Wendell Smallwood and the End of the American Century By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker PARIS — Somewhere between the Champs-Élysées and the 24-hour döner kebab stand that now passes for French cuisine, the name “Wendell Smallwood” flickered across a sports ticker. It was 03:42 local time, the hour when insomniacs, night-shift nurses, and futures traders in…
Tottenham versus Manchester City—two words that, depending on your passport, either trigger Pavlovian yawns or a Pavlovian grab for the credit card. In a world where grain ships dodge Russian drones in the Black Sea and COP delegates argue over commas, the planet still finds time to debate whether Son Heung-min can outrun a back…
DAVID LETTERMAN: AMERICA’S LATE-NIGHT EXPORT THAT TAUGHT THE WORLD HOW TO YAWN IN SARCASM By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Pacific The first time a bar in Reykjavík stayed open past 2 a.m. to simulcast “Late Night,” the locals thought Letterman’s gap-toothed grin was a US dental-insurance commercial. By the second…
Steven Merryday and the Planet-Sized Implications of One Stubborn Judge in Tampa By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, Nursing a Flat White and Existential Dread TAMPA, FLORIDA—From the air-conditioned gloom of a courthouse that smells faintly of toner and ambition, Senior U.S. District Judge Steven Douglas Merryday has, once again, reminded the world that…
Damson Idris and the Soft-Power Gambit: How a Peckham Kid Became the United Nations of Netflix By our London bureau chief, nursing a lukewarm Negroni and a deeper chill about the future Damson Alade-Bo Idris—yes, that really is his name, as if his parents anticipated LinkedIn’s fetish for multi-hyphenates—has spent the past decade doing something…
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – If you listen closely during the 93rd minute of Al-Ahli Saudi vs Al-Hilal, you can almost hear the global order creak: petrodollars shifting in numbered Geneva accounts, streaming executives frantically refreshing spreadsheets, and a lone PIF accountant sighing at the carbon-footprint column marked “private jets, match-day.” This is no ordinary derby;…
From the Baltic to the Bolshoi, the planet’s favorite geopolitical boogeyman is enjoying what might charitably be called a vintage year. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin—ex-KGB judoka, bare-chested horse-whisperer, and the only man who can annex a peninsula before breakfast and still insist he’s just tidying up the yard—continues to set the tempo for our weary waltz…
Al-Ahli vs. Al-Hilal: When Riyadh’s Derby Becomes a Mirror for the World’s Nastiest Family Feuds by Our Correspondent, filing from a hotel bar that still smells of 1979 Riyadh, Tuesday night. Outside the King Fahd Stadium the air tastes of sand, engine oil, and the faint metallic tang of geopolitical anxiety. Inside, Al-Ahli Saudi and…
Oxford Still Beats Cambridge, Earth Still Orbits Sun: 2025 Global Rankings Confirm British Universities Are Expensive, Excellent, and Slightly Alarmed by L. V. Merriweather, International Affairs Correspondent LONDON—The annual scholastic beauty pageant known as the QS World University Rankings sashayed down the runway this week, and British institutions once again collected tiaras like a kleptocratic…
The Moon and Venus Walk Into a Bar: A Cosmic Rendezvous for the End of the World By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk If you missed the moon’s flirtatious waltz with Venus this past week, congratulations—you’ve managed to ignore the only celestial event that didn’t immediately segue into a cryptocurrency scam. For roughly four nights, our…
Regal Theaters: The Last Palace Guard of Global Escapism Falls to the Streaming Guillotine The velvet curtains parted one final time this week, not for a royal premiere, but for the corporate obituary of Regal Cinemas—those red-roped pleasure domes that once flashed brighter than a Saudi prince’s Bugatti. Cineworld, Regal’s debt-sodden British parent, announced it…
Botoșani vs FCSB: A Balkan Derby as Geopolitical Metaphor By Our Man in the Moldavian Mud, filing from a press box that smells of wet wool and existential dread One must begin, dear Dave’s Locker reader, by confessing the obvious: on the global index of Things That Keep the Planet Spinning, a Friday-night Liga I…
