The world’s newest diplomatic crisis isn’t being negotiated in Geneva, Vienna, or even Davos; it’s unfolding on a California soundstage where a 72-year-old widower in suspiciously white sneakers is handing out roses like a geriatric Zeus doling out lightning bolts. ABC’s “The Golden Bachelor” has landed—an octogenarian remix of the franchise that once gave us…
Dave’s Locker – International Desk 3 June 2024 Red Sox vs Athletics: A Microscopic Battle on a Planet That’s Already on Fire By the time the first pitch left Brayan Bello’s hand in Oakland, the Nikkei had slipped another 400 points, a cyclone was politely rearranging the coast of Bangladesh, and somewhere in Brussels a…
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…
Harrison Smith and the Curious Global Cult of the American Safety Dateline: Somewhere over the Atlantic, where Wi-Fi costs more than a decent bottle of Moldovan wine and still drops every time the plane hits a cloud. From this altitude, the spectacle of modern fandom looks remarkably uniform: whether you’re in Lagos, Lyon, or Lahore,…
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…
The Global Bazaar of Hope and Hubris by our correspondent in three time-zones and one existential crisis If you want to see humanity at its most optimistic and delusional in equal measure, skip the dating apps and go straight to the investment pages. From a glass tower in Singapore where a 29-year-old analyst just bet…
When a name as ornately hyphenated as Harold Rashad Dabney III hits the trans-Atlantic group chat, even the most jaded diplomatic attaché perks up. Who, exactly, is this third-generation bearer of regal consonants, and why is every bored customs officer from Dubai to Düsseldorf now muttering it under their breath like a cursed haiku? The…
StubHub’s IPO: Selling Tickets to a Show Called Late-Stage Capitalism by Dave’s Locker Global Correspondent When StubHub filed to go public last week, the planet’s collective reaction was less “Wow, live events are back!” and more “Ah yes, another marketplace for the same Beyoncé ticket, now with quarterly guidance.” From the bourses of New York…
Philadelphia’s Weather Forecast: A Micro-Tragedy With Global Ticket Sales by R. S. Vane, International Desk Philadelphia woke up this morning to a sky the color of last week’s coffee grounds and a forecast that could generously be called “schizophrenic.” By noon the temperature had already performed three costume changes, hailstones auditioned for a Broadway revival…
The Geopolitics of Glitter: Madison Square Garden as Planet Earth’s Loudest Embassy By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere above Section 412, nursing a US$17 bottle of water From the outside, Madison Square Garden looks like a brick-and-mortar shrug at the skyscraper orgy surrounding it—an unimpressive box that swallowed a city block and never…
The phrase “task HBO” first appeared on a Nigerian meme page at 2:14 a.m. Lagos time, sandwiched between a crypto-scam hotline and a video of a goat boarding a BRT bus. Within 36 hours it had been retweeted in Tagalog, subtitled in Cyrillic, and turned into a dubstep remix by a teenager in Novosibirsk who…
From the cheap seats of the global economy, few scoreboards flicker with more schadenfreude than the American League East standings. While the rest of the planet frets over tightening grain corridors, runaway currencies, and the slow-motion demolition of the Antarctic ice shelf, this five-club cabal on the eastern seaboard of the United States continues to…
