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…
From the Atacama to Wall Street: Lithium Americas and the Global Battery-Powered Hangover By Our Man in Santiago, nursing a pisco sour and existential dread SANTIAGO – If you squint hard enough through the lithium-rich brine shimmering in the Atacama Desert, you can almost see the future: a planet of silent Teslas gliding past silent…
Oklahoma Football Schedule: How a Flyover-State Fixture Became a Geopolitical Mood Ring By the time the Sooner Schooner makes its first thundering lap this autumn, grain silos from the Texas Panhandle to the edge of the Flint Hills will have already spent weeks parsing the Oklahoma football schedule like it’s a leaked NATO communiqué. To…
The planet’s most durable reality-TV franchise—let’s call it “Make America Gawk Again”—has been renewed for another season, and the season premiere is set in Kyiv. Once again, Donald Trump’s gravitational pull is bending diplomacy into late-night infomercial prose: “Act now, supplies of U.S. security guarantees are limited!” From Berlin to Bangkok, chancelleries that spent four…
Famous Birthdays: The Global Festival of Manufactured Significance By the time the sun rises over the International Date Line, the planet’s content mills are already humming. Somewhere between a Tokyo pop-up ad for limited-edition strawberry cheesecake and a São Paulo influencer’s “morning routine” reel, the daily algorithmic drumroll begins: Famous Birthdays. Not the quiet, cake-and-candles…
Mohammad Nawaz and the Beautiful, Pointless Game By Our Man in the Press Box, Still Wondering Why He Bothered to Show Up For the uninitiated, Mohammad Nawaz is a 29-year-old left-arm spinner from Rawalpindi who can, on good days, also swing a bat like a man who has just discovered fire. In the grand tapestry…
Barnsley vs Brighton: When the World’s Problems Take a 90-Minute Smoke Break By C. V. Mortensen, International Correspondent still pretending to enjoy Yorkshire tea The United Nations Security Council has spent the week arguing over adjectives; the World Bank is calculating how many micro-credits equal one oligarch’s super-yacht; meanwhile, 18,497 freezing souls cram into Oakwell…
Physint: Kojima’s New Espionage Opera Proves the World Still Loves a Good Wiretap By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you were hoping 2024 would finally be the year humanity outgrew its addiction to clandestine snooping, Hideo Kojima has some unfortunate news. Fresh off Death Stranding’s existential parcel-delivery simulator—and Norman Reedus’s increasingly sentient beard—the Tokyo-based auteur…
Desmond Watson and the 400-Pound Shadow He Casts Over the World By: “Lucky” Luca Bianchi, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the manicured fairways of Florida and the fluorescent-lit war rooms of NFL analytics departments, Desmond Watson—Florida State’s 6-foot-5, 410-pound freshman defensive tackle—has become a planetary event. Seismographs in Reykjavik registered a tremor when he…
From the Antipodes to the Abyss: Sandy Brondello’s Quiet Reign Over Global Women’s Hoops By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk There’s a special flavor of irony in the fact that the most influential Australian in world sport right now is a soft-spoken coach who still sounds like she’s ordering a flat white even when she’s drawing…
Chengdu Open: A Tennis Tournament, a Power Cable, and the World’s Slow-Motion Nervous Breakdown By Dave’s Far-East Correspondent, Nursing a Hangzhou Hangover The Chengdu Open—an ATP 250 event played 1,600 kilometres from the nearest ocean and zero kilometres from the next Sichuan hotpot—kicked off this week in a city best known for pandas who refuse…
Every September, while the planet quietly negotiates yet another cease-fire, another climate threshold, and another crypto bankruptcy, the State Fair of Texas throws open its gates and invites humanity to postpone the apocalypse for twenty-four fried-food-stuffed days. From Oslo to Lagos, analysts tracking inflation, grain futures, and the global obesity index watch the spectacle the…
