Diamondbacks vs. Padres: Two Small-Market Gladiators in America’s Colosseum, Watched by a World That’s Already Late for Work By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Between Tijuana and Tucson On the surface, it’s just another Wednesday-night tilt in Major League Baseball’s sprawling, 162-game telenovela: the Arizona Diamondbacks, a franchise whose payroll is roughly the…
THE ASU GAME: HOW A CAMPUS RIOT BECAME THE WORLD’S FAVORITE METAPHOR FOR EVERYTHING FALLING APART PHOENIX—If you squint past the tear gas and squelch of overpriced sneakers on broken glass, the so-called “ASU game” looks less like a college football fixture and more like a travelling circus of late-stage capitalism. Arizona State versus [insert…
In the geopolitical cafeteria of global pop culture, the dish labeled “Lady Gaga” is no mere canapé. It is a full-course, multi-sensory banquet that has been passed from Seoul’s Gangnam clubs to Lagos’s Afro-fusion parties, from Berlin’s Berghain basement to a yacht off Monaco where oligarchs pretend they still care about music. One decade and…
Somewhere between the Rhine’s industrial haze and the Mekong’s plastic-bottle flotilla, two Midwestern baseball clubs—whose combined payroll couldn’t buy a decent London parking space—played a game that, on paper, mattered only to people who still think chili belongs on spaghetti. Yet the Reds versus Brewers tilt in Milwaukee last night rippled outward like a drunk…
House of Guinness Cast: A Global St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Disney+ Cork, Ireland – Somewhere between a pint of plain and a corporate synergy meeting, Disney has decided the world needs another origin story. This time the brand is Guinness, the 264-year-old stout that has lubricated Irish wakes, Nigerian weddings and Tokyo salary-men’s karaoke…
Tigers Game Today: A Feline Farce Played on the World’s Cheapest Stage By Diego Serrano, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Detroit—If you squint past the rust-flaked Ambassador Bridge and the slow-motion bankruptcy that is the Michigan sky, you can just make out Comerica Park, where the Detroit Tigers will today attempt to convince 30,000 freezing optimists…
Penn State vs Oregon: A Parable of Two Empires in the Age of Collapse By Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Pacific, Still Jet-lagged and Philosophical Somewhere between the ghost malls of Shenzhen and the ever-shrinking glaciers of Patagonia, two American universities—Penn State and Oregon—will collide this weekend on a rectangle of turf in Indianapolis. To…
Rays vs Blue Jays: The Balkanization of Baseball and Other Tragedies in Miniature By “Roving” Rodrigo Amarante, foreign correspondent stuck in a Tampa strip-mall Starbucks Tampa, Florida—The Tropicana Field roof is doing its best impression of a half-deflated bouncy castle, sagging under subtropical humidity and the accumulated sighs of 14,000 ticket holders who suspect they’ve…
The Orioles vs. Yankees, A Statistical Proxy War in Polyester By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere east of the Chesapeake and west of existential dread BALTIMORE—In the grand theatre of American exceptionalism, two flocks of birds—one orange, one pin-striped—took the field last night to decide nothing less than which corporation’s laundry would preen…
While the rest of the planet juggles runaway inflation, sovereign debt crises, and the slow-motion implosion of the post-war order, a pocket of the Caribbean diaspora in Queens and a sun-bleached corner of South Florida spent three late-autumn evenings locked in a duel that, on the surface, concerns nothing more than who gets to spray…
The Silk Road Is Dead—Long Live the Silk Road A sardonic tour of humanity’s digital black market, from a Bangkok internet café to a Moldovan server farm By the time you finish this sentence, three new darknet marketplaces will have opened, two will have exit-scammed, and one will have been seized by a three-letter agency…
STRAKA: A CURIOUS CZECH WORD THAT FLEW THE COOP AND NEVER LOOKED BACK By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Prague, 3:17 a.m.—The night tram rattles past the National Theatre, and somewhere between the clatter of iron wheels and the last-call slur of tourists, a lone pigeon strafes an outdoor café. A Czech grandmother hisses “Straka!” and…
