The Gloria Funicular: Lisbon’s Vertical Escalator to the Human Condition By our Special Correspondent, still waiting for the elevator to self-respect If you stand at the foot of Calçada da Glória on any given afternoon, you will witness a tableau so perfectly absurd it could be commissioned by the United Nations as a cautionary exhibit….
PARIS — In a world where geopolitical alliances crumble faster than a croissant in July, one American export has managed to retain diplomatic immunity: Hailee Steinfeld’s face. The 27-year-old singer-actress-emoji-enthusiast has quietly become the soft-power equivalent of an aircraft carrier, bobbing along the 24-hour news cycle projecting cultural hegemony without ever firing a shot—unless you…
Radiohead’s 2025 World Tour: A Post-Apocalyptic Pilgrimage for the Disillusioned Masses By Lucía “Lucky” Valenti, International Cynic-at-Large, currently marooned in an airport lounge that smells of wet carpet and broken dreams. LONDON—In a move that simultaneously reassures and terrifies the planet, Radiohead have announced their first full world tour since 2018, a 33-date slog across…
The World According to Iga By our Warsaw-to-Wimbledon correspondent, still wondering why the coffee tastes like geopolitics. It’s 2024 and the planet’s usual cast of calamities—proxy wars, rogue algorithms, runaway inflation—have been momentarily shoved to the margins of the global attention economy by a 22-year-old Pole with a topspin forehand that sounds like a microwave…
The Red Machine Reboots: Liverpool’s Champions League Squad as Global Metaphor By Our Man in Every Departure Lounge Liverpool, England – While the rest of the planet debates whether democracy is clinging to life support or merely on a smoke break, 25 men in matching tracksuits have quietly re-certified themselves as a planetary spectacle. Jürgen…
PARIS—Somewhere between the Basque barricades and the manicured lawns of Roland-Garros, a 27-year-old Californian-Moroccan-Filipina with a passport thicker than a Michelin guide has become tennis’s latest geopolitical Rorschach test. Nina Ghaibi doesn’t just hit balls; she ricochets through the fault lines of identity politics, oligarchic sponsorship, and the eternal human urge to package diaspora trauma…
The Curious Case of Sophie Turner, or How the North Remembers the Global Soap Opera By the time the news alerts pinged from Reykjavík to Rabat, Sophie Turner—once best known for looking stoically miserable in a fur cloak—had already become a trans-Atlantic custody piñata. A routine divorce filing in Miami-Dade County ricocheted across time zones,…
Robert Half: The Global Talent Broker Quietly Redrawing the Map of Work When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, history books breathlessly announced the end of ideology. They were half right: ideology simply moved to LinkedIn. Into that vacuum stepped Robert Half, the San Ramon–born staffing firm that has spent 75 years persuading CFOs in…
From the vantage point of a press perch that smells faintly of disinfectant and broken dreams—Wimbledon’s media bunker, where hope goes to die and biscuits go stale—Katie Boulter has become an unlikely geopolitical weather vane. The 27-year-old from Leicestershire, currently charted somewhere between “British darling” and “late-stage wildcard,” is not merely swinging a graphite wand…
Felix Auger-Aliassime: The Maple-Leaf Messiah Who Forgot to Read the Script By *Dave’s Senior Correspondent for Existential Tennis Meltdowns* PARIS—Somewhere between the first and second espresso this morning, the global tennis-industrial complex realized it has been stood up at the altar again. Felix Auger-Aliassime—Canada’s polite, 6-foot-4 answer to the question “What if a royal guard…
Nigel Farage: The Man Who Weaponised Nostalgia and Won the World’s Attention By Dave’s Locker International Desk The planet’s pundits spent years dismissing him as a pint-sized sideshow in pin-stripe, yet Nigel Farage has quietly become the Brexit Age’s answer to Rasputin: apparently un-killable, faintly perfumed by beer foam, and still pulling strings long after…
RedZone: The 21st-Century Colosseum Beamed to Your Flat Screen, Pub, and Probable Dystopia By Sebastian “Bas” Mortensen, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker LONDON—It’s 6:57 p.m. GMT on a Sunday when the Sky Sports satellite uplink crackles alive above a Shoreditch sports bar already vibrating with cheap lager and existential dread. Inside, punters from four continents hush…
