Kazakhstan versus Wales: a fixture that sounds like the punch-line to an obscure geopolitical joke, yet here we are, pretending it matters. On paper it’s a UEFA Nations League group game; in practice it is a morality play staged for the benefit of arm-chair Brahmins from Bishkek to Bangor, all of whom have Wi-Fi strong…
The Global Joke Index: How One-Liners Are Quietly Steering Geopolitics By Our Correspondent in Perpetual Transit VIENNA—While the rest of the press corps was busy dissecting grainy satellite photos of missile silos last week, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe quietly released a more explosive document: the first-ever Global Joke Index (GJI). The…
San Salvador, El Salvador – If you squint past the heat haze, the place looks almost hopeful. Glass towers glint where bullet casings once did, Bitcoin ATMs wink like slot machines, and the president’s Twitter feed is a 24/7 motivational poster with the occasional AK-47 cameo. From Berlin boardrooms to Beijing Belt-and-Road spreadsheets, the world…
The Beautiful Catastrophe: How 22 Millionaires Chasing a Ball Became the Planet’s Last Universal Language By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk When the lights go up in Doha, Dortmund, or downtown Dakar, the same curious ritual unfolds: grown adults scream at a sphere while other grown adults scream at screens showing the sphere. From the marble…
The ADP National Employment Report dropped this morning like an overpriced latte on a marble trading-floor desk: briefly scalding, quickly mopped up, and instantly debated by people whose bonuses depend on pretending to know what it means. According to America’s largest private-payroll processor, U.S. private employers added a breezy 192,000 jobs in April—comfortably above the…
Global Jobs Report: The World Holds Its Breath While the Printer Jams By Dave’s Locker International Bureau (currently located wherever the coffee’s cheapest) The latest jobs report has dropped like a lukewarm burrito onto the conference-room table of global consciousness—half nourishing, half indigestible. In Washington, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the United States…
Tokyo, Wednesday, 3:14 a.m.—while the rest of the planet either sleeps fitfully or doom-scrolls itself into a deeper existential debt, an emergency press conference is underway inside MAPPA’s gleaming headquarters. The topic: an as-yet-untitled Jujutsu Kaisen spin-off that promises, in the words of producer Makoto Kimura, “to explore the morally gray corridors of jujutsu society…
Chad vs Ghana: A Tale of Two Africas, One IMF, and the Perpetual Search for the Next Miracle By the time you finish your morning coffee, another development bank will have issued a glossy report announcing that somewhere between the Sahara and the Gulf of Guinea lies the “next frontier of growth.” Never mind that…
Good Morning, World: How “GMA Deals & Steals” Became the Soft Power Bargain Basement of the 21st Century By Henrietta “Hank” Delacroix, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker NEW YORK—While the United Nations Security Council bickers over commas in draft resolutions, a far more efficient form of geopolitics is unfolding at 8:07 a.m. Eastern inside a Times…
BBC Cricket: The Empire Strikes Back—With Sponsors and a Theme Tune By Our Man in the Pavilion Bar, Nursing a Warm G&T and Existential Dread When the BBC’s Test Match Special crackles back onto long-wave each May, you can almost hear the collective sigh of a planet that has quietly agreed to pretend the 21st…
Randy Moss: A Meteor Across Every Sky By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, International Desk To the uninitiated, Randy Moss is merely the greatest deep-threat wide receiver the NFL ever produced—an American folk hero who once famously declared, “Straight cash, homey,” while paying a league fine with dollar bills extracted from his sock like…
Angela Rayner, Graffiti Muse: How One Spray-Can Stencil Became the World’s Rorschach Test By Dave’s International Correspondent, still wiping aerosol off his passport Manchester, England – Somewhere between the kebab wrappers and the drizzle, a life-size stencil of Angela Rayner appeared on a brick wall in Leigh, eyes narrowed, arms crossed, the caption “WORKING CLASS…
