Troy Franklin, Wide Receiver, American: How One Twenty-Year-Old in Shoulder Pads Quietly Became a Data Point in Everyone Else’s Existential Crisis By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Between the 50 and the Apocalypse Picture, if you will, the planet at 3 a.m. Kyiv time, 7 p.m. in Oregon, and roughly half-past despair in…
Cooper Beebe: The Overlooked Colossus Quietly Rebooting the American Empire’s Offensive Line—and the World’s Power Grid By A. Grigor, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global capitalism has many moving parts—semiconductors, shipping lanes, crypto scams—but few are as under-celebrated as the 6-foot-3, 335-pound human firewall known as Cooper Beebe. While the chattering classes in Davos sip lukewarm…
Denver, Colorado – Somewhere between the thin alpine air and the thicker wallets of corporate sponsors, the Broncos played another game last night. This alone is hardly news; the sun also rises, and the Broncos also lose. Yet from the vantage point of a planet simultaneously on fire and drowning in its own plastic, the…
Cardinals Game: A Feathered Spectacle in Which the Planet Gambles on Red Robes and Higher Stakes By Our Man in the Eternal City, nursing an espresso and existential dread Rome, Thursday – While half the world was doom-scrolling through inflation charts and the other half was busy re-branding war as “special military operations,” roughly 120…
The Longest Field Goal Ever Kicked: A Parable of 66 Yards and the Global Attention Span By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk (tired, over-caffeinated, and still jet-lagged from Doha) On 26 September 2021, in the concrete cathedral formerly known as Mile High Stadium, a 26-year-old Baltimore place-kicker named Justin Tucker swung his leg like Zeus flipping…
The NFL’s New Record Field Goal: When a 66-Yard Footnote Becomes the World’s Loudest Sigh By Dave’s Locker International Desk In a stadium built on landfill, beneath a sky that smelled faintly of cheesesteak and existential dread, Philadelphia Eagles kicker Jake Elliott booted a 66-yard field goal on Sunday night. The ball traveled so far…
Jerry Jones: The Last American Monarch in a League of His Own By Our Man in Row Z, International Affairs Desk The name “Jerry Jones” doesn’t translate into Mandarin or Swahili, yet from Lagos sports bars to Seoul betting apps, everyone knows the silhouette: the silver pompadour rising from a luxury box like a weather…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Avenue Montaigne and a Malibu rehab facility, the name Brooke Mueller keeps ricocheting across the planet like a designer boomerang that refuses to come down. To most of the world she is simply “that woman who married the tiger-blooded warlock,” a footnote in the Charlie Sheen global meltdown franchise. Yet from Berlin…
The planet’s most pressing geopolitical question this fine afternoon is not whether the BRICS summit will topple the dollar, nor if the Houthis have added another shipping lane to their maritime scrapbook, but rather: Is Taylor Swift presently breathing the same recycled Arrowhead Stadium air as a man whose primary talent is throwing an inflated…
Mets Score: The Trivial Number That Launched a Thousand Hot Takes and Proved the World Still Cares (Barely) By the time the final digit flickered across scoreboards from Flushing to Frankfurt, the Mets had done something remarkable: they lost 7-3, and yet the planet’s collective cortisol spiked as if the Dow had just belly-flopped. In…
When a Man Called Freddie Flintoff Becomes a Global Metaphor By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic On paper, Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff is merely a retired English cricketer turned accidental television deity—six-foot-four of Lancastrian swagger who once hit a ball clean into orbit and later drove a Reliant Robin into a…
When the name “Kaleb Johnson” flashed across a thousand algorithmic feeds last Tuesday, the planet reacted with the collective shrug of a species that has learned to distrust virality. In Lagos, a crypto-trader mistook the trending hashtag for yet another memecoin. In Tallinn, a bored teenager scrolled past it while doom-looting on TikTok. Meanwhile, in…
