River Plate vs. Palmeiras: Two Continents Collide in a Match the World Pretends Not to Care About By the time the Buenos Aires sun sets tonight, 70,000 River Plate devotees will have burned through half their monthly wages on dubious hot-dogs and replica shirts that dissolve in the wash. Across the equator, a near-equal mob…
River Plate vs Palmeiras: A Diplomatic Incident Disguised as a Football Match By the Bureau Chief Who’s Seen Too Many VAR Reviews BUENOS AIRES-SÃO PAULO AXIS – Somewhere between the cocaine-grade caffeine of a Buenos Aires cortado and the São Paulo traffic that moves like cholesterol in a billionaire’s artery, two football clubs are about…
SURVIVOR: A GLOBAL USER’S MANUAL FOR OUTLASTING EVERYTHING, INCLUDING YOURSELF Dateline: Everywhere and Nowhere—The planet has become one long, badly produced reality show whose host never sleeps and whose prize is simply waking up tomorrow. From the floodplains of Bangladesh to the boardrooms of Davos, “survivor” is no longer a noun but a job description—equal…
Late Night’s Borderless Reign: How Suits, Sarcasm, and Studio Applause Became the World’s Shared Lullaby By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Somewhere between the midnight muezzin’s call in Jakarta and the 2 a.m. clink of last-call glasses in Reykjavík, a curious planetary ritual unfolds: millions of humans—jet-lagged consultants, insomniac medics, and doom-scrolling teenagers—queue up the same…
The Last Derby That Still Matters By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere between Tegucigalpa and the apocalypse They call it El Clásico Nacional, which is a charming bit of branding for what is essentially a quarterly civil-war cosplay between two neighborhoods separated by roughly six traffic lights and 112 years of mutual contempt….
Mahmoud Khalil: One Man, Two Passports, and the Entire Planet’s Nervous Breakdown By the time Mahmoud Khalil was escorted off a sidewalk in St. Louis last month—hands zip-tied, Columbia Law sweatshirt riding up to reveal a polite paunch—he had already become a Rorschach test for whatever international ailment you happened to be nursing. To the…
Frank Turek, the American apologist who insists that morality can’t exist without a cosmic referee, has lately become the improbable export the world never ordered but keeps receiving—like those plastic-wrapped “American cheese slices” that appear on supermarket shelves from Lagos to Lahore. To most of humanity, which wakes up each morning to inflation, drought, or…
Thursday in Baku or Bratislava used to mean nothing more than an extra shot of rakı or borovička in a dimly lit bar. These days it means the Europa League has rolled into town, trailing camera crews, riot police, and a caravan of men in Stone Island who look like they moonlight as debt collectors….
Lead leaching cookware is the rare product recall that manages to unite Beijing bargain-hunters, Parisian gastronomes, and Midwestern coupon-clippers in one slow-motion panic. From the wet markets of Guangzhou to the Instagram kitchens of Copenhagen, the same grim punch-line is being served: dinner might be glazing itself with a light seasoning of cumulative brain damage,…
From the rickety rooftop bars of Havana to the fluorescent-lit sportsbooks of Macau, the Cubs standings—currently hovering in the polite purgatory of third place in the NL Central—have become a kind of universal Rorschach test for anyone who’s ever tried to explain American optimism to a customs officer abroad. Ask a Berliner why a city…
The Marco Rubio Traveling Circus: A Floridian in the Global Funhouse By Diego “Weathered Passport” Valdez, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Miami — The first thing you notice when you land at MIA is that even the palm trees seem faintly embarrassed. They know they’re props in a stage set that doubles as the seventh-largest economy…
Jeffrey Gundlach—super-investor, bond oracle, and the man whose permabear scowl has become a kind of global mood ring—has once again wrapped the planet’s financial mandarins around his little finger. From Tokyo’s Ministry of Finance to a Berlin pension fund that still thinks 2 % is a “decent yield,” traders refreshed their browsers at 3 a.m….
