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…
Gyokeres: When a Swedish Striker Becomes the World’s Favorite Economic Indicator By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk The name “Gyokeres” has lately been muttered in places where football boots fear to tread: hedge-fund break rooms in Mayfair, Bundesbank briefing folders, even the dimly lit karaoke bars of Singapore where traders unwind by belting ABBA’s back catalogue…
Bradford: The Post-Industrial Parable Europe Keeps Ignoring By our special correspondent still recovering from a Yorkshire pudding overdose Bradford, West Yorkshire – Population 542,000, elevation 134 m above denial. From a distance the city looks like a Victorian mill-owner’s afterthought: rows of soot-kissed sandstone, a football stadium wedged between kebab shops, and the sort of…
The Curious Case of Brilyn Hollyhand: How a 17-Year-Old Alabama Kid Accidentally Became the World’s Most Reluctant Soft-Power Asset By D. Locke, International Correspondent PARIS—Somewhere between the seventh arrondissement and a nondescript brasserie where the espresso tastes like regret, I found myself staring at a phone screen displaying Brilyn Hollyhand’s Instagram grid. The kid—yes, kid,…
Cameron Crowe’s Existential Crisis—and Ours A dispatch from the planet-wide screening room where the house lights never quite come up By the time the news pinged across continents—Cameron Crowe, 66, was “stepping back to reassess narrative priorities,” a phrase that sounded suspiciously like Hollywood code for “my last film financed a small nation and still…
Bitcoin: The Glorious Global Game of Make-Believe We All Pretend Has Rules By A Correspondent Who Still Owns Some, Just in Case Marrakesh, Morocco – While the call to prayer echoed over the medina last Friday, a French tourist in a linen suit tried to buy saffron with Bitcoin. The shopkeeper, who has survived three…
امید جهان and the Great Global Consolation Prize by Dave’s Locker International Desk The Persian phrase “امید جهان” translates, with suspicious tidiness, as “hope of the world”—a label so grandiose that only marketing departments or desperate diplomats could have coined it. Yet in 2024 the expression has migrated from Tehran’s coffee-house poetry nights to the…
Monmouthshire: The Little County That Couldn’t Quite Decide Which Country It’s In By the time you finish this sentence, a Silicon Valley startup will have rebranded itself three times, Beijing will have built another island, and Monmouthshire will still be quietly arguing with itself about whether it belongs to Wales, England, or some liminal car-park…
Ore Oduba: How A British TV Host Became The Canary In Our Global Celebrity Coal Mine By Our Man in a Mid-Cost Airline Lounge, Somewhere Over the Persian Gulf There are, by last IMF count, roughly 7.9 billion humans currently failing to save for retirement. Of these, only one is named Ore Oduba—an accident of…
