Sal Stewart: The Accidental Globalist Who Conquered Baseball by Refusing to Leave His Couch Somewhere between the 37th parallel and the cold glow of a laptop screen, Sal Stewart became the planet’s most improbable export: a 21-year-old Cincinnati Reds farmhand whose swing now travels farther than most passports. While diplomats argue over trade routes and…
Every four summers, the planet tilts slightly on its axis—not from any cosmic wobble, but from the collective psychic tremor of 130 million Mexicans holding their breath. El Tri, the itinerant national soap opera disguised as a football team, staggers onto the global stage again, and the rest of us pretend we have better things…
Draymond Green: The Empire’s Court Jester Goes Global By Diego “The Sardine” Martinez, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker If you want to understand late-stage American soft power, skip the State Department pressers and watch Draymond Green conduct a press conference in Paris, Tokyo, or—God help us—Riyadh. There he is: 6-foot-6, built like a bouncer who moonlights…
Tigers vs Yankees: A Proxy War in Pinstripes and Whiskers By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere over the Pacific If you squint hard enough from the press box of the Tokyo Dome, the Detroit Tigers look less like a baseball team and more like a floundering nation-state: rich in nostalgic glory, poor in…
The Thunder in the Void: Why Benin vs Lesotho Is the Geo-Political Cage Match Nobody Ordered By the time you read this, the world’s attention will have already flitted elsewhere—probably to whatever tropical island a crypto billionaire just sank his yacht on—but for one shimmering, slightly ridiculous moment, the planet’s idle gaze fixed itself on…
Kingdom Hearts 4: The Planet-Spanning Power Fantasy We Can’t Quit By Cora Voss, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker International Bureau It’s 2025, half the Northern Hemisphere is either on fire or underwater, and the other half is arguing on Discord about whether Sora’s new sneakers constitute cultural appropriation. Yet here we are—again—salivating over a fresh trailer…
Dancing With the Stars Premiere: When the Globe Pauses to Watch C-List Glitter Diplomacy In a week when the Arctic Circle reported its first rain-on-snow-in-August event and the Bank of Japan quietly debated whether to let the yen commit honorable seppuku, roughly seventeen million people from Reykjavík to Reykjavík (via Perth, Lagos, and that one…
THE QUIET IMPERIALISM OF HENRY BIENEN, OR HOW A NORTHWESTERN PRESIDENT TAUGHT THE WORLD TO LOVE ITS NEOLIBERAL OVERLORDS By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between the Quad and the IMF It is tempting, in the age of instant outrage and TikTok summits, to dismiss Henry Bienen as a quaint Midwestern apparition: tweed, tortoiseshell glasses, and the…
Marc Guéhi and the Quiet Art of Empire Maintenance By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere above the M4 Marc Guéhi is the sort of name that makes global powerbrokers yawn and then, three seconds later, frantically open a new tab. To the average punter from São Paulo to Singapore, he sounds like a…
Love Island Games: Humanity’s Diplomatic Breakthrough—Or Just Another Reason to Question Evolution By [REDACTED], Senior Cynic-at-Large Dateline: Everywhere Wi-Fi still reaches It began, as most global crises now do, with a push notification: “Love Island Games is live on Peacock.” Within minutes, VPN servers from Reykjavík to Rangoon lit up like Christmas trees in a…
Innings Festival 2026: The United States Invents a Five-Day Vacation from Reality, and the Rest of the World Watches with Envy and Mild Disgust Tempe, Arizona—While half the planet toggles between wildfire alerts and flood warnings, the United States has once again solved the global crisis of general malaise by flying in thirty-five rock bands,…
Joe Swash: How a Former EastEnders Barista Became an Unlikely Global Metaphor for the Age of Perpetual Side-Hustles By Our Man in the Departure Lounge There are, in this fractured century, only two kinds of celebrity: those who accidentally ignite geopolitical crises and those who quietly embody them. Joe Swash—yes, the grinning geezer who once…
