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…
Lenny Kravitz Is Still Wearing That Scarf, and the Planet Has Noticed From Montreux to Montevideo, the man once photographed exiting a Parisian hotel in eleven different shades of leather has become a low-grade global barometer—equal parts fashion Rorschach test and sonic nostalgia export. Thirty-five years after “Let Love Rule” tried (and failed) to) topple…
The Ballad of Conan Gray, or How a Texan Teen Became the Planet’s Shared Diary By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent In the same week that the Arctic Council admitted it can no longer find the Arctic and the IMF downgraded global growth to “eh, whatever,” Conan Lee Gray—age twenty-five going on eternal adolescence—released “Found Heaven,”…
Tate McRae and the Algorithmic Ballet of Global Stardom By Matteo “Grim Reaper” Ricci, Dave’s Locker Foreign Bureau If you’ve spent any recent evening doom-scrolling on a malfunctioning airport Wi-Fi in Jakarta—or, frankly, anywhere from Lagos to Lille—you’ve probably seen her: a 5’8″ Canadian in split-sole sneakers, executing a pirouette sharp enough to slice through…
The Green Cathedral of the Andes, Now Streaming Worldwide Dave’s Locker – International Desk Medellín—If you crane your neck high enough above the jacaranda trees and concrete scars of Colombia’s second city, you’ll spot the twin spires of Estadio Atanasio Girardot. Locals call it “la Catedral Verde,” which sounds charming until you remember that the…
Green Bay Packers Players: When Cheeseheads Become Geopolitical Chess Pieces By Our Man in Geneva, Still Wearing the Same Parka Since Brett Favre’s Rookie Year The world’s diplomats insist the next global flashpoints will be water, semiconductors, and whatever Elon Musk tweets at 3 a.m. They are, as usual, only half-right. The other half is…
Kelvin Sheppard’s Global Cameo: How One Linebacker Accidentally Became an International Metaphor for Everything Going Wrong By the time Kelvin Sheppard’s name crossed the Atlantic this week—carried on the same jet stream that now delivers wildfire smoke and micro-plastics to whichever hemisphere is currently on sale—most of humanity had already forgotten what position he played….
Global Footnotes: How Jake Moody’s Right Foot Briefly Became a Geopolitical Talking Point by Our Man in the Cheap Seats For most of the planet, Jake Moody remains the sort of name that slides off the tongue like lukewarm tap water—forgettable, slightly metallic, gone before the swallow. Yet on 12 February 2024, somewhere between the…
The Empire’s Tennis Ball: How US Open Champions Quietly Rule the World By a correspondent who once got food poisoning at Arthur Ashe and still blames capitalism NEW YORK—Every September the United States dutifully stages its fortnightly imperial coronation disguised as a sports tournament. The US Open crowns a new sovereign of string and neon,…
Tyler Lockett and the Quiet Art of Being Too Good for This Timeline By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk (Seattle Bureau, Sub-Basement 3) The planet keeps finding new ways to disappoint us—crypto winters, methane tsunamis, election cycles that feel like recurring dreams of dental surgery—yet every Sunday at roughly 1:05 p.m. Pacific (21:05 UTC for…
Brock Purdy and the Strange Miracle of American Excess By Elias Delgado, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk In the grand bazaar of geopolitical crises—where grain ships dodge Russian missiles in the Black Sea and lithium wars simmer beneath Bolivian salt flats—it is comforting, in a perverse sort of way, to know that the United…
From Manila to Madrid, the arena lights dim to a conspiratorial hush just before the three-point line becomes a geopolitical fault line. Enter Wardell Stephen Curry II, a 6’2″ Californian with the diplomatic passport of a rock star and the jump shot of an intercontinental ballistic missile. While lesser mortals debate tariffs and troop deployments,…
