The Hollywood Bowl, that half-domed amphitheater squatting on a Hollywood hill like a crashed UFO made of redwood and stucco, is supposedly just another music venue. Yet to the rest of the planet it remains a shorthand for America’s most profitable export: the illusion that everyone, everywhere, is invited to the party—provided they can afford…
Walker Cup Results: When America’s Golfing Teenagers Become Collateral Damage in the Global Soft-Power Arms Race By “Lucky” Luciano Verde, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker St Andrews, Scotland – The scoreboard reads USA 14½, GB&I 11½, which is the polite, tartan-wrapped way of saying the United States has once again weaponized orthodontics and college meal plans…
Baltimore Ravens: America’s Gothic Opera, Now Playing on Every Continent By Our Man in Perpetual Transit Somewhere over the Mid-Atlantic, 37,000 feet above whatever fresh geopolitical disaster is brewing below, the in-flight Wi-Fi hiccups just long enough for the passenger in 14C to miss Lamar Jackson pirouette out of a collapsing pocket and flick a…
Elle Fanning and the End of the American Empire, as Told from a Café in Sarajevo By “International Correspondent Who’s Given Up on Pretending to Be Optimistic” Sarajevo, 07:14 a.m. CEST — A thick Bosnian coffee hisses on the table, the kind that once fortified Ottoman viziers and now fuels NGO interns who still believe…
KANSAS CITY—In a world where TikTok decides elections and central banks treat recessions like seasonal fashion, it’s almost quaint that a 24-year-old Texan with a 6.7 WAR can still hijack the international news cycle by whacking a horsehide sphere into orbit. Yet here we are, and Bobby Witt Jr.—the Kansas City Royals’ shortstop-cum-global metaphor—is doing…
Dodging alien artillery or congressional subpoenas with the same square-jawed equanimity, Chris Evans has become the world’s most export-ready piece of modern American soft power. From Seoul to São Paulo, the man is less an actor these days than a geopolitical utility: a walking, occasionally shield-flinging reminder that the empire can still package its anxieties…
The Global Village Has a New Village Explainer – and He’s Still Not Sure Why We’re Here By our Special Correspondent, currently self-isolating with a thermometer in one hand and a passport in the other From a cramped flat in São Paulo to a yurt on the Mongolian steppe, the name “Brian Cox” now travels…
Paris, 03:47 local time – The Daily Telegraph, that stately British broadsheet once nicknamed “The Torygraph” by people who thought they were being original, has been having what the tabloids would call “a moment.” Not the sort of moment that involves a prime minister’s aide, a suitcase of rosé, and a Downing Street swing set—more…
UC Davis vs Washington: A Rumble on the Pacific Rim That the Rest of the World Pretends Doesn’t Matter—But Actually Sort of Does By Our Correspondent, filing from a hotel minibar somewhere between LAX and Narita To the 7.8 billion humans who weren’t invited, the NCAA women’s volleyball regional semifinal between UC Davis and the…
Son Heung-min: The Smiling Assassin Who Keeps the World’s Billionaires Awake at Night By Dave’s Far-East Correspondent, nursing a soju hangover in a Seoul hotel that still smells faintly of 1988 Somewhere in Riyadh, a sovereign-wealth-fund accountant just spilled his espresso over a spreadsheet. The line item reads: “Acquisition Target – S. Heung-min, ₤200 million…
Pete Wicks: The Existential Haircut Roaming a Planet on Fire By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, somewhere between duty-free vodka and the abyss In the grand, slow-motion car crash we politely call “current affairs,” certain names ricochet across the Anglosphere’s algorithmic echo chamber with the inexplicable persistence of a drunk uncle at a wedding. One such name…
Tom Holland Is Still Clinging to the Multiverse, and the Rest of Us Are Just Trying to Hang On By the time you finish this sentence, Tom Holland will have signed another three-picture deal, watched his latest blockbuster top the box office in seventeen languages, and politely apologized to a Brussels reporter for spoiling something…
