Tiny Kingdom, Big Shadows: Eswatini in the Age of Global Schadenfreude By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk The Kingdom of Eswatini—population 1.2 million, landmass slightly larger than Connecticut, and still stubbornly clinging to an absolute monarchy like it’s 1899 and Wi-Fi hasn’t been invented—managed to crash the international news cycle twice this month. First, when King…
Cupertino, California – The iPhone 17 was unveiled yesterday beneath an LED sky the color of a corporate sunrise, and within minutes the planet performed its annual synchronized swoon. From Lagos to Lahore, Berlin to Bogotá, the same ritual unfolded: thumbs hovering above “Add to Cart,” credit-card limits quietly recalculated, and a billion screens refreshed…
Rockies vs Dodgers: A Ballgame for the End of the World By Diego “Flight Risk” Morales, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker DENVER—Somewhere between the thin air that makes baseballs fly like drunken drones and the smog that makes sunsets look like a Dario Argento film, the Colorado Rockies hosted the Los Angeles Dodgers last night. On…
Cardinals vs Mariners: A Proxy War Between Two Empires Nobody Asked For By Our Man in the Upper Deck, Nursing a $14 Beer and Existential Dread Tokyo—If you squint through the smog of a Wednesday morning in Shibuya, the giant outdoor screen above the crossing is looping the same highlight: St. Louis’ Lars Nootbaar—yes, that’s…
Chicago — It began, as most modern apocalypses do, with a push notification: “Bears vs Vikings: 3 p.m. local, 21:00 GMT, 06:00 tomorrow in Seoul.” Somewhere between the algorithmic chirp and the global reflex to refresh the scoreboard, the planet’s attention pivoted to a frozen rectangle of Midwestern sod where 106 padded mercenaries pretended the…
**The Universal Language of Buck: How America’s Most Polarizing Sportscaster Became a Global Mirror** In the pantheon of American sports broadcasting, few names evoke such visceral reactions as Joe Buck—a man whose voice has narrated more championship collapses than a Greek chorus on amphetamines. Yet beyond the baseball diamonds and football fields of the United…
MILWAUKEE—In a world where the Arctic is on fire and central bankers play Jenga with interest rates, the planet paused last night to watch two American ball clubs named after beer and law enforcement chase a small white sphere across a manicured lawn. The Brewers versus the Rangers, a mid-May interleague tilt that, on paper,…
From the vantage point of a hotel bar in Phnom Penh—where the barman insists on playing 1990s American sitcom theme songs at funeral-parlor volume—the Cubs versus Braves tussle feels less like a ballgame and more like an allegory for late-stage capitalism’s greatest hits. Two franchises, each clutching century-old grievances like passports to self-pity, meet in…
Ashton Kutcher: The Last American Export That Still Works by our correspondent in a café whose Wi-Fi password is literally “password123” PARIS—On the same day the French government announced yet another bailout for baguette artisans, Ashton Kutcher was in Davos explaining to a roomful of unelected technocrats how blockchain can stop child trafficking. Somewhere in…
Chang’an: The City That Invented Globalization, Then Got Rebranded By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk If you want to see the birthplace of twenty-first-century supply-chain anxiety, you need to look 1,400 years backward and 8,000 kilometers east of Davos. Welcome to Chang’an—modern-day Xi’an—where cosmopolitan merchants once haggled over bolts of silk and, presumably, complained that the…
Royals vs Guardians: How a Pedigreed Pastime Became a Global Power Struggle The phrase “Royals vs Guardians” sounds like the elevator pitch for a Netflix fantasy series—complete with brooding heirs, moody castles, and a CGI dragon voiced by a disgraced Oscar winner. In reality, the drama is unfolding on baseball diamonds from Kansas City to…
Mets vs Phillies: Two Rust-Belt City-States Fight Over a Pastime While the Planet Melts By Ignacio “Nacho” Valdez, International Correspondent, currently hiding from his bar tab in Athens If you squint at the right moment—say, during a 3-2 changeup that dies in the humid Philadelphia night—the Mets-Phillies rivalry starts to look like a low-stakes reenactment…
