UCI World Championships 2025: When the Planet Puts Its Best Carbon-Fiber Foot Forward By Our Correspondent, currently somewhere between a hotel mini-bar and existential dread Rimini, Italy—The Adriatic sun glints off 3,000 bicycles worth more than the GDP of several island nations, and for one week in September the UCI Road World Championships will attempt…
Sassuolo vs Udinese: A Serie A Sideshow in the Age of Apocalypse Somewhere between the Adriatic lapping at Italy’s boot-heel and the Alps shrugging off another decade of glacial tears, two provincial clubs will square off in a game that the global spreadsheet insists is “Matchday 34.” The rest of the planet will be doom-scrolling…
From a creaking internet café in Lagos to a miner-lit basement in Novosibirsk, the same sentence is being typed into glowing chat boxes: “Bro, did you see the camel spit?” The occasion is Mounts of Mayhem, the latest Minecraft update whose release has achieved that rare feat of uniting humanity in collective distraction—right when several…
The sun never sets on Major League Baseball’s anxiety. From Seoul to São Paulo, bleary-eyed office workers are furtively refreshing the standings on company Wi-Fi, praying their VPN doesn’t betray them to a humorless IT manager who still thinks baseball is “an American cricket.” Yes, friends, the MLB Wild Card schedule has been released, and…
Across the planet—whether you’re sipping cortado in Madrid, slurping borscht in Minsk, or pretending to enjoy oat-milk flat whites in Los Angeles—one truth unites us: somewhere, a screen is playing Kate Beckinsale in slow-motion, hair billowing like a UN flag for our collective existential dread. The British actress, once a polite Oxford ingenue, has become…
Wrongful Death Attorney: The Global Reaper’s Little Helper by Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—In most countries you need a license to drive, to fish, and—if you ask nicely—to sell baguettes. Only in the realm of death does no permit seem required: crosswalks in Lagos, mining pits in China, hospital corridors in São Paulo, and American…
The Department Store: A Monument to Global Delusion Somewhere between the perfume counter and the final markdown rack, the modern department store has become our most honest confession booth. From Tokyo’s Shibuya Parco to Istanbul’s Istinye Park, these multi-story confessionals offer a single universal truth: we are all, in our own special way, catastrophically disappointed…
The Curious Case of the Vanishing Finale: Netflix’s Wayward Pines and the Global Art of Self-Cancellation By Our Cynical Correspondent, Somewhere Between Reykjavík and Recife When Netflix quietly yanked the third season of Wayward Pines from the platform last month—no press release, no commemorative montage, just a brief 404 where Matt Dillon’s worried face used…
SYDNEY—In the grand theatre of international sport, where nations outsource their self-esteem to 22 people chasing leather, Australia Women versus England Women is less a contest and more a slow-motion custody battle over the Ashes of imperial pride. On paper it’s cricket; in practice it’s geopolitical therapy for two countries that still can’t decide whether…
Michael Sheen: The Welsh Actor Who Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Hotspot If you’ve spent any time on the Anglophone internet this week, you may have noticed an unusual spike in searches for “Michael Sheen + Palestine + Gaza + genocide + boycott.” No, the beloved Welsh thespian hasn’t suddenly pivoted to arms dealing; rather, he’s…
Elizabeth Day: The Accidental International Holiday That Tells Us Everything About Ourselves If you had told a London literary agent in 2018 that her name would eventually be invoked by small-business owners in Manila, podcast addicts in São Paulo, and that one guy in Reykjavik who still thinks irony is a personality, she would probably…
The Poles have an old saying: “When the Russian bear dances, everyone else pays the cover charge.” Last night the bear lumbered over the border and tried to waltz into Przemyśl, apparently forgetting that the last time Moscow “dropped by” uninvited, Poland redesigned half the Red Army with cavalry sabres. This time the sabres have…
