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…
Baseball, that pastoral relic of 19th-century American leisure, still manages to ricochet across the planet every October like a drunken satellite. This week the Philadelphia Phillies—those perennial bridesmaids in red pinstripes—have clawed their way atop the National League East, and the reverberations are being felt from Caracas to Seoul. Why should a city famous for…
The Name That Quietly Rules the World By Our Correspondent in Transit Between Time Zones Somewhere above the North Atlantic, seat 14B is occupied by a mid-level trade attaché who still believes his job matters. Somewhere below, a container ship named *MSC Crawford* glides past Gibraltar carrying 19,000 units of everything from Ukrainian sunflower oil…
Balogun: The Global Bazaar Where Everyone Haggles Over the Future By Our Man with a Hangover in Three Time Zones ISTANBUL—Try explaining “balogun” to a jet-lagged German trade attaché who thinks it’s a new crypto coin. You’ll watch his pupils dilate when he realises it’s actually the planet’s biggest informal market—an open-air, cash-only Disneyland stretching…
Tegucigalpa and Managua have never been accused of modesty, but even by Central-American standards their latest pas de deux feels like geopolitical cabaret performed on a stage made of termite-riddled balsa. While the rest of the planet obsesses over whether an American president can remember which continent he’s bombing, the strip of land between the…
Charlie Sheen: A One-Man Sanctions Regime the World Keeps Negotiating With By “Lucky” Lucinda Marín, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The name Carlos Irwin Estévez—better known to Interpol, hotel security cameras, and late-night subtitle writers as Charlie Sheen—functions as a sort of transnational Rorschach test. To Los Angeles he is an errant sitcom warhead; to Bangkok…
