**The Curious Case of Jade McKissic: How One Woman’s Story Became the World’s Favorite Distraction** In the grand theater of global affairs—where nuclear powers play chicken in the Taiwan Strait and climate change politely waits for us to finish arguing about pronouns—Jade McKissic has emerged as our latest international obsession. Who, you ask? Exactly. Yet…
Dodgers Standings: The Blue Empire’s Report Card and Why the Rest of the World Should Pretend to Care By Diego “Cynic-at-Large” Morales, filing from a bar in Bogotá that inexplicably streams MLB in lieu of telenovelas. LOS ANGELES—Somewhere between a freeway pile-up of Teslas and the latest wildfire evacuation, the Los Angeles Dodgers continue to…
The Dodgers’ Magic Number: A Decimal in a World Running Out of Numbers By J. B. Vespers, International Correspondent LOS ANGELES—While the Eastern Hemisphere slept off another round of sovereign-debt nightmares, a spreadsheet cell in Chavez Ravine quietly ticked from “6” to “5.” In baseball shorthand, that single digit is the Dodgers’ “magic number”—the alchemic…
“In Whose Name?”—three polite words that, when strung together, form a question no government, corporation, or streaming algorithm wants to answer honestly. The film, by Syrian-French director Ziad Kalthoum, opens with a slow pan across Beirut’s port, still mangled after the 2020 ammonium-nitrate fireworks show that vaporised half the city. From there it spirals outward…
Anthony Banda and the Borderless Brotherhood of Disposable Left Arms By Marisol Vargas, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk Dateline: Everywhere and Nowhere—Somewhere between the cracked bullpen benches of Phoenix and the fluorescent-lit hotel lobbies of Seoul, Anthony Banda is presently warming up. Again. The itinerant left-hander has been optioned, designated, outrighted, traded, waived, and…
Sun News, Earth Blues By our roving cosmic correspondent, still hung-over from last night’s aurora The Sun has been making headlines again—always a bit of a narcissist, that 4.6-billion-year-old ball of plasma. From Delhi’s smog-choked rooftops to Reykjavík’s geothermal spas, the latest “sun news” is that our star has entered a more exuberant phase of…
Jonathan Groff: The Unlikely Global Export America Never Put on a Tariff List PARIS—While Washington and Beijing slug it out over semiconductors and soybeans, another U.S. product is slipping through every customs checkpoint unmolested: Jonathan Groff. Yes, the man who once asked the world if it wanted to build a snowman has quietly become the…
Luciano Darderi: The Quiet Italian Who Accidentally Became Tennis’s Newest Metaphor for Global Chaos By Matteo “No One Invited Me To The G7” Rossi If you blinked somewhere between the war in Gaza and the latest crypto-bro meltdown, you might have missed the moment an unseeded 22-year-old from Tandil, Argentina—who grew up speaking Italian at…
When Rappler, the Philippine digital news site founded by Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, announced yet another court date last week, the global press corps barely flinched. We’ve seen this tango before: government subpoenas, sudden tax cases, the slow bureaucratic garrote—democracy’s version of death by a thousand paper cuts. From Berlin to Buenos Aires, editors simply…
Am I the Drama? A Geopolitical Self-Interrogation Played Out in 195 Seats at the U.N. By the time you finish reading this sentence, at least six governments will have tweeted the phrase “Am I the drama?”—three ironically, two in panicked self-defence, and one because the social-media intern thought it sounded hip in English. What began…
**The 9.76-Second Diplomat: How Fred Kerley Became the World’s Fastest Metaphor** In a world where nuclear threats trend alongside TikTok dances, it’s almost quaint that a man running in a straight line for less than ten seconds can still make the planet collectively gasp. Yet here we are, watching Fred Kerley—a 28-year-old Texan who looks…
**The Global Arithmetic of Heartbreak: How a Teenager’s Diary Became a Multi-Million Dollar Empire** In the grand casino of modern capitalism, where trauma is currency and vulnerability trades at premium rates, 18-year-old d4vd has managed to parlay bedroom heartbreak into a net worth that would make small-nation treasury ministers weep into their spreadsheets. The Houston…
