**Oracle Park, USA –** Somewhere between the garlic-fries fog and the seagull air-raids of San Francisco’s waterfront, the San Francisco Giants are quietly staging a baseball season that matters far beyond the quaint provincialism of American sports pages. While the rest of the planet sorts out grain shortages, proxy wars, and the slow-motion demolition of…
The Man Who Fed the World—And Charged a Service Fee While the rest of us spent the plague years perfecting banana bread and existential dread, Tony Xu was quietly turning the global food chain into a delivery chain. The 39-year-old co-founder and CEO of DoorDash (market cap: bigger than the GDP of Iceland) has spent…
Ryan Howard, the Sultan of Swing-and-Miss, Still Haunts Ballparks from Caracas to Canberra By Dave’s Locker International Desk There’s a moment—usually in the bottom of the 7th, when the beer lines shorten and the scoreboard goes politely berserk—when every ballpark outside the United States seems to summon the ghost of Ryan Howard. In Seoul, the…
The Name That Quietly Rules the World By Our Correspondent in Transit Between Time Zones Somewhere above the North Atlantic, seat 14B is occupied by a mid-level trade attaché who still believes his job matters. Somewhere below, a container ship named *MSC Crawford* glides past Gibraltar carrying 19,000 units of everything from Ukrainian sunflower oil…
Charlie Sheen: A One-Man Sanctions Regime the World Keeps Negotiating With By “Lucky” Lucinda Marín, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The name Carlos Irwin Estévez—better known to Interpol, hotel security cameras, and late-night subtitle writers as Charlie Sheen—functions as a sort of transnational Rorschach test. To Los Angeles he is an errant sitcom warhead; to Bangkok…
Harrison Bader and the Tragicomedy of Global Citizenship By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic PARIS—While the French Senate debated whether to irradiate Japanese oysters and the Bundesbank quietly updated its “In Case of American Default” PowerPoint, Harrison Bader—yes, that Harrison Bader, the human highlight reel from Bronxville—was introduced to 40,000…
Anthony Rizzo and the Geopolitics of a First-Baseman’s Elbow By Our Man in the Dugout Bar, Somewhere between Caracas and Queens Somewhere in the world tonight, a war correspondent is filing copy on grain futures while Anthony Rizzo’s cervical fusion is trending above a failed cease-fire. That’s not a punch-line; it’s merely Tuesday. The Yankees’…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that two professional ball clubs, separated by the 2,000-kilometre polite fiction known as the U.S.–Canada border, can still manufacture enough existential dread to keep the rest of the planet momentarily distracted from its own flaming garbage scows. On Tuesday night the Houston Astros—those erstwhile pariahs of the sign-stealing scandal,…
Tigers vs Yankees: A Proxy War in Pinstripes and Whiskers By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere over the Pacific If you squint hard enough from the press box of the Tokyo Dome, the Detroit Tigers look less like a baseball team and more like a floundering nation-state: rich in nostalgic glory, poor in…
Pirates vs Orioles: A Global Parable Written in Pine Tar and Despair By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, filing from a bar in Lisbon that still thinks the Cold War is on Let us begin with the obvious: when a club named after 17th-century maritime criminals meets a club named after a small orange songbird, the universe…
DENVER, Colorado—The Mile-High City’s weather forecast this week reads like a ransom note Mother Nature scribbled on the back of a bar napkin: 70°F on Monday, 7 inches of snow by Wednesday, and a 30% chance of existential dread by the weekend. To the average Coloradan this is merely Tuesday; to the rest of the…
THE QUIET IMPERIALISM OF HENRY BIENEN, OR HOW A NORTHWESTERN PRESIDENT TAUGHT THE WORLD TO LOVE ITS NEOLIBERAL OVERLORDS By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between the Quad and the IMF It is tempting, in the age of instant outrage and TikTok summits, to dismiss Henry Bienen as a quaint Midwestern apparition: tweed, tortoiseshell glasses, and the…
