The AP Poll Is the World’s Most Tolerated Lie—And Everyone Keeps Pretending Otherwise By “Globetrotting” G. M. Lefèvre, Senior Cynic-at-Large, Dave’s Locker PARIS, FRANCE—Every Monday at 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (7 p.m. GMT, 3 a.m. Tuesday in Pyongyang for the truly committed), a cabal of 62 American sportswriters and broadcasters releases a ranking that…
Dodgers: The Art of Slipping Away, From Tokyo Tax Shelters to Mediterranean Deck Chairs By Our Correspondent, Still Counting the Empty Seats GENEVA—The word “dodger” once evoked muddy Brooklyn baseball and the crack of post-war innocence. Today it is a cosmopolitan chameleon, changing its accent in every time zone. In Hong Kong it answers to…
Stanford vs BYU: When Silicon-Valley Nihilism Meets Mormon Moral Fibre on a Football Field and the World Watches, Bewildered From the vantage point of a Paris café where the espresso is bitter and the Wi-Fi is worse, the annual collision between Stanford University and Brigham Young University looks less like a collegiate football game and…
From the banks of the River Seine to the neon canyons of Seoul, the autumn ritual is the same: a hush falls, smartphones glow, and millions of otherwise rational adults rearrange their circadian rhythms around a patch of grass in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The Crimson Tide’s 2024 schedule—released last week like a papal bull—has already ricocheted…
LOS ANGELES – In the same week that the International Monetary Fund politely warned the planet may be circling the drain, 22 millionaires in neon footwear kicked a ball around a converted baseball diamond and called it progress. The occasion: LA Galaxy versus Houston Dynamo, a fixture that, on paper, promises nothing more than three…
Wimbledon, that annual fortnight in which the grass grows greener, the strawberries grow more expensive, and the British upper lip achieves Olympic-grade stiffness, has once again unfurled its ivy-draped flag over the international conscience. From Lagos to Lima, screens flicker with images of perfectly manicured lawns—lawns that cost more per square meter than a downtown…
PARIS—On the red-clay courts of Roland-Garros this week, a curious sideshow has been unfolding next to the strawberries-and-cream set: Donald Trump Tennis, an unofficial, unsanctioned, yet oddly magnetic phenomenon that began when the former U.S. president’s name was spotted on the reservation sheet of an indoor court in Palm Beach and then ricocheted across continents…
Lucid: The Word the World Pretends to Understand While Hitting Snooze By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Jet Lag and Existential Dread Lucid, adj. — clear in expression or thought; rational; easily understood. A lovely, optimistic scrap of Latin that somehow survived the fall of Rome, two world wars, and an internet full of conspiracy theories…
Tonight, while most of the planet sleeps or pretends to, a small but disproportionately loud slice of humanity will gather around glowing rectangles to watch American college football. From Lagos to Lahore, expatriate alumni bars will swell with the nostalgic aroma of overpriced wings and the quiet desperation of mid-level executives clinging to alma-mater identity…
When the Earth slips between the Sun and the Moon this week, casting its ruddy shadow across our nearest celestial companion, billions of humans will stop arguing about tariffs, interest rates, and which billionaire most recently insulted which head of state. Instead, they will tilt their heads skyward like synchronized meerkats and murmur variations of…
September 5, 2025 – Astrology for Nations That Still Pretend the Stars Care by L. M. Valdez, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker If you’re reading this on a functioning screen, congratulations: you’ve survived another 24 hours of the slow-motion demolition derby we call “late-stage globalization.” While the IEA quietly revises peak-oil dates again and the IMF…
Daily Horoscope for September 4, 2025 – A Global Forecast in Which Absolutely No One Gets Out Alive By Our Cynical Correspondent, currently orbiting the chaos from a press seat in Reykjavík REYKJAVÍK—Somewhere between the 14th volcanic belch of the year and the IMF’s 37th emergency Zoom, humanity reached for its horoscopes this morning like…
