Dave’s Locker, International Desk – Seoul, San Diego, and the Sovereign Republic of Highlight Reels In a world where supply-chain shortages, crypto-crashes, and the slow-motion implosion of liberal democracy compete for headline space, Ha-seong Kim has done something subversive: he has become quietly, stubbornly excellent. The 28-year-old South Korean infielder is currently turning double plays…
The Buffalo Bills depth chart—an innocuous PDF that drops every August like a tax notice—has quietly become the Rosetta Stone for twenty-first-century geopolitics. To the untrained eye it’s just a list of large men arranged by jersey number, but to anyone who has watched civilization lurch from crisis to crisis, it reads like a classified…
Sinner: The World’s Favorite Scapegoat, Now Available in Multiple Languages By Dave’s International Affairs Correspondent Who Has Personally Sinned on Three Continents Before Breakfast PARIS—If you believe the marketing, the term “sinner” has never been more cosmopolitan. Once the exclusive property of medieval flagellants and small-town preachers armed with megaphones and cholesterol, the label is…
Yankee Game Today: A Global Dispatch from the Republic of Bread and Circuses By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker NEW YORK—Somewhere between the Hudson’s toxic shimmer and the Hudson Yards tax write-off, the New York Yankees are scheduled to play a baseball game this afternoon. While 46,000 ticket-holders prepare to genuflect at the altar of pinstripes, the…
The Global Ballad of ESPN Fantasy: How Imaginary Sports Became the Last Universal Currency By the time the sun rose over Reykjavik last Sunday, 3.4 million people—spread from Lagos to Lapland—had already checked their ESPN Fantasy lineups. They did so before breakfast, before brushing teeth, before remembering whether their actual national football teams were still…
The world’s most consequential geopolitical contest this week is not playing out in the South China Sea but in a dimly lit spare bedroom in suburban Milwaukee, where Trevor—an actuarial analyst who once misspelled “Ukraine” on a conference call—is deciding whether to start Jordan Addison or bench him for a London game that kicks off…
Yahoo Fantasy Football: The Last Empire America Still Runs Better Than the U.N. By Diego “Draft Day” Serrano, International Correspondent filing from a Wi-Fi dead zone near the Syrian-Turkish border If you want to witness a functioning global bureaucracy that still inspires mass participation without drone strikes or debt ceilings, skip Davos and open the…
Athletics vs Cardinals: When Cosmic Irony Dresses in Spandex and Feathers By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Pacific If you tuned in expecting a quaint American baseball rivalry, congratulations—you’ve just been punked by the universe. The phrase “Athletics vs Cardinals” is no longer the exclusive property of two teams that trade…
Yahoo Fantasy: The Last Empire Still Flying a 1990s Flag By Our Man in the Cloud Somewhere between the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of TikTok micro-celebrities, Yahoo Fantasy Sports carved out a digital fiefdom where grown humans trade imaginary athletes like tulip bulbs in 1637. From Singapore to São Paulo, 8.9…
CenterPoint Energy: Houston, We Have a Grid Problem (and It’s Contagious) By the time the lights flickered out in Texas last February, the rest of the planet had already stopped pretending to be surprised. After all, we’ve spent the last decade watching power grids from South Africa to Siberia audition for the same tragicomedy: one…
CBS Fantasy Football: How an American Pastime Became the Planet’s Most Efficient Sleeper Cell By the time most of Europe is debating whether to raise the retirement age to 75 or simply replace pensions with TikTok dances, a quiet army of 12 million global managers—yes, that is the officially sanctioned euphemism—has already spent the pre-dawn…
Blue Jays vs Reds: A Global Tragedy Painted in Feathers and Box Scores By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, still wearing yesterday’s cynicism GENEVA — While the world’s finance ministers argue over digital-tax commas in Swiss conference suites, and while a forgotten war reruns its greatest hits on another continent, two North American bird-themed baseball clubs have…
