Kingdom Hearts 4: The Planet-Spanning Power Fantasy We Can’t Quit By Cora Voss, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker International Bureau It’s 2025, half the Northern Hemisphere is either on fire or underwater, and the other half is arguing on Discord about whether Sora’s new sneakers constitute cultural appropriation. Yet here we are—again—salivating over a fresh trailer…
Dancing With the Stars Premiere: When the Globe Pauses to Watch C-List Glitter Diplomacy In a week when the Arctic Circle reported its first rain-on-snow-in-August event and the Bank of Japan quietly debated whether to let the yen commit honorable seppuku, roughly seventeen million people from Reykjavík to Reykjavík (via Perth, Lagos, and that one…
The Andes vs. the Chaco: Why a Tuesday Night Qualifier in Asunción Matters More Than Your Mortgage Rate By Our Man in Lima, Still Waiting for the Bus In any other week, the planet’s attention would be fixed on the usual circus: a G-7 finance minister explaining how “transitory” now means “permanent,” or a tech…
Brazil vs Bolivia: A Quiet Derby for the Soul of South America By: Our Man in a Hammock with Wi-Fi RIO DE JANEIRO—While the rest of the planet was busy measuring the global recession in crypto-converted lattés and wondering whether World War III will be fought on TikTok, Brazil and Bolivia spent last week conducting…
Elizabeth Tsurkov and the Global Hostage Economy: A Graduate Student, a War, and the Price of Curiosity By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk When Elizabeth Tsurkov, a Russian-Israeli doctoral candidate at Princeton, vanished in Baghdad last March, the world performed its now-customary shrug: another intellectual swallowed by the Levantine wood-chipper. Nine months later, the Islamic Resistance…
Innings Festival 2026: The United States Invents a Five-Day Vacation from Reality, and the Rest of the World Watches with Envy and Mild Disgust Tempe, Arizona—While half the planet toggles between wildfire alerts and flood warnings, the United States has once again solved the global crisis of general malaise by flying in thirty-five rock bands,…
Kathmandu, Nepal – In a country where the mountains are taller than most democracies’ ambitions and the air is so thin that even political promises struggle to breathe, the Himalayan republic has once again swapped out the occupant of Baluwatar, the prime-ministerial bungalow that apparently comes with a revolving door and a six-month warranty. The…
Bosnia vs Austria: A Balkan Derby for the Age of Collapsing Certainties By L. V. Raković, Senior Continental Misanthrope VIENNA—When the draw spat out “Bosnia-Herzegovina vs Austria” for the Nations League fixture this week, the world’s attention pivoted—briefly—from whichever apocalypse is currently trending to a collision of two nations nobody has confused since 1914. On…
Mitrovic: A Name that Travels Like a Bad Passport Photo By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk (Sarajevo bureau, second‐floor bar) The surname Mitrovic—Serbian in its DNA, Balkan in its swagger—has recently slipped past the border guards of regional gossip and is now loitering in the departure lounge of global conversation. Whether you first met it while…
Volcanic Ash and Haute Couture: France vs. Iceland and the Glorious Futility of Trying to Out-Cool the North Atlantic PARIS—Somewhere between the Champs-Élysées and Reykjavík’s geothermal hot-dog stands, the world is once again being asked to choose between champagne flutes and glacier runoff. France versus Iceland—on the surface, a Euro 2024 qualifying fixture that could…
The Curious Case of Sébastien Lecornu: Europe’s Defense Wunderkind and the Art of Looking Busy While the World Burns By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—In the grand, slightly mildewed ballroom of European politics, where every minister arrives with a rehearsed sound bite and a half-eaten canapé, French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu has managed the…
Hungary vs Portugal: The Quiet Balkanization of European Soft Power Bylines from the Danube to the Tagus, by someone who’s run out of passport pages and patience On the surface, the latest diplomatic joust between Budapest and Lisbon looks like a spat about EU recovery funds, some footnotes on judicial independence, and an energetic argument…
