From the Ruins of the American Empire, a Six-Stringed Consolation Prize Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk | 12 June 2025 Paris—It is 2 a.m. on the Rive Gauche and the bistros have finally run out of rosé. Somewhere between a tab of questionable MDMA and a heated debate on whether NATO still exists, a busker breaks…
Jeff Driskel and the Curious Case of the Disposable Quarterback By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over the North Atlantic If the American experiment in late-stage capitalism had a mascot, it might well be Jeff Driskel—an itinerant quarterback whose career arc resembles a Ryanair flight plan: cheap, indirect, and perpetually delayed. The 31-year-old…
De Minaur: The Last Australian Standing in Tennis’s Endless Game of Thrones By Dave’s Locker International Desk SYDNEY—If you squint through the smog of a Pacific bushfire haze, you can almost see the ghost of Pat Cash still arguing with umpires at the net. Australia, the nation that once weaponised tennis whites and exported surly…
Marvel’s Angela: How a Forgotten Spawn Sidekick Quietly Conquered the Global Imagination By A. S. de Winter, International Cultural Correspondent Somewhere between a NATO summit and the latest crypto scandal, the planet’s collective id decided that what it really needed was a six-foot-tall, platinum-haired Valkyrie-lawyer who can audit your taxes and then split you in…
The Ballad of Streameast: How One More Ghost Ship Sank in the Endless Ocean of Piracy By Dave’s Foreign Desk, somewhere between a cheap hotel minibar and whatever counts as “international waters” these days PARIS—If you listen carefully at 3 a.m. along the Seine, you can almost hear the collective sigh of a million insomniac…
Marvel Rivals: When Super-Powers Collide in the Shadow of Real-World Chaos By Our Man in the Multiverse In the grand tradition of pitting gods against each other for our mild amusement, Marvel Entertainment has once again invited the planet to watch its costumed demigods punch each other through digital skyscrapers. Marvel Rivals—the freshly announced 6-v-6…
The Vuelta a España, the Tour’s moody younger sibling who still wears black nail polish at 35, kicked off last weekend under a sun so brutal even the asphalt looked apologetic. While the planet elsewhere debated which apocalypse to schedule next—climate, debt, or the next crypto-currency—2,000 kilometres of Iberian tarmac offered an alternate reality where…
Nate Bargatze and the Soft Power of the American Mumble: How One Tennessee Everyman Quietly Became the Planet’s Preferred Sedative By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—On any given Thursday, while ministers in Brussels argue over grain tariffs and Beijing’s censors sharpen their knives for the next celebrity, a 44-year-old man from Old Hickory, Tennessee, is…
Colton Herta: The Californian Kid Who Might End Up Driving Europe Mad By our man in the paddock, still nursing an espresso and existential dread Monaco, Thursday, 11:47 a.m. – While the rest of the planet argues over the price of eggs and whether democracy is merely a seasonal flavor, a 23-year-old from Valencia, California—yes,…
Tropical Storm Lorena: A Gentle Reminder That the Planet Still Hates Us By Our Correspondent in the Tempestuous Tropics They named her Lorena, presumably after someone’s abuela who brewed lethal coffee and never forgot a grudge. This week, the storm politely introduced herself to the Mexican Riviera, slapped Acapulco with 65-mph winds, and then drifted…
Warsaw, 2024 – Somewhere between the Vistula’s lazy bend and the next EU summit, Poland has quietly become the world’s most over-qualified cautionary tale. Thirty-five years after the Berlin Wall’s souvenir hawkers packed up, the country sits at the geopolitical equivalent of the last booth in a 24-hour diner: everyone ends up there eventually, the…
John Sununu: The Man Who Made Bureaucracy a Contact Sport By Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk On the surface, John H. Sununu looks like the sort of technocrat who could be quietly misplaced behind a potted palm at any OECD reception. A former governor of New Hampshire, White House Chief of Staff to George H….
