The Ice-Cream Empire That Melted Geopolitics: A Global Postcard from Ben & Jerry There are few things more reliably universal than the human desire for cold, sweet fat—second only, perhaps, to the human desire to argue about it. And so Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, two underachieving gym-class refugees from Merrick, Long Island, accidentally built…
A Peninsula, a Ballpark, and the Slow-Motion Existential Crisis of the SSG Landers By Our Correspondent in the Departure Lounge, Incheon It is a truth universally acknowledged that when a global shipping titan decides baseball is the next great hedge against geopolitical whiplash, the world has officially run out of sane hobbies. Last year, SSG—a…
The Ballad of Jamie Vardy, Global Folk Hero for the Age of Diminishing Returns By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, somewhere between the duty-free Toblerone and existential dread There are two kinds of fairy tales left in the twenty-first century: the ones Disney franchises into lunchboxes, and the ones that leak out of a…
**Marcos Giron: The Accidental Diplomat of Tennis in an Era of Existential Chaos** In a world where nations weaponize everything from natural gas to TikTok, it’s almost quaint that a 30-year-old Californian with a one-handed backhand has become an unlikely envoy of soft power. Marcos Giron—ranked 49th, owns one ATP title, and looks like the…
Storm Frontiers: How AccuWeather Quietly Re-Writes the Planet’s Mood Swings (Dave’s Locker, International Desk) PARIS—It’s 3:11 p.m. local time, and a push notification just informed a commuter on the RER B that a “life-threatening derecho” will flatten her picnic plans in twenty-three minutes. She sighs, deletes the brie from her online cart, and mutters something…
iOS 26 Wallpaper: The Earth’s Most Expensive National Flag, Now Available in 12K By the time you finish reading this sentence, Apple’s design team in Cupertino will have changed its mind about the default wallpaper twice and scheduled three emergency all-hands meetings about shade #2F4F4F. Yet somewhere between the smog of Delhi and the smog…
Somewhere above the Indian Ocean, a Boeing 777 freighter hums with the refrigerated sighs of Chilean cherries headed for Chinese New Year, while—in the cargo hold of a separate flight—a single replacement phone charger rattles around in a box the size of a microwave, bound for a London flat whose occupant forgot to tick “eco-friendly…
When the Berlin Wall finally crumbled, a few East German teenagers celebrated by hurling bricks like wide-outs, shouting “Jerr-ry! Jerr-ry!” even though most had never seen a single 49ers highlight. They’d only heard the shortwave whispers: somewhere across an ocean, a man in gold and crimson was re-writing the geometry of a very American game,…
Rob Lowe Has Finally Gone Global, and No, We’re Not Talking About the Actor By the time the sun rose over the Strait of Malacca last Tuesday, three separate governments had already issued “Rob Lowe” advisories. Singapore’s port authority warned of “anomalous drone signatures.” Jakarta’s air-traffic control logged an object “the size of an Airbus…
The Curious Case of Dave Roberts: How One Man’s Name Became a Global Cultural Cipher By Dave’s Locker’s Worldly Cynic-in-Residence There are 8.1 billion of us on this spinning rock, give or take a few who just ghosted the census taker, yet the name “Dave Roberts” keeps popping up in the strangest corners of the…
**The Curious Case of Cristopher Sánchez: When Baseball’s Forgotten Corners Become the World’s Mirror** In the grand theater of global affairs, where nuclear powers play chicken over postage-stamp islands and central bankers treat entire economies like their personal slot machines, the emergence of Cristopher Sánchez as a legitimate MLB starting pitcher might seem about as…
The Brewers’ “magic number” is now 7, a figure that sounds almost quaint in a world where central banks toss around trillions the way teenagers burn through TikTok minutes. Yet from a corrugated-plastic bar in Lagos to a smoke-choked izakaya in Osaka, the impending clincher for Milwaukee’s baseball club has become a Rorschach test for…
