Rugby: The World’s Most Polite Blood-Sport By Dave’s Locker International Desk If there is a single pursuit that proves human beings will ritualise anything short of nuclear war, it is rugby: a game invented when an English schoolboy allegedly picked up a football in 1823 and thought, “Let’s add concussions.” Two centuries later, that boyish…
Spotify, the Swedish-born jukebox that now soundtracks the apocalypse, has quietly become the most influential diplomatic force never to sit at the UN. From Lagos to Lima, commuters ride buses whose rattling engines are masked by algorithmic playlists named things like “Chill Vibes for Existential Dread.” The platform boasts 489 million users, or roughly the…
Jess Hull: The Quiet Aussie Who Just Taught the World to Run Scared of Its Own Stopwatch By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between a Berlin Beer Garden and Existential Despair Paris, 7 August—In the grand amphitheater of human folly that we call the Olympic Games, where nations bankrupt themselves for the fleeting dopamine hit of a…
Socialism Has Entered Its Midlife Crisis—And Brought the Whole Planet Along for the Therapy Session By the time the Parisian café Marxist finishes his overpriced espresso and the Shenzhen tech-bureaucrat closes her state-capitalist spreadsheet, the word “socialism” has already shape-shifted more times than a Swiss bank account. From Caracas’ empty shelves to Copenhagen’s bicycle superhighways,…
Somewhere between the burnt-orange smog of Beijing and a Reykjavik pub that still smells like 2008 financial panic, the name “J.T. Miller” is being uttered in languages that can’t even decide how many vowels to keep. To North American hockey fans, Miller is the Vancouver Canucks’ resident chaos engine: equal parts point-per-game center and contractual…
Gaza Strip: 140 Square Kilometres of Perpetual Headlines By the time you finish reading this sentence, some foreign minister somewhere will have issued a “deeply concerned” press release about Gaza. That is the Strip’s greatest export: statements of concern, delivered in impeccable officialese, then promptly filed next to the coffee-stained draft on climate change and…
Shoppers of the World, Unite: Retail Sales Data as Our New Global Blood Pressure Reading By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent If you want a quick, painless biopsy of planetary morale, skip the WHO mental-health surveys and just glance at the monthly retail-sales print. Released in a rolling 24-hour relay from Beijing to Berlin to Brasília,…
Brett Goldstein: The British Scowl That Conquered a Planet Already in Therapy by “Dave’s” Global Correspondent, currently hiding in a Copenhagen airport lounge that smells of herring and regret PARIS—At 2:14 a.m. on a Wednesday, when most of the world is doom-scrolling about melting ice caps or the latest crypto-casino implosion, a 43-year-old man from…
Dustin Hoffman: The Accidental Everyman Who Conquered a Planet That Barely Agreed on Anything By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Watching the World Burn in Subtitles PARIS—Try explaining Dustin Hoffman to a Gen-Z Berliner who thinks “The Graduate” is a crypto-scam and “Rain Man” a TikTok filter. You’ll discover, as I did over flat…
Paul Newman, the man who once smirked at us from a thousand movie posters, has been dead for sixteen years, yet his face still sells salad dressing on every continent where supermarkets have refrigeration. From Lagos to Ljubljana, shoppers reach for the same genial grin in a jar, proving that global capitalism can turn even…
SYDNEY McLAUGHLIN-LEVRONE: THE LAST HAPPY THING BEFORE THE FIREWORKS FACTORY BLOWS By the time most of the planet wakes up, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone has already done something that would make an Olympic demigod blush and a hedge-fund quant reach for new algorithms. On a humid Thursday in Paris—while half the world argued on social media about…
In a modest apartment in Nairobi, Kevin Mwangi pores over his accounting ledger, wondering how the $30,000 he borrowed from a London-based lender to study data science in Manchester has ballooned into something resembling the GDP of a micronation. Meanwhile, in São Paulo, Mariana Andrade contemplates whether her monthly Brazilian-real payment on a U.S. dollar-denominated…
