. Meet the Apple Bee: not an actual insect, but the latest attempt by humanity to fix a problem we created by throwing more humanity…
Rice vs Charlotte: A Clash So Local It Might Actually Matter to the Rest of the Planet Somewhere between the South China Sea’s latest near-collision and the European Central Bank’s newest interest-rate séance, two American college-football programs—Rice University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte—will collide in a contest that, on paper, is about…
Green Bay, Wisconsin—population 100,000, annual snowfall 48 inches, and, as of last Sunday, the temporary epicenter of global schadenfreude. Tight end Tucker Kraft, whose last name sounds like a budget German cheese spread, tore his pectoral muscle during what coaches optimistically call “non-contact drills,” a phrase that translates in any language to “nobody touched him,…
Guardians of the Schedule: How a Cleveland Baseball Calendar Became a Global Omen The moment the Cleveland Guardians released their 2024 regular-season slate, currency traders in Singapore reportedly paused mid-sip, AI models in Zurich re-weighted their “probability of spontaneous human joy,” and a shipping clerk in Lagos printed the 162-game grid, taped it above his…
Tuesday night saw the planet’s most popular recurring panic attack—international football—deliver another batch of scores that simultaneously mattered to billions and, cosmically speaking, meant absolutely nothing. Still, we all agreed to pretend otherwise, because it beats reading quarterly inflation reports. In Doha, Argentina beat Croatia 3-0 in a “friendly” so chummy that at one point…
Global Tiger Scoreboard: Stripes, Spin, and the Absurd Luxury of Keeping Count By Our Man in the Anthropocene, filing from a press seat somewhere between a Bangladeshi delta and a Dubai influencer’s private zoo The phrase “tigers score” usually lands in two camps: sports fans who think it refers to Detroit’s baseball misadventures, and conservationists…
The Curious Diplomacy of Khalil Shakir’s Stat Line By “Dave’s Far-flung Correspondent,” currently hiding from customs in Istanbul If you squint at Khalil Shakir’s modest gridiron résumé long enough, you can almost see the ghost of every forgotten slot receiver who ever tried to explain to a bewildered in-law why 29 catches for 318 yards…
