Calexico—population 38,633, elevation 2 feet below your last shred of optimism—sits on the California side of the border fence, staring across at her sister city Mexicali like a younger sibling who borrowed the car and never came back. To the untrained eye, it’s just another dusty notch on Imperial County’s belt, notable mainly for triple-digit…
Project 2025: The World Watches America Draft Its Own Fan-Fic Constitution By Our Correspondent, Still Jet-Lagged from Three Continents and One Existential Crisis PARIS—In the plush backroom of a café off Rue de Rivoli, a German diplomat sips an €8 espresso and mutters, “The Americans are at it again.” He isn’t referring to the usual…
The Curious Case of Scott Jennings: How One American Pundit Became the World’s Most Unlikely Geopolitical Weather Vane By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS – Somewhere between the croissants and the existential dread that usually accompanies breakfast in the French capital, the name “Scott Jennings” slid across my phone screen like an unsolicited stock tip….
The Curious Case of Nick Sogard, or How One Utility Infielder Became a One-Man Metaphor for Global Uncertainty PARIS—In the grand bazaar of professional sport, where fortunes rise and fall like crypto during a regulatory panic, few commodities are as gloriously disposable as the utility infielder. Enter Nicholas Sogard—26, switch-hits, plays every infield position except…
If you tune into CNN’s late-night election marathons, you’ll see Abby Phillip holding court with the unflappable calm of someone who has already mentally drafted three post-mortems for democracy and a grocery list. To much of the planet she is merely the poised Washington anchor who can call a race in Arizona while the rest…
**Abu Dhabi: Where Oil Money Meets Existential Dread** The capital of the United Arab Emirates has always been the quieter, more calculating sibling to Dubai’s flamboyant showmanship—a city that built the world’s largest indoor theme park while its neighbors were still figuring out indoor plumbing. But beneath the marble-clad surface of this desert metropolis lies…
Dijonai Carrington and the Geopolitics of a Three-Pointer By Our Correspondent, still recovering from a press-box hot dog in Belgrade PRAGUE—While the planet’s attention was fixed on more traditional forms of brinkmanship—tank exercises in the Taiwan Strait, central bankers playing Russian roulette with inflation, or Elon Musk rebranding another social-media platform into oblivion—an unassuming 5-foot-11…
Antifa: A Four-Letter Word the Whole World Loves to Mispronounce By Dave’s Locker | Global Affairs Desk PARIS—If history has taught us anything, it’s that nothing travels quite as badly as a local street fight. And yet, the brand-name “antifa”—a portmanteau so efficient it could have been cooked up by a German tax accountant—has managed…
Jesus Luzardo and the Global Theater of Overpaid Arms By Our Man in the Dugout, somewhere between the mound and the International Date Line If you blinked somewhere between Caracas and Seoul last week, you probably missed Jesus Luzardo’s 96-mph fastball—an object that traveled faster than most passports and carried roughly the same economic weight…
ATHLETICS: THE PLANET’S MOST EXPENSIVE MASS COPING MECHANISM By the time the sun rises over the Maracanã, it has already set on a makeshift track in Svalbard where three Norwegian scientists jog in minus-20°C darkness, trying to outrun existential dread. Athletics, in its noble guise as the pursuit of human excellence, is really just the…
**The Curious Case of Veronica Burton: How One Woman’s Basketball Career Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Wrong (and Right) with Modern Sport** If you’ve been anywhere near a sports bar in Ulaanbaatar lately—and honestly, who hasn’t—you’ve probably overheard heated debates about Veronica Burton’s defensive rating. The WNBA guard’s journey from Northwestern University standout to…
The Valkyries Are Back, and They’ve Got Global Entry By Our Correspondent Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic NORWAY—On paper, the valkyries were always a Nordic HR department for the afterlife: winged middle-managers who skimmed battlefields, filed the résumés of the freshly dead, and escorted top talent to Valhalla’s open-bar networking lounge. In practice, of course, they…
