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 NC Dinos, for the uninitiated, are not a new strain of Jurassic Park cosplay gone rogue in Pyongyang. They are, in fact, South Korea’s most improbable baseball success story—an expansion team that clawed its way from corporate afterthought to 2020 Korean Series champions faster than most governments can agree on a Zoom background. And…
Hotel Babylon: A Global Tour of the Last Refuge Before the Apocalypse By Your Correspondent, Fresh from the Minibar and Existential Dread PARIS—At 2:14 a.m. in the Hôtel des Grands Boulevards, a Saudi prince is arguing with the night concierge about the ethical sourcing of his pillow mints. Three floors below, a climate-science post-doc from…
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…
Phillies-Dodgers: A Globe-Trotting Tragedy in Nine Innings By our man in the cheap seats, filing from everywhere and nowhere Across six continents—Antarctica’s penguins wisely abstain—baseball fans woke to the news that the Philadelphia Phillies and Los Angeles Dodgers were renewing hostilities. At first glance it’s just another installment of America’s provincial pastime, a 162-game soap…
From the Banks of the Bosporus to the Beaches of Bali, the world has many pressing questions: will the BRICS dethrone the dollar, can COP agreements survive another American election cycle, and—most urgent—how did a 27-year-old Georgian with frosted tips and a podcast about “holy testosterone” become a diplomatic curiosity in six languages? Meet Chase…
Angels vs. Brewers: A Cosmic Reminder That Even Baseball Is Stuck in Geopolitical Quicksand By Luka Varga, Dave’s Locker Senior Correspondent (currently exiled in a Zagreb café that doubles as a crypto-launderette) MILWAUKEE—While the rest of the planet debates whose navy gets to ram whom in the South China Sea, a smaller, more existential clash…
ATHLETICS VS RED SOX: A GLOBAL POWER STRUGGLE PLAYED OUT ON A PATCH OF GRASS IN MASSACHUSETTS By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the North Atlantic Boston, USA – Somewhere between the artisanal clam chowder stands and the inflatable Wally the Green Monster dolls, the Athletics and the Red Sox squared off…
Guardians vs Tigers: A Global Metaphor in Cleats By Dave’s Locker’s Resident Foreign Correspondent-at-Large The moment the Cleveland Guardians and the Detroit Tigers took the field last night in Comerica Park, the world did not stop spinning, oil markets did not tremble, and no heads of state called emergency sessions—yet, in the grand tradition of…
Somewhere between the Arctic shipping lanes and the latest crypto-crisis, the planet’s attention briefly flickered to a man named Darnell Savage. Yes, the same Darnell Savage who lines up in the Green Bay backfield wearing a number so forgettable that even the stadium Wi-Fi refuses to store it. While glaciers calve and central banks wobble,…
The Champions League standings have always been a kind of global stock exchange for hope—except the market never closes, the brokers are all teenagers in club-branded pajamas, and the dividends are measured in memes rather than money. Still, every autumn the same ritual unfolds: continents rearrange their body clocks to watch 32 clubs from 16…
Juventus vs Borussia Dortmund: A Timeline of Two Empires Pretending Everything Is Fine By “Il Conte” Malatesta, Senior Continental Misanthrope 1993 – The Cold War Is Over, So Let’s Fight Over Midfield The first UEFA Cup final between these two continental super-brands lands in the same year Bill Clinton is learning the saxophone and the…
