Niagara Falls: The World’s Most Photogenic Glitch in the Geological Matrix By Dave’s Locker International Desk From the deck of the Maid of the Mist—now rebranded, of course, as “Mist-Xperience™ Premium Voyage: Poncho Included”—you quickly realize that Niagara Falls is less a waterfall and more a global congregation of humanity’s collective short attention span. On…
COLE BISHOP, THE ACCIDENTAL DIPLOMAT: HOW ONE AMERICAN SAFETY WITH A FRENCH NAME IS REDRAWING THE NFL’S GLOBAL MAP By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent (currently hiding from customs in a Reykjavik airport bar) It’s hard to find a more American export these days than the National Football League, that padded pageant of concussions and commercial…
Baltimore Ravens: America’s Gothic Opera, Now Playing on Every Continent By Our Man in Perpetual Transit Somewhere over the Mid-Atlantic, 37,000 feet above whatever fresh geopolitical disaster is brewing below, the in-flight Wi-Fi hiccups just long enough for the passenger in 14C to miss Lamar Jackson pirouette out of a collapsing pocket and flick a…
Buffalo, New York – The moment Damar Hamlin’s torso hit the turf at Highmark Stadium, the world’s collective attention dropped faster than the Dow on a Federal Reserve tantrum. From Lagos to Lisbon, smartphones pinged with push alerts like a synchronized fire drill, proving once again that nothing unites humanity quite like televised cardiac arrest….
**The World Watches America Wrestle Itself: Super Bowl LIX as Global Spectacle and Warning** While glaciers melt and supply chains crumble, approximately one-third of humanity will pause this Sunday to watch grown millionaires in colored spandex attempt territorial conquest over an oblong leather ball. Super Bowl LIX—America’s annual tribute to excess, consumerism, and ritualized violence—will…
Peyton Manning’s Kids and the Quiet Globalization of the American Quarterback Gene Pool By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between a Munich Beer Hall and the Delhi Duty-Free In the pandemic’s bleary aftermath, the planet’s attention-starved continents have found one low-stakes consensus: staring at other people’s children. Enter Marshall, Mosley, and the inexplicably vowel-deprived “B” (short for…
Matt Prater: The Man Who Kicks Civilization’s Existential Dread Through Uprights By the time most Europeans are debating whether 4 p.m. is too early for a second espresso, Matt Prater has already launched a football—oval, not spherical, the shape of America’s neuroses—far enough to make GPS satellites recalibrate. 64 yards, a record, give or take…
Marshall Manning – the very name sounds like a Pentagon program that was quietly cancelled once the invoices hit eight figures. Yet in the past 72 hours this previously un-Googleable American teenager has become the planet’s most unlikely Rorschach test. From Lagos trading floors to Seoul crypto cafés, everyone is projecting something onto the kid…
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…
Lady Gaga’s World Tour: A Glitter-Soaked Pilgrimage Through the End Times by Dave’s Locker International Desk Rome, May 2024 – While the Colosseum’s stone arches quietly molder under a heat dome that would make Caligula blush, 65,000 Little Monsters in LED devil horns are screaming the bridge to “Bad Romance” at a pitch that could…
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,”…
