# The Wayward World Tour: How Every Nation Perfected the Art of Getting Spectacularly Lost There is a charming lie we tell at passport control: that borders keep the wayward out. In truth, they merely provide a convenient queue for the globally disoriented. From the Arctic Circle to the equator, humanity has spent the last…
Sheryl Underwood and the Infinite Scroll of Global Empathy Fatigue By Our Correspondent in a Hotel Room with One Working Lightbulb Somewhere between the burnt-coffee time zone of U.S. breakfast television and the 3 a.m. doom-scroll in Jakarta, Sheryl Underwood cracked a joke about her own wig budget and accidentally became a diplomatic incident. It…
Jeopardy Today: A Planet-Wide Pop Quiz Nobody Studied For By our jaded foreign correspondent, still jet-lagged since 2016 GENEVA—Somewhere between the coffee that tastes like burnt passport stamps and the 3 a.m. cable news ticker, it dawns on me: the entire world has become one never-ending Daily Double. Only the stakes are actual nukes, supply…
In the same week that the Arctic registered its first 2 °C above-normal ocean temperature and a Swiss banker was caught using carrier pigeons to smuggle bearer bonds, the Daily Mail—fleet-footed, fluorescent, and forever indignant—managed to make both stories about house prices in Kent. This is not merely a British eccentricity; it is a global…
The Gladiators of Santa Clara: How a 49ers Game Became a Global Mood Ring By Our Correspondent, still jet-lagged from the last apocalypse SANTA CLARA—Somewhere between the Caspian Sea evaporating and the yen staging a one-currency rebellion, the San Francisco 49ers took the field on Sunday and, for three merciful hours, allowed the planet to…
The Accidental Diplomat: How Case Keenum Became the NFL’s Only Functioning Global Institution By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk In a world where multilateralism is collapsing faster than a European bank on a Friday afternoon, we have—against all odds—found a rare example of sustained international cooperation: Case Keenum’s passport stamp collection. Yes, the journeyman quarterback best…
Top 25 College Football: A Global Satire in Shoulder Pads By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent, still jet-lagged from covering a Bolivian llama race The American ritual known as the AP Top-25 college football poll dropped this week, and—like a drone strike on good taste—it instantly colonized timelines from Lagos to Lahore. Why, you ask, should…
Dortmund vs Wolfsburg: A Bundesliga Fixture That Pretends It Matters to the Wider World Dave’s Locker | International Desk The Ruhr sun—filtered through the usual industrial haze—rose this Saturday as if the planet hadn’t just spent another week sliding toward irreversible climate, financial, and moral bankruptcy. Still, 81,365 souls crammed into Signal-Iduna-Park to watch Borussia…
The World Watches America Play Tag With Itself By Diego Morales, Foreign Correspondent-at-Large NEW YORK—Across the marble lobbies of five-star hotels from Dubai to Davos, television screens flickered this week with the same surreal tableau: grown adults in suits sprinting across manicured lawns, frantically tagging one another while bellowing the words “You’re it, communist!” and…
Blue Jays: Feathered Diplomats in an Age of Collapsing Alliances By Our Correspondent, somewhere between Toronto and Tehran The blue jay—cyanocitta cristata to the taxonomically inclined, “that loud bastard on my balcony” to everyone else—has quietly become the most cosmopolitan bird never to clear customs. Native only to North America, it now serves as an…
Aires in the Age of Over-Sharing: A Global Tour of Hot Air and Cold Hard Cash By the time you finish reading this sentence, roughly 847 new “aires” will have been minted—cryptic aires, green aires, luxury aires, even aires-for-people-who-hate-aires. The suffix, once the modest dominion of French real-estate agents (“trois pièces, deux aires ouvertes”), has…
A Palmetto Punch-Up on the World’s Margins: SC State vs South Florida through the Bleary Eyes of the Planet By L. Vargas, Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk Picture, if you will, an over-air-conditioned conference room on the 38th floor of some soulless tower in Dubai. A Lebanese risk consultant, a Ghanaian cocoa broker, and a…
