Podgorica—population roughly the same as a mid-tier Premier League stadium on derby day—has quietly become the black-box recorder of 21st-century geopolitics. From the café terraces along the Ribnica, you can watch Chinese cranes assemble a belt-road bridge, sip Italian espresso roasted in Hamburg, and eavesdrop on German tax consultants explaining Montenegrin citizenship-by-investment to Russian crypto-millionaires…
Michael McIntyre: How a Man in Skinny Jeans Became the UN’s Unofficial Jester of the Apocalypse Byline: Dave’s Locker foreign desk, filed from an over-air-conditioned lounge in Singapore where the gin is warm but the Wi-Fi is existential. Walk into any expat bar from Lagos to Lima and you’ll hear the same low-grade grumbling about…
Austin Butler: The Last American Boy Scout the World Never Ordered By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over Greenland Let us begin with the obvious: the planet did not wake up yesterday screaming for another blue-eyed Californian who can cry on cue. Yet here he is—Austin Butler—hovering above the international dateline in a…
Jessie J and the Global Pop Machine: One Woman’s Quest to Remind Us We’re All Just Idiots with Headphones By Dave’s Locker International Bureau PARIS—If you squint past the Eiffel Tower’s nightly seizure-inducing strobe show, you’ll notice a faint, familiar wail drifting from the cafés along Rue de la Paix: “I’m feeeeelin’ sexy and freeeeee.”…
The Cucurella Doctrine: How a Spanish Left-Back Became the Canary in Capitalism’s Coal Mine By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Barcelona, Stamford Bridge, and a nondescript industrial town in Extremadura—Marc Cucurella has now contaminated all three with the same virus: hope. Once a sprightly La Masia graduate who looked like he’d been raised on tapas and…
RIYADH — The desert air crackled with all the manufactured drama of a Netflix trailer last night as Al-Nassr and Al-Riyadh locked horns in what the league’s marketing department has optimistically labeled “The Capital Clásico.” That descriptor, like most things in modern football, is 30 percent history and 70 percent scented candle: a gentle lavender…
The United States has always excelled at exporting two things: weapons-grade optimism and television. USA Network, the plucky cable channel that once promised “Characters Welcome,” is the softer, more insidious sibling of those F-35s—flying under most foreign radars while still reshaping the global skyline. From its birth in 1977 as the Madison Square Garden Sports…
Charlotte vs. New York City: A Quiet Southern Belle Tries to Outshout the World’s Loudest Megaphone By [REDACTED], Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The first thing you notice when you land in Charlotte is the smell of fresh asphalt and ambition, lightly perfumed by sweet-tea-scented lobbyists. The second thing you notice is that absolutely nobody here…
The lights flickered from Lagos to Lyon last week, and no one at the United Nations cocktail circuit bothered to ask why. That’s because the culprit wasn’t another geopolitical tantrum or a rogue undersea cable—it was Entergy, the New-Orleans-based utility whose name sounds like a budget airline but whose reach now stretches like a power…
From Lagos boardrooms to Laotian noodle stalls, the name Katie Maloney is now muttered with the same hushed awe once reserved for off-shore tax shelters and FIFA’s travel per diems. How, you ask, did a 37-year-old Californian who spent most of her screen time arguing about sangria-stained sofas become a geopolitical barometer? Welcome to the…
Hull City, the football club that Geography forgot, has spent the last decade auditioning for the role of “quintessential Brexit metaphor.” Perched where England’s East Coast meets the North Sea—close enough to Europe to smell the moules-frites, yet determinedly insular—Hull has yo-yoed between the Premier League and the Championship more times than a hedge-fund manager’s…
Sri Lanka versus Bangladesh—three syllables that, when uttered in cricketing circles, elicit the same mild enthusiasm you reserve for a lukewarm airline meal. And yet, the latest “SL vs BAN” series, which concluded under the sodium glare of Dhaka’s floodlights, has quietly become a geopolitical canary in the coal mine. While the rest of the…
