Fluff Bothwell: The Global Ripple of a Scottish Sock Puppet’s Existential Crisis By Our Correspondent, presently in a bar in São Paulo pretending to check football scores Glasgow—The name “Fluff Bothwell” sounds like a failed indie band or an artisanal gin, but it is, in fact, a moth-eaten sock puppet currently trending on six continents….
Trey Benson’s Ankle Becomes a Global Geopolitical Flashpoint, Because Of Course It Does Dave’s Locker – International Desk When Trey Benson—Arizona State’s 6-1, 225-pound junior running back—rolled his right ankle on a nondescript inside-zone against Stanford, the immediate reaction was the usual: sideline panic, a flurry of white towels, and thirty-eight camera angles of a…
**The Devon Witherspoon Doctrine: How a Cornerback from Florida Became an Unlikely Metaphor for Global Power Shifts** In the grand theater of international relations, where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and cryptocurrency barons purchase democracy like souvenir snow globes, it takes a peculiar sort of genius to find geopolitical significance in a 22-year-old…
Sun-Powered Bribery: A Global Tour of Solar Incentives, or How Governments Pay Us Not to Cook the Planet By the time you finish reading this sentence, Germany will have wired another household €6,000 for daring to bolt panels onto its roof. Somewhere in Rajasthan, a farmer is checking his phone to see if New Delhi’s…
**The Global Empire of Rafael Devers: How a Dominican Slugger Became Baseball’s Reluctant Geopolitical Power** In the grand theater of international relations, where nations jockey for influence through trade agreements, military alliances, and the occasional proxy war, one mustn’t overlook the soft power wielded by a 27-year-old man from Nizao who can hit a baseball…
Powerball Numbers Drop, Earth Tilts Slightly Off Axis By L. Marceau, Dave’s Locker Global Bureau (somewhere between the duty-free and the existential dread) The winning Powerball numbers—3, 12, 34, 56, 67, and a Powerball of 9—were announced at 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. Within forty-three seconds the news had ping-ponged across undersea cables, leapt over…
Miller Moss: The Global Fungus That Eats Your Roof, Your Dreams, and Maybe Your Sovereignty By the time you notice the greenish fuzz creeping across your terracotta tiles in Seville, it has already colonized slate roofs in Sheffield, asphalt shingles in Seattle, and the corrugated tin favelas of Rio. Miller Moss—scientifically “Dicranoweisia cirrata” for anyone…
Moscow wakes up to the news, Lagos scrolls past it, and a Copenhagen barista shrugs: Kirk Ferentz just signed on to coach Iowa through 2029. On the surface it’s a provincial American story—college football’s answer to tenure—but in the age of global streaming, NIL money that would make a Swiss banker blush, and universities that…
The Strange Afterlife of Greg Schiano, or How One American Football Coach Became the World’s Accidental Diplomat By Our Man in the Neutral Zone Somewhere between the hash marks of a soggy Rutgers practice field and the marble corridors of FIFA’s Zurich bunker, Greg Schiano has quietly become the planet’s most improbable export. To the…
Lecce vs Cagliari: A Mediterranean Derby for the Age of Collapse By Our Man in Purgatory, filing from the Otranto Bar, somewhere between the Adriatic and the abyss There is, of course, no earthly reason why the world’s attention should pivot to a mid-table scuffle in Italy’s deep south. The Arctic is on fire, bond…
**From Motown to Moscow: How a Humble Baseball Schedule Explains the Collapse of Western Civilization** The Detroit Tigers released their 2024 schedule this week, a document that international observers have greeted with the same enthusiasm typically reserved for quarterly IMF reports on emerging market debt crises. Which, coincidentally, is exactly how one should view America’s…
The Windy City Isn’t Just Chicago—It’s the Whole Planet, Spinning Faster Toward Regret By Our Correspondent Somewhere Downwind of Consequence When an American says “Windy City,” they usually mean Chicago, that muscular Midwestern metropolis famous for deep-dish pizza, deep-frozen winters, and politicians whose promises evaporate faster than lake-effect snow. But step back—say, to a rooftop…
