North Dakota vs. Montana: A Prairie Cold War the World Pretends Not to Notice By “Marcel Dufresne,” Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker PARIS—While the rest of the planet obsesses over which septuagenarian will control the nuclear football, a quieter, far more existential struggle has broken out on the high plains of the United States: North Dakota…
Sophie Cunningham and the Art of Being Cancel-Proof: A Global Case Study in the Death of Nuance By the time Sophie Cunningham’s latest novel dropped in Melbourne, the algorithmic tide had already rolled through Lagos, São Paulo, and a dozen other megacities where bookshops now double as co-working spaces for digital nomads who treat literature…
Stacey Doley: How a Former Luton Checkout Girl Accidentally Became the UN’s Favourite Reality-TV Witness PARIS—Sometime between the Brexit referendum and the first TikTok war, the planet quietly agreed to outsource global conscience to a 37-year-old former hairdresser from Bedfordshire. Stacey Doley—once famous primarily for winning Strictly Come Dancing and having a surname that sounds…
The morning after every major football “Super League table” leak, the planet’s stock markets usually open 0.3 % lower—apparently the algorithmic traders have learned to hedge against the inevitable Twitter tantrums of 20-something millionaires. Still, what began as a prissy European power-grab has metastasised into a planetary metaphor: a league table that nobody asked for,…
PORTLAND—Somewhere between the artisanal kombucha taprooms and the climate-controlled grow-ops that now outnumber Starbucks, Oregon has quietly become the world’s most polite apocalypse. From an international vantage point, the Beaver State is less a geographic oddity and more a pilot program for how the rest of the planet might cope when the bill for two…
Lainey Wilson and the Great American Brand Export: How a Bell-Bottomed Arkansan Became a Global Stress Ball PARIS — On any given Tuesday, the Café de Flore smells of Gauloises, existential dread, and—since last spring—bourbon. Not because the French have finally noticed Kentucky exists, but because the house playlist has surrendered to a woman in…
Oklahoma vs Temple: A Dispatch from the Imperial Margins By Sergei “Sarge” Volkov, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker The alert pinged in from a bar in Tbilisi, a city that knows something about being a buffer zone between empires. A college football game—Oklahoma versus Temple—was trending worldwide. Not because the Sooners might drop 50 points on…
Newcastle—pronounced “nyew-cass-ull” by locals who refuse to acknowledge the existence of consonants—has, for most of the planet, remained a punch-line about coal, rain, and footballers who tackle like they’re settling old family grudges. Yet in the last 24 months, this damp post-industrial smudge on England’s northeast coast has become a geopolitical mood ring: whatever color…
BANGLADESH VS SRI LANKA: TWO SMALL COUNTRIES, ONE BIG GLOBAL METAPHOR Dave’s Locker | International Desk | 28 May 2024 When Bangladesh and Sri Lanka lock horns—be it in a cricket stadium, a Geneva debt-restructuring ballroom, or an increasingly salty Bay of Bengal—the world rarely interrupts its doom-scrolling to notice. Yet the tussle between these…
The Ban vs. SL Showdown: When a Tiny Island Punches Above Its Weight Class and the Rest of the World Pretends to Care By Dave’s Locker International Desk Sri Lanka, population 22 million, has recently discovered that being small, bankrupt, and strategically located is a bit like being the last slice of pizza at a…
Heidenheim 2 – 0 Dortmund: A Provincial Punchline in the Theatre of Global Football By Philippe “Phil” Moriarty, International Sports Correspondent, somewhere over the Bodensee The world did not stop spinning when 1. FC Heidenheim, population 50,000 and a stadium you could mistake for a mid-sized IKEA, scalped Borussia Dortmund on a damp Friday night….
Savona, Italy – Population 58,000, hometown of the inventor of Nutella, proud owner of a port that once swallowed half of Genoa’s shipping traffic, and now—if you believe the international press—ground zero for the next global recession nobody saw coming. The city, whose medieval towers look on with the weary indifference of grandparents who’ve already…
