NL Wild Card: The Last Gasp of American Exceptionalism, Now Streaming Worldwide by Dave’s Locker International Desk If you tune in from Paris at 3 a.m. or from Lagos at 9 p.m.—thanks to the miracle of geo-pirated streams and unquenchable insomnia—you’ll discover the same tableau: grown men in poly-blend pajamas sprinting across manicured Kentucky bluegrass…
Houston, We Have a Brand Problem: Astros vs Yankees as Global Morality Play by Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent (still jet-lagged from a nonstop via Reykjavik) When the Houston Astros and New York Yankees renew their blood feud this week, most of the planet will be busy keeping the lights on, the bombs off, or the…
Mega Millions: How a $1.6 Billion Mirage Seduces the Planet By Our Man in the Cheap Seats At 11 p.m. Eastern last night, a single American lottery draw produced more overnight billionaires than most African stock exchanges manage in a decade. The Mega Millions jackpot—$1.6 billion and change—had swollen to the kind of figure normally…
The Astros Game Today: A Tragicomedy in Nine Innings, Brought to You by Planetary Melodrama Houston, Texas—population 2.3 million, humidity 100%, probability of existential dread steadily rising. While the locals shuffle into Minute Maid Park to watch grown millionaires in pajamas swat cowhide spheres, the rest of the planet quietly wonders whether this is the…
JACKSONVILLE, Florida – While the rest of the planet debates whether the Arctic will melt or merely relocate to the Mediterranean next summer, the Jacksonville Jaguars have quietly published a depth chart that, in its own small way, mirrors the global order: a thin blue line of starters propped up by an underfunded reserve army,…
Miley Cyrus: The Last American Export Still Clearing Customs By the time you read this, Miley Cyrus has already twerked, tongue-lolled, and power-balladed her way through another cultural checkpoint. Somewhere between Berlin’s Berghain and Bangkok’s rooftop infinity pools, the former Disney Channel tax write-off has become the global West’s most reliable soft-power delivery system—one glitter…
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…
