San Francisco, a city where the fog rolls in thicker than the average tech CEO’s sincerity, hosts a baseball franchise whose global footprint is oddly disproportionate to the sport’s worldwide popularity. The San Francisco Giants—originally the New York Gothams, because nothing says “major leagues” like a Victorian anxiety attack—now sit at the nexus of American…
The American League West: A Pocket-Sized Empire in a World That Barely Notices Somewhere between the Strait of Hormuz and the Taiwan Strait, the planet’s most combustible shipping lanes hum with crude-oil tankers whose cargo value dwarfs the combined payrolls of the Houston Astros and Seattle Mariners. Yet if you scroll far enough down the…
When the World Ends, Bravo Will Still Be Green-Lighting Reunions by our correspondent in the last functioning embassy bar, somewhere between Reykjavík and oblivion Somewhere in the rubble of 2024, while governments topple, oceans acidify, and TikTok teenagers auction their bathwater as NFTs, one American man keeps the global living-room lamp on. His name is…
Baseball, that pastoral relic of 19th-century American leisure, still manages to ricochet across the planet every October like a drunken satellite. This week the Philadelphia Phillies—those perennial bridesmaids in red pinstripes—have clawed their way atop the National League East, and the reverberations are being felt from Caracas to Seoul. Why should a city famous for…
Pirates vs Orioles: A Global Parable Written in Pine Tar and Despair By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, filing from a bar in Lisbon that still thinks the Cold War is on Let us begin with the obvious: when a club named after 17th-century maritime criminals meets a club named after a small orange songbird, the universe…
GENEVA—The Apple Watch Series 11 debuted this week, and humanity’s response was as choreographed as a North Korean military parade: half the planet gasped in rapture, the other half Googled how to pawn a kidney in Jakarta. From Berlin’s glass-walled co-working chapels to Lagos traffic jams where the watch costs more than the average annual…
Liam King, the 29-year-old software engineer from Manchester who spent three consecutive nights on the roof of a burning data centre in Jakarta, has unwittingly become the poster child for what happens when late-stage capitalism meets a heatwave and a looming recession. While CNN hailed him as “the last firewall standing between civilisation and a…
Dodgers Score Again, Earth Shrugs: How Nine Innings in Chavez Ravine Became a Global Barometer of Apocalypse Fatigue By “World-Weary” Wu, Senior Correspondent LOS ANGELES—Another night, another crooked number on the Dodger Stadium scoreboard. The boys in blue hung a 7-spot on whoever the poor saps from the Midwest were this time—details blur when you’ve…
The Conjuring: Last Rites and the Global Economy of Dread By L. Marlowe, Senior Correspondent, Somewhere Between a Screening Room and Existential Despair If you believed the Vatican’s only export these days is schism and papal merch, think again. The Conjuring: Last Rites—Warner Bros.’ latest dispatch from the ecclesiastical horror-industrial complex—turns exorcism into a passport-stamped…
Adam Thielen and the Global Apostrophe Crisis By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic In the grand geopolitical sweep of 2024—where BRICS nations flirt with ditching the dollar, AI prophets promise either utopia or annihilation, and your toaster now demands a firmware update—Adam Thielen’s career arc should register as a footnote….
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…
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…
