Twitch: The 24-H7 Coliseum Where Nations Go to Watch Each Other Stall By the time the sun rises in São Paulo, a Korean teenager is already 17 hours into a “Just Chatting” stream, explaining in near-perfect Portuguese why he prefers Brazilian memes to K-pop stans. In the same breath, 34,000 viewers from 112 countries vote…
The Shire Goes Global: How a Fantasy Card Set Became the New Geopolitical Weather Vane Dave’s Locker | International Desk | 12 June 2024 It began, as most modern crises do, with a Zoom leak. A blurry slide deck from Wizards of the Coast’s quarterly earnings call—captioned in Comic Sans, no less—revealed the next Magic:…
Jude Law, Jason Bateman, and the Black Rabbit: A Global Morality Play in Four Movements By the time the Black Rabbit cocktail bar opened its unmarked door beneath a crumbling palazzo in Venice last month, the world had already decided what it was. A money-laundering front? An A-list fever dream? Another casualty of the streaming…
**The Glittering Collapse of Civilization, Brought to You by Taylor Swift** While Gaza smolders and Ukrainian drones dance their deadly waltz across Russian skies, humanity collectively decided that the most pressing international crisis requiring our undivided attention was whether Taylor Swift would release her re-recorded *Showgirl* album at an exclusive party where the champagne costs…
**The Global Implications of Lyssa McGowan’s Pets at Home: When Corporate Pets Become International Players** In the grand theater of international commerce, where titans clash over semiconductor supplies and nations wage economic warfare through trade tariffs, one might be forgiven for missing the seismic shifts occurring in Britain’s pet care retail sector. Yet here we…
UMASS VS IOWA: A MICROSCOPE SLITHER ON THE PETRI DISH OF PLANET EARTH Dateline: Somewhere above the North Atlantic, where the in-flight Wi-Fi costs more than a week’s wages in Ulan Bator and still drops every time someone sneezes. If you squint hard enough—and have the misfortune of being awake during the 03:00 UTC rebroadcast—you…
Fluminense vs Bahia: A Tiny Patch of Grass Becomes the World’s Most Honest Mirror RIO DE JANEIRO—On Saturday night the Maracanã will once again host Fluminense vs Bahia, two football clubs whose combined wage bill is less than a single week of Lionel Messi’s Parisian dry-cleaning allowance. Yet for 90 minutes plus whatever farcical stoppage…
**The Tiny Town That Outsourced Itself: How Minco, Oklahoma Became a Global Metaphor for Modern Delusion** In the grand theater of globalization, where megacities swallow nations and tech titans play deity with GDPs, the international press corps rarely wastes column inches on places like Minco, Oklahoma—a town whose population (1,632 souls, give or take a…
Yankee Game Today: A Global Dispatch from the Republic of Bread and Circuses By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker NEW YORK—Somewhere between the Hudson’s toxic shimmer and the Hudson Yards tax write-off, the New York Yankees are scheduled to play a baseball game this afternoon. While 46,000 ticket-holders prepare to genuflect at the altar of pinstripes, the…
