Somewhere above the 47th parallel, under a sky the color of old pewter, the Seattle Mariners are playing baseball—an activity that, to the uninitiated, looks like nine men in pajamas trying to swat a pill while the rest of the planet negotiates grain corridors and microchip embargoes. Yet on this particular evening the Mariners game…
LIZZO SHEDS POUNDS, PLANET SHEDS SANITY: A GLOBAL DISSECTION OF ONE WOMAN’S WAISTLINE AND THE WORLD’S WARPED PRIORITIES Dave’s Locker, International Desk – 02:11 UTC, somewhere over the Atlantic When Lizzo announced last week that she had “lost a little weight,” seismographs from Reykjavík to Riyadh practically twitched. Not because the earth moved, but because…
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…
**Oracle Park, USA –** Somewhere between the garlic-fries fog and the seagull air-raids of San Francisco’s waterfront, the San Francisco Giants are quietly staging a baseball season that matters far beyond the quaint provincialism of American sports pages. While the rest of the planet sorts out grain shortages, proxy wars, and the slow-motion demolition of…
**The Global Scream: How a Child’s Abduction Became the World’s Emergency Ringtone** The amber alert has evolved from a humble American emergency system into humanity’s collective panic button—a digital air raid siren that transforms every smartphone into a handheld megaphone of dread. What began as a tribute to a murdered nine-year-old in Texas has metastasized…
The Man Who Fed the World—And Charged a Service Fee While the rest of us spent the plague years perfecting banana bread and existential dread, Tony Xu was quietly turning the global food chain into a delivery chain. The 39-year-old co-founder and CEO of DoorDash (market cap: bigger than the GDP of Iceland) has spent…
Hirving Lozano and the Global Theater of Transfer-Window Schadenfreude By Our Man in the Departure Lounge If you blinked somewhere between the Tokyo commuter crush and a Lagos traffic jam last week, you probably missed Hirving Lozano’s latest cameo in the never-ending telenovela we politely call “world football.” The Mexican winger—nicknamed “Chucky,” presumably because he…
Robinhood: How a Cartoon Fox Became the Global Financial Psy-Ops We Didn’t Know We Needed By the Bureau Chief, Somewhere Between Tallinn and a Tax Haven Once upon a time, a “Robin Hood” was the guy who nicked a purse from a portly bishop and dropped it into the lap of a starving serf. Charming…
Costa Rica: The Tiny Nation Making the Rest of Us Look Like Absolute Slobs San José, Costa Rica—If countries were houseguests, Costa Rica is the annoyingly well-mannered vegan cousin who shows up with a solar-powered blender, thanks you for the Wi-Fi, and then quietly composts your fridge before you’ve even found the corkscrew. While the…
The Repechaje Mundial 2026: A Global Consolation Derby Where Second Chances Meet First-World Guilt By A. Nonymous, Senior Cynic-at-Large, Dave’s Locker MONTREAL—Across five time zones and innumerable WhatsApp family groups, the planet is currently obsessing over the 2026 World Cup “Repechaje Mundial,” FIFA’s freshly minted second-chance tournament for teams that proved, in diplomatic parlance, “not…
Mateo Chávez and the Beautiful, Doomed Dream of the Global Everyman By our correspondent in the departures lounge of a half-built airport that will never open MEXICO CITY—Somewhere between the mariachi-themed Starbucks and the fourth immigration checkpoint, Mateo Chávez became an international metaphor. The 37-year-old Mexico City street-vendor—who owes his new fame to a seventeen-second…
Ryan Howard, the Sultan of Swing-and-Miss, Still Haunts Ballparks from Caracas to Canberra By Dave’s Locker International Desk There’s a moment—usually in the bottom of the 7th, when the beer lines shorten and the scoreboard goes politely berserk—when every ballpark outside the United States seems to summon the ghost of Ryan Howard. In Seoul, the…
