The world’s attention, already stretched thinner than a politician’s promise, pivoted westward last night to a patch of Astroturf in San Diego where Oregon State and Texas Tech—two universities whose combined endowments still can’t match what the EU spends on olive-oil subsidies—decided to settle their differences with shoulder pads and play-action fakes. For 60 commercial-splintered…
Georgia vs. Tennessee: A Front-Row Seat to the Collapsing American Experiment By the time you read this, the American South—land of honey-baked pride and insulin-resistant hospitality—will have served up another football game so grandiose that foreign diplomats briefly mistake it for a military parade. Georgia versus Tennessee, a rivalry whose history is measured not in…
WrestleMania 42: The World’s Most Expensive Therapy Session Rolls into São Paulo By A. D. “Dante” Marlowe, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker SÃO PAULO—In a city where rush-hour traffic already resembles a steel-cage match, the planet’s premier spandex opera has pitched its tent. WrestleMania 42—billed as “The Showcase of the Immortals, now with 40 % more…
WrestleMania 43: The Last Empire’s Circus Comes to Riyadh JEDDAH—If the Roman Empire had survived into the age of fiber-optic thongs and pre-show drone ballets, it would have looked exactly like WrestleMania 43. On a makeshift desert moonscape ten miles outside Riyadh, 82,000 pilgrims—half of them jet-lagged Americans clutching prescription heartburn medication, the rest a…
Tampa Bay Rays versus Chicago Cubs: a pairing that sounds less like a playoff preview and more like an eco-tourism brochure gone rogue. Somewhere an endangered Florida manta glides past the ivy-strewn bricks of Wrigley, wondering why its name is being invoked in a contest featuring grown men chewing sunflower seeds at industrial scale. Yet…
Luigi Mangione: The Ivy-League Suspect Whose Arrest Went Viral on Five Continents by Dave’s Locker International Desk NEW YORK—It’s not every day that a manhunt for a 26-year-old Ivy-League graduate becomes a global spectator sport, but Luigi Mangione has managed the improbable: uniting the doom-scrolling masses from Lagos to Lisbon in the shared conviction that…
The Red Arrows over the Tyne: Aerial Ballet in the Age of Apocalypse By the time the first lycra-clad pilgrim shuffled across the start line in Newcastle last Sunday, global positioning satellites had already logged four coup attempts, three wildfires, and one cryptocurrency collapse. Yet for exactly nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds, as nine scarlet…
Red Arrows Today: A Global Spectacle of Smoke, Mirrors, and Geopolitical Maneuvering By D. Lockhart, Dave’s Locker Foreign Bureau It started, as most things do these days, with a red squiggle on a radar screen in a windowless room outside Brussels. NATO analysts, fresh from their morning croissants and existential dread, noticed nine Hawk T1…
England vs South Africa: Two Nations, One Cricket Match, and the Illusion of Global Significance By Our Correspondent Who’s Learned to Love the Absurd London—For 48 hours this weekend, the planet’s most urgent diplomatic crisis is not Ukraine, Gaza, or the slow-motion implosion of the Antarctic ice shelf, but whether a red leather sphere can…
