PARIS — Somewhere between the Seine and the Seine-et-Marne, the 2025 Ballon d’Or ceremony unfolded like a Versailles costume party where the courtiers forgot to bring the guillotine. Thirty-two cameras tracked the red carpet from every conceivable drone-approved angle, while 195 nations pretended to watch “live” on delay loops calibrated to their time zones. The…
KANSAS CITY—If you squint hard enough, the Kansas City Chiefs’ 2024 roster starts to look less like an NFL depth chart and more like a geopolitical risk assessment. There’s the $210 million quarterback who moonlights as a Pfizer ad, the Italian-born kicker whose very existence angers every Brexit voter, and a defensive line that could…
The Astros Score and the Collapse of Civilization: A Dispatch from the End of Days By the time you read this, the Houston Astros will have either won or lost another baseball game, and the numerical residue of that contest—what the sports desk clinically labels “the Astros score”—will ripple outward across the planet like a…
If you squint at the right angle, Trevon Diggs looks less like a cornerback and more like a one-man global supply-chain disruption. Every time the Dallas Cowboys’ No. 7 snatches a pass out of the sky, somewhere in Shenzhen a factory foreman is told to halt production on the next batch of opposing-quarterback jerseys—demand just…
Dodgers Standings: The Blue Empire’s Report Card and Why the Rest of the World Should Pretend to Care By Diego “Cynic-at-Large” Morales, filing from a bar in Bogotá that inexplicably streams MLB in lieu of telenovelas. LOS ANGELES—Somewhere between a freeway pile-up of Teslas and the latest wildfire evacuation, the Los Angeles Dodgers continue to…
The Café of Broken Dreams, Somewhere Between Mexico City and Zurich Tuesday, 03:17 GMT-6 If you squint just right, the fluorescent glow of Estadio Azteca on Wednesday night looks less like flood-lights and more like the interrogation lamp of a very polite loan shark. Club América—Latin America’s self-appointed Galactic Empire—has rolled up to the semifinal…
Como vs Genoa: A Provincial Derby That Explains Why the World Is Still a Mess by “Il Professore” – Dave’s Locker’s Balkan bureau chief, currently on sabbatical in a lakeside bar tabacchi Lake Como’s Sunday residents—Russian oligarchs in floating villas, German tax exiles in electric speedboats, and a solitary Swiss banker who still thinks fax…
Milan vs Bologna: A Derby of Desperation in the Age of Global Collateral Damage By Our Man in the Mezzogiorno, still coughing up neoliberal dust MILAN—At first glance, tonight’s Serie A fixture between Milan and Bologna is merely the 156th official meeting of two clubs whose combined trophy cabinets could house a modest oligarch’s ego….
Ashton Gate: The World Shrinks Around a Patch of Grass in South Bristol By our correspondent, still pretending the local is global The first thing you notice when you land at Heathrow—after the queue that makes purgatory look like priority boarding—is that the planet’s problems are now classified as either “over there” or “somebody else’s…
The Lions Schedule, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the 3 a.m. Kickoff By Dave’s International Desk Geneva, Switzerland – While the rest of the planet frets over ballistic missile trajectories and the precise temperature at which coral turns to bone meal, a quieter, more civilized form of global coordination is unfolding:…
The Geopolitics of a Pop-Up Stream: How Streameast Became the Twenty-First Century’s Floating Pirate Republic By R. D. “Rum-Runner” Delgado, Senior Correspondent for Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Copyright, the ghost galleon named Streameast drifts in and out of existence—there one Champions League Tuesday, vanished the next, only…
The Pacific and the Plains meet in Dallas, which is already a geographical punch-line, but the Alamo Bowl insists on staging Oklahoma State versus Oregon as though the fate of hemispheres hangs on which set of teenagers can better choreograph a lateral. To the rest of the planet—currently juggling inflation, war, and the creeping suspicion…
