Musetti: A Global Love Affair With a Twelve-Cent Doughnut Hole By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and the last functioning traffic light in Naples, the planet has quietly agreed that the pinnacle of human ingenuity is a sugar-dusted sphere of fried dough the size of a golf ball. Italians call it musetti;…
The Last Flight Out of Bucaramanga: How a Colombian Football Match Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Wrong (and Right) with 2024 If you squint hard enough through the smog of modernity, the world occasionally lines up its metaphors like dominoes waiting for a toddler with a sugar rush. Case in point: last Tuesday’s Copa…
The Weeknd in San Antonio: A Global Pop Ritual in the Shadow of Collapse Dave’s Locker International, filed from somewhere between the Alamo and TikTok San Antonio—where the ghosts of 1836 mingle with vape smoke and the faint smell of churros—played host this week to Abel Tesfaye, the Canadian R&B warlock who answers to “The…
Stephen Ehikian, a name that sounds like it should belong to a Bond villain’s accountant, has quietly become the most interesting man in Silicon Valley—and, by extension, the world. While you were doom-scrolling about melting ice caps and the latest celebrity divorce, Ehikian has been stitching together the global digital nervous system with the nonchalance…
Jon Jones: Humanity’s Last Riot-Control Specialist By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, filed from a hotel bar where CNN is muted but the fight replays never are The first time most of the planet heard about Jon Jones, he wasn’t being celebrated for his footwork or his ability to fold human joints like origami; he was on…
Did MrBeast Buy the NFL? A Dispatch from the End of Civilization, Probably By the time the rumor ping-ponged its way across five continents, the question had already mutated into a dozen languages: “¿MrBeast compró la NFL?”, “MrBeast hat die NFL gekauft?”, “ミスター・ビーストがNFLを買収したってマジ？” The short answer, delivered with the same enthusiasm a coroner uses to…
Malcolm Gladwell, the Canadian-born pop-intellectual with the hair of a startled alpaca and the delivery of a bedtime-storyteller who moonlights as a management consultant, has managed to export a very particular brand of reassuring explanation to every corner of the globe. From Lagos traffic jams to Tokyo bullet-train lounges, airport bookstores still stack The Tipping…
Beyond the Gates: How the World’s VIP Rope Became a Geopolitical Fault Line By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Pacific, Seat 47B For centuries, “beyond the gates” meant pasture land, graveyards, or the occasional dragon. Today it’s where the planet’s real decisions are made: the velvet-roped lounges of Davos, the blast-proof checkpoints of COP summits,…
UMass Lowell: How a Former Textile Trade School Quietly Became the Canary in Global Higher-Ed’s Coal Mine By Our Man in the Commonwealth, Nursing a Dunkin Cold Brew and Existential Dread LOWELL, Massachusetts—Somewhere between the rust-red brick of a repurposed mill and the aggressively optimistic glass of a new “Innovation Hub,” the University of Massachusetts…
MrBeast Tackles the NFL: When YouTube Philanthropy Meets America’s Most Sacred Violence Circus By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you woke up last week to learn that Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson had purchased the Carolina Panthers, congratulations—you’ve just witnessed late-stage capitalism’s newest halftime show. The rumor mill began whirring after Beast dropped a teaser video titled…
The Red Machine Reboots: Liverpool’s Champions League Squad as Global Metaphor By Our Man in Every Departure Lounge Liverpool, England – While the rest of the planet debates whether democracy is clinging to life support or merely on a smoke break, 25 men in matching tracksuits have quietly re-certified themselves as a planetary spectacle. Jürgen…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Basque barricades and the manicured lawns of Roland-Garros, a 27-year-old Californian-Moroccan-Filipina with a passport thicker than a Michelin guide has become tennis’s latest geopolitical Rorschach test. Nina Ghaibi doesn’t just hit balls; she ricochets through the fault lines of identity politics, oligarchic sponsorship, and the eternal human urge to package diaspora trauma…
