Yankees vs. Orioles: The Empire Strikes Back (and Forth) in a World Already on Fire By the time the first pitch leaves Gerrit Cole’s hand at Yankee Stadium, roughly 3.2 billion people will have already decided that whatever cataclysm arrives next—nuclear winter, crypto collapse, another season of The Crown—will still be less cruel than the…
Cubs vs Reds: The Eternal Midwestern Proxy War That Explains Everything Wrong With the Planet By the time the sun rose over the Sea of Japan on Thursday, bleary-eyed salarymen in Tokyo were already checking the overnight box score from Wrigley Field like it contained state secrets. Half a world away, a British currency trader…
From the Green Bay Packers’ frozen tundra to the frost-bitten edges of Siberia, the name Tucker Kraft is currently being muttered in accents ranging from Wisconsin dairy-farm flat to Singaporean finance-dialect crisp. How, you ask, did a second-year tight end from South Dakota State become a geopolitical Rorschach test? Simple: in a world where supply-chain…
Europa League Play-off, Second Leg Old Trafford, Manchester – 22:00 CET, 29 August 2024 If you squint hard enough, Manchester United versus SK Brann begins to resemble one of those late-night infomercials for a miracle kitchen gadget: loudly advertised, vaguely unnecessary, yet somehow compulsory viewing for anyone still awake on a Thursday. On paper it…
Lauren Daigle and the Soundtrack of a Planet on Fire By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you were to drop a very precise seismograph in Lagos, Ulaanbaatar, and São Paulo all at once, you might detect a faint tremor at 72–76 BPM. That, dear reader, is the approximate tempo of “You Say,” the song that…
The World Watches, Mildly Terrified, as “Your Party” Expands Beyond Borders By Special Correspondent, Dave’s Locker PARIS—Somewhere between the seventh espresso and the eighth apology for the espresso machine being broken again, the news broke: “Your Party” has gone global. Not the rinky-dink house gathering you promised the neighbors would wrap up by 10 p.m.,…
WNBA Scores: A Tiny Pixel in the Planet’s Fever Dream By Our Correspondent, filing from somewhere with worse Wi-Fi than you The final buzzer sounded in Brooklyn at 22:47 GMT-4, and with it the New York Liberty edged the Las Vegas Aces 93-87, a scoreline that will ricochet around the encrypted group chats of Filipino…
Ekitike: The Tiny West African Nut That Quietly Runs the World DAKAR—On a cracked concrete loading dock just off the port here, men in knock-off Barcelona shirts shovel what looks like gravel into burlap sacks stamped with flags from Turkey, Vietnam, and a surprisingly chipper rendition of North Korea’s. The cargo is ekitike—cola nut’s uglier…
The Philadelphia Phillies, for those who still believe baseball is more than a taxpayer-funded real-estate hustle, have quietly become a small but telling barometer of late-stage global capitalism. While the world’s attention toggles between the next missile test and the latest crypto-meltdown, the Phillies—those red-pinstriped avatars of American pastoral nostalgia—are busy exporting existential dread disguised…
Brian Thompson: The Man Who Became a Global Metaphor Overnight By Our Correspondent in the Department of “Seriously, This Is 2024?” If you’ve been doom-scrolling in any of the world’s 195-odd countries this week, you’ve probably seen the name Brian Thompson trending harder than a K-pop comeback. On the surface, he’s the 50-year-old CEO of…
Michael Douglas, the man who once warned us that “greed is good,” has now spent four decades proving that charm is better currency than Bitcoin and considerably less volatile. From Wall Street’s mahogany corridors to Netflix’s algorithmic back alleys, Douglas has become a kind of walking, talking IMF of charisma—dispensing loans of credibility to whichever…
From the Files of the Global Cultural Attaché: A Dispatch on Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar, A.K.A. Cardi B It is 2:07 a.m. in Dubai, the hour when the Burj Khalifa’s LED façade usually cycles through stock-market quotes and tourist selfies. Tonight, however, it flashes hot-pink lyrics in Comic Sans: “Okurrr.” Somewhere in Lagos, a danfo bus…
