Blue Jays vs Royals: A Featherweight Bout in the Coliseum of Global Spectacle By Diego “The Vulture” Valdez, Special Correspondent, Dave’s Locker KANSAS CITY—If you squint past the fountains and the overpriced nacho helmets, the latest tilt between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Kansas City Royals resembles less a baseball series than a miniature…
Boston and Tampa Bay, two cities separated by 1,200 miles of I-95 traffic and an even wider cultural chasm, met again last night under the merciless glow of LED banks that could guide aircraft. The Red Sox versus the Rays: a matchup that, on the surface, is merely nine innings of grown men in pajamas…
PARIS — Somewhere along the Seine, a Senegalese street vendor hawks bootleg NFL jerseys that read “OBJ 13” in Comic Sans. Two blocks away, a Korean tourist live-streams the transaction to 40,000 followers on TikTok, tagging it #GlobalIcon. In this moment, Odell Beckham Jr.—a man whose most memorable NFL play is now almost a decade…
Rome once pitted lions against Christians; the Aztecs let jaguars snack on POWs; today we settle the primal score between striped predator and feathered warrior on a baseball diamond in Cobb County, Georgia. Welcome to Braves vs. Tigers, the latest episode in humanity’s endless quest to rebrand carnage as family entertainment while keeping concession margins…
Travis Scott: The Global Pied Piper of Retail Therapy By: Our Man in the Duty-Free Lounge Astroworld isn’t just a theme park Travis bulldozed back to life in his own image—it’s now the operating system for a planet that can’t decide if it wants to rage or just return the sneakers. From Lagos to Ljubljana,…
WrestlePalooza: When the World’s Problems Enter the Ring in Spandex PARIS—While the planet busied itself with minor inconveniences like climate tipping points and the slow-motion disintegration of the rules-based order, 65,000 pilgrims descended on a purpose-built arena in Riyadh for WWE WrestlePalooza. There, under 2,000 LED panels and the watchful eye of a sovereign wealth…
Anthony Boyle: The Belfast Ghost Who Haunts Every Screen on Earth By Our Man in the Last Row of Economy Class If you’ve flown long-haul recently and accidentally pressed “play” on the in-flight entertainment menu, you’ve met Anthony Boyle. There he is, a pale, red-haired specter in 4K, whispering Shakespearean menace in *Danny Boy*, then…
From Oslo to Outer Darkness: Casper Ruud and the Global Tennis Afterlife By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large Somewhere beyond customs in Terminal 2, Charles de Gaulle, a Norwegian passport flutters like a polite surrender flag. It belongs—this week at least—to Casper Ruud, the 25-year-old Nordic metronome whose game is so relentlessly correct it makes Scandinavian social…
Dodgers Baseball: The Empire of Overpriced Sunscreen and Existential Dread From the vantage point of a press box that smells faintly of garlic fries and the slow decay of hope, the Los Angeles Dodgers—once a humble Brooklyn trolley dodger and now a $4.8 billion global content platform—look less like a ball club and more like…
Black Rabbit, Jason Bateman, and the Worldwide Art of Selling Nothing Very Loudly By Diego M. Salgado, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the Kremlin’s latest cryptic press release and TikTok’s newest dance craze performed on a melting glacier, Netflix dropped the trailer for “Black Rabbit.” The limited series stars Jason Bateman as a middle-aged…
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport—three initials that sound like a failed boy band and a footprint roughly the size of Manhattan—has quietly become the world’s most convincing argument that geography is now optional. Wedged between two modest Texan cities whose combined population could fit into a Shanghai subway car, DFW somehow moves 75 million souls a…
Stuttgart vs St. Pauli: A Tale of Two Germanies, Sponsored by Late-Stage Capitalism By Dave’s Locker International Desk Düsseldorf—From a safe distance, the Bundesliga fixture between VfB Stuttgart and FC St. Pauli looks like a simple Saturday afternoon collision of football philosophies: Swabian precision versus Hamburg anarcho-hipster chic. Zoom out, however, and the match becomes…
