The London Film Festival kicked off last week under the usual autumn drizzle, which felt almost too on-the-nose: a grey sky weeping politely over a city that has perfected the art of pretending everything is fine. Inside the red-carpet bubble, however, the planet’s creative class was busy congratulating itself for surviving another year of algorithmic…
London, that damp and overpriced island capital, is once again pretending the planet orbits Leicester Square. The 67th BFI London Film Festival (or LFF to the acronym-obsessed) has rolled out its red carpet—this year woven from equal parts recycled polyester and Brexit anxiety—inviting the world to queue politely and pretend the weather is “atmospheric.” From…
The Liverpool Third Kit Has Landed, and the Planet Shudders by Diego “Cheekbones” Serrano, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Liverpool—city of Beatles ballads, maritime melancholy, and, apparently, the gravitational center of the football fashion multiverse—has released its 2024-25 third kit. Nike’s announcement ping-ponged across time zones faster than a crypto scam on WhatsApp, igniting group chats…
Alan Davies: The Accidental Global Emissary of British Self-Deprecation By Our Correspondent in a Layover Lounge Somewhere Over the Caspian Somewhere between the Brexit hangover and the latest geopolitical migraine, a middle-aged man in a sensible jumper has become an unlikely piece of soft-power artillery. Alan Davies—yes, the one who used to be “that kid…
Stockholm, Sweden – In a move that has sent tremors through every time zone from Vladivostok to Vancouver, EA DICE has finally admitted that Battlefield 6 will land “holiday 2025.” Seasoned observers of the military-entertainment complex immediately translated that to “mid-November, unless the QA team stages a coup.” The announcement, delivered via a 47-second teaser…
The Weeknd Tickets: How a Scarborough Kid’s Tour Became the New Global Reserve Currency By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between a Shanghai scalper’s WeChat group and a Berlin club kid’s burner phone, The Weeknd’s 2024 “After Hours Til Dawn” tickets are trading hands like miniature bearer bonds—only with more glitter and a higher failure…
The World According to Miriam Margolyes: How One Roly-Poly British Dame Became the Planet’s Guilt-Free Conscience By L. V. Salinger, International Correspondent, Somewhere Between Heathrow and Existential Despair There are ambassadors who arrive in gilded limousines, and then there is Miriam Margolyes—stout, septuagenarian, and armed with the vocal register of a Victorian foghorn—who simply materialises…
Global Money Launderettes: How Investment Companies Became the World’s Favorite Laundromat There’s a moment, usually around 3 a.m. in Singapore, when a senior compliance officer at BlackRock—or one of its 73 look-alikes—scrolls through a client’s “Environmental, Social, Governance” questionnaire and discovers the biggest shareholder is a Cayman-registered shell whose only asset is a Panamanian tugboat….
The Crane That Shrank: Lufthansa’s Global Glide from Flag-Carrier to Flagellant By Our Correspondent, Somewhere above the North Atlantic with a plastic cup of “Château de Terminal” There was a time—ask anyone who still clutches a battered Senator card like a rosary—when Lufthansa’s stylized crane suggested something almost mythic: an airborne Teutonic phoenix, immaculately on…
Somewhere between the first crunch of metal in São Paulo rush-hour and the eleventh WhatsApp ping from a Lagos “claims specialist,” the accident attorney has become the new traveling diplomat of our battered planet. Their briefcases now contain more passports than most spies: one for each jurisdiction where human error meets human litigiousness. From the…
If Earth were a half-finished jigsaw puzzle abandoned on a coffee table, New Zealand would be the pristine piece still in the box—edge intact, colors un-smeared, quietly wondering why everyone else looks so dog-eared. To the rest of the planet, Aotearoa is the last kid picked for dodgeball who turns out to be annoyingly good…
The Pacific’s latest mood swing—Hurricane Kiko, a name that sounds more like a trendy Tokyo café than a Category-4 air punch—skimmed past Hawaii this week with the polite indifference of a tourist who realizes the luau is overpriced. From Sydney to São Paulo, the collective global reaction was a shrug that registered on seismographs: another…
