Chorrillo vs. América: A Micro-Cosmic Spectacle for the End of the World By Diego “Doomsday” Delgado, International Correspondent-at-Large Panama City, 2:47 a.m. local time—an hour when sane people consider either sleep or arson—yet Estadio Rommel Fernández is lit up like a hedge fund manager’s conscience. Inside, Club Deportivo Chorrillo—population: the entire neighborhood plus two stray…
Yankee Game Today: A Global Dispatch from the Republic of Bread and Circuses By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker NEW YORK—Somewhere between the Hudson’s toxic shimmer and the Hudson Yards tax write-off, the New York Yankees are scheduled to play a baseball game this afternoon. While 46,000 ticket-holders prepare to genuflect at the altar of pinstripes, the…
Kaitlan Collins and the Global Gladiator Pit A dispatch from the front row of the world’s most expensive reality show By the time the sun rises in Kyiv, Kaitlan Collins has already made three governments flinch. By dusk in Jakarta, she’s on every diplomatic WhatsApp group, her questions clipped, translated, and weaponised. The 32-year-old CNN…
The Global Ballad of ESPN Fantasy: How Imaginary Sports Became the Last Universal Currency By the time the sun rose over Reykjavik last Sunday, 3.4 million people—spread from Lagos to Lapland—had already checked their ESPN Fantasy lineups. They did so before breakfast, before brushing teeth, before remembering whether their actual national football teams were still…
The world’s most consequential geopolitical contest this week is not playing out in the South China Sea but in a dimly lit spare bedroom in suburban Milwaukee, where Trevor—an actuarial analyst who once misspelled “Ukraine” on a conference call—is deciding whether to start Jordan Addison or bench him for a London game that kicks off…
Yahoo Fantasy Football: The Last Empire America Still Runs Better Than the U.N. By Diego “Draft Day” Serrano, International Correspondent filing from a Wi-Fi dead zone near the Syrian-Turkish border If you want to witness a functioning global bureaucracy that still inspires mass participation without drone strikes or debt ceilings, skip Davos and open the…
Naomi Osaka, the soft-spoken grand-slam dispenser who once made an entire stadium hush like a library in a police raid, has become a global Rorschach test. From Melbourne to Manhattan, Lagos to Lausanne, people peer at the 26-year-old and see whatever the zeitgeist needs: a mental-health pioneer, a corporate cash-cow, a reluctant activist, or—depending on…
**The Global Hamstring: How Justin Jefferson’s Pulled Muscle Quietly Terrified Four Continents** *By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Dave’s Locker International* MINNEAPOLIS—Somewhere between the 38-second mark of the second quarter and the next round of artisanal nachos, Justin Jefferson’s hamstring sent a ripple across the planet that registered roughly 3.7 on the Richter Scale…
Athletics vs Cardinals: When Cosmic Irony Dresses in Spandex and Feathers By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Pacific If you tuned in expecting a quaint American baseball rivalry, congratulations—you’ve just been punked by the universe. The phrase “Athletics vs Cardinals” is no longer the exclusive property of two teams that trade…
Osaka – Population: 19 million, Sarcasm: Infinite By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk (still jet-lagged since 2019) If Tokyo is the world’s impeccably ironed suit, Osaka is the same suit after it’s slept in a capsule hotel, eaten three sticks of kushikatsu, and decided to pick a fight with the global order. Long dismissed abroad as…
Yahoo Fantasy: The Last Empire Still Flying a 1990s Flag By Our Man in the Cloud Somewhere between the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of TikTok micro-celebrities, Yahoo Fantasy Sports carved out a digital fiefdom where grown humans trade imaginary athletes like tulip bulbs in 1637. From Singapore to São Paulo, 8.9…
CenterPoint Energy: Houston, We Have a Grid Problem (and It’s Contagious) By the time the lights flickered out in Texas last February, the rest of the planet had already stopped pretending to be surprised. After all, we’ve spent the last decade watching power grids from South Africa to Siberia audition for the same tragicomedy: one…
