Piers Morgan, the human Twitter ratio in a Savile Row suit, has spent the last thirty years performing the geopolitical equivalent of lighting a cigarette in a fireworks factory and then complaining about the noise. His latest incarnation—professional indignation merchant on TalkTV and whatever streaming platform hasn’t yet blocked his push notifications—offers a neat parable…
The Return of Douglas Alexander, or How the World Learns to Love a Political Boomerang By Our Man in the Departures Lounge If you blinked sometime last November, you might have missed the moment Douglas Alexander re-entered polite international society without so much as a security pat-down. One minute he was the invisible man of…
Seminole County, Florida: The Global Village’s Petri Dish in a Golf Shirt Dave’s Locker – International Bureau of Mildly Unsettling Observations From a safe editorial distance in a city that still remembers what seasons feel like, it’s tempting to dismiss Seminole County as just another sun-bleached rectangle on the U.S. map, notable mainly for having…
Measles, Mumps & Money: How One Little Syringe Keeps the World from Coughing Itself to Death By “Lefty” Morales, Senior Pathological Optimist, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk It begins, as most modern catastrophes do, with a cough in one hemisphere and a conspiracy theory in the other. In the last 12 months alone, measles has gate-crashed…
Opta Stats: The Global Spreadsheet That Knows You’re Overrated Before You Do By Our Man in Cyberspace, Still Nursing a Hangover from the Last World Cup If the planet ever decides to hold a beauty contest for raw data, Opta’s spreadsheets would arrive dripping in sponsored moisturizer, each cell flexing like an influencer on a…
Brad Lander and the Municipal Thermometer: Why One New York Comptroller Makes the Bond Markets Sweat from Singapore to São Paulo By the time Brad Lander hops on his 7 a.m. Zoom with London pension managers, the overnight repo desks in Hong Kong have already priced in whatever he might say. That’s the quiet punchline…
Kimberly Guilfoyle, the American political commentator whose surname sounds like a brand of discount cologne, has transcended mere domestic notoriety to become a curious specimen of late-imperial pageantry. From Manila to Milan, observers watch her performative patriotism with the same detached fascination usually reserved for slow-motion train derailments or North Korean parades—equal parts horror and…
Red Robin, the globe-trotting mascot of American casual-dining excess, has landed in fourteen countries and counting—proof that if you fry it, they will come. The chain’s crimson-capped robin now perches above the neon streets of Dubai, the megamall food courts of Manila, and a repurposed Cold-War bunker in Riga that still smells faintly of surplus…
The Year the Planet Decided Zac Efron Was a Geopolitical Asset By Dave’s Foreign Desk, filing from four time-zones and a suspiciously warm December It began, as most 21st-century absurdities do, on a group chat. Somewhere between a grainy paparazzi shot of Zac Efron hugging a solar panel in Namibia and an AI-generated deepfake of…
The Curious Case of the Vanishing Nimrods: How Three Missing Coloradans Became a Global Mirror By the time the first snow flurries hit the Rocky Mountains last week, three hunters—each armed with enough gear to outfit a small expeditionary force—had already slipped off the digital map somewhere between TikTok and the Continental Divide. What began…
Xavier Legette’s 200-yard Sunday matinee in Munich wasn’t just another box-score footnote; it was a geopolitical flare shot across the bow of every soccer-obsessed continent. While the Allianz Arena crowd practiced polite Teutonic applause, American expats in lederhosen howled like their student-loan balances had just been forgiven. Somewhere in Lagos a betting syndicate recalibrated the…
In Queens, New York, sits Benjamin N. Cardozo High School—a red-brick monument to the American conviction that meritocracy can be manufactured like plastic lawn flamingos. Named after the Supreme Court justice who once called law “a solemn farce,” the building now hosts a daily farce of its own: 3,800 teenagers trying to game the algorithm…
