The 2025 MTV Video Music Awards—aka the VMAs, or “Diplomatic Immunity for Sequins”—were held Tuesday night in Newark, New Jersey, a city chosen, rumor has it, because the airport has a direct flight to every nation currently under U.S. sanctions. One might expect a glorified high-school talent show to have limited geopolitical relevance, yet the…
Mike Green, the Man Who Accidentally Became a Global Geopolitical Rorschach Test By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between a Hotel Mini-Bar and Existential Dread Somewhere on a laptop screen in Lagos, a hedge-fund analyst named Mike Green is being quoted as gospel. In a dimly lit bar in Bucharest, two crypto bros toast “the real Mike…
The Jelly Roll Doctrine: How a Swirled Pastry Became a Geopolitical Metaphor By the time you finish this sentence, approximately 2.7 metric tons of jelly rolls will have been consumed somewhere between Jakarta and Jacksonville. That’s the kind of useless statistic international correspondents like me toss around to sound worldly while secretly Googling “what is…
Ariana Grande: The 5’3” Geopolitical Juggernaut in a Ponytail By Dave’s Locker International Desk If the Cold War was fought with missiles and manifestos, the 21st-century version is waged with perfume endorsements, TikTok choreography, and the high-pitched whistle note that can apparently be heard from Seoul to São Paulo. Ariana Grande, the Boca-Raton-born soprano who…
Buffalo, New York – Population: 278,000, Average January temperature: –3 °C, Collective blood-alcohol level on game day: incalculable. Thousands of kilometres away, the good citizens of Baltimore are busy convincing themselves that crab cakes and Old Bay seasoning constitute a personality. Between these two post-industrial monuments to American decline, an oval ball will be hurled…
Niagara Falls: The World’s Most Photogenic Glitch in the Geological Matrix By Dave’s Locker International Desk From the deck of the Maid of the Mist—now rebranded, of course, as “Mist-Xperience™ Premium Voyage: Poncho Included”—you quickly realize that Niagara Falls is less a waterfall and more a global congregation of humanity’s collective short attention span. On…
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…
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,…
Rolex: The Swiss Crown That Rules Every Boardroom, Battlefield, and Bail Hearing Geneva—At 7:00 a.m. on a fog-choked tarmac in Dubai, a Gulfstream G650 disgorges a man wearing flip-flops and a Daytona that costs more than the median annual wage in 153 countries. By 9:00 a.m. the same watch is being slipped off a wrist…
The Ministry of Defense calls it “Reggie White,” which is either a nod to the late NFL evangelist or proof that someone in Procurement has a bleak sense of humor. Either way, the world now has a 27-ton bundle of American steel, rubber, and wounded optimism parked in a Polish forest, its paint scheme so…
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…
Madrid, 3 a.m. local time—though the hour is largely theoretical in a country where dinner starts when most Scandinavians are already in REM sleep. Spain, that sun-bleached amphitheater of ancient grudges and modern appetites, is once again the place where Europe tests whether optimism can be reverse-engineered from a hangover. While the rest of the…
