Alcaraz vs Djokovic: The Gladiator Match in Which the Colosseum Is Everywhere By Dave’s Locker Global Sports Bureau (with a flask in the press box) PARIS – On a late-spring afternoon when the Seine smelled only faintly of industrial despair and the Eiffel Tower’s lights blinked like a malfunctioning slot machine, two men in white…
Kodai Senga and the Global Art of Vanishing Stuff When Kodai Senga uncorks his ghost-forkball somewhere over the Atlantic this summer, the pitch will do more than dive like a drunk albatross—it will carry with it the weight of two countries’ mid-life crises, the hopes of a billion-dollar television deal, and the faint smell of…
From the Shard to São Paulo, a quiet corporate ghost has been flitting through medicine cabinets and quarterly earnings calls: Kenvue, the Johnson & Johnson spin-off that now owns everything from Tylenol to the sticky little BAND-AID you applied last week while pretending your kitchen knife skills were better than they are. In 2023, the…
Paris, May – Somewhere between the baguette crumbs and the drone debris, the Franco-Ukrainian pas de deux has entered its third year, and the orchestra is still tuning the same dissonant chord. On the surface, Emmanuel Macron plays the dashing understudy to Volodymyr Zelensky’s blood-spattered lead, pledging Mirage jets, long-range missiles, and—because this is France—an…
Italy vs Estonia: A Mediterranean Opera Meets a Baltic Ballad—And the World Watches the Encore By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk ROME—Picture the scene: on one side, a boot-shaped colossus that once taught the planet how to conjugate love, war, and pasta. On the other, a country whose population could fit inside a single Roman…
Chelsea vs Manchester City: A Global Gladiator Match Sponsored by Petro-Dollars and Regret By Our Man in the Upper Tier with a Flask of Cheap Bourbon LONDON—In the beginning there was the ball, the grass, and the faint smell of geopolitical anxiety. Somewhere between the Thames and the Irwell, two English clubs owned by an…
Kyiv, 3:00 a.m. local—while most of Europe was snoring beneath its weighted blanket of post-industrial angst, 60-odd Ukrainians in yellow and 11 world-weary Frenchmen in navy were busy reminding the planet that geopolitics can still be settled by twenty-two pairs of lungs and one very opinionated ball. The scoreboard said Ukraine 2–1 France (B), but…
COPENHAGEN—Somewhere between hygge and haggis, the North Sea has coughed up its latest episode of geopolitical improv: Denmark versus Scotland, a friendly so punctual it could be mistaken for a Swiss train colliding with a Highland stag. The fixture, scheduled for a brisk Parken Stadium evening, arrives just in time for the planet to remember…
When the Name “Chris Mason” Echoes Across Continents: A Dispatch from the Department of Overlapping Identities By Dave’s Locker Foreign Bureau, somewhere between Brussels and existential dread The world has many Chris Masons, and—like certain pandemics—they refuse to stay neatly quarantined in one country. There’s the BBC political editor who politely torments British cabinet ministers;…
Katarzyna Stoparczyk and the Quiet Collapse of Borders By our correspondent in the departure-lounge bar, Gate B12, somewhere east of reason If you have never heard of Katarzyna Stoparczyk, do not feel slighted; the planet’s filing system is famously sloppy. Yet in the humming corridors of Interpol’s General Secretariat in Lyon—where the coffee tastes like…
Eric Tarpinian-Jachym and the Passport Paradox: When One Man’s Identity Crisis Becomes the World’s Problem By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk Geneva, Switzerland – Somewhere in the fluorescent-lit catacombs beneath the Palais des Nations, an intern with a master’s in multilateral studies and a minor in artisanal coffee just stamped the latest iteration of a…
Nationals vs Cubs: A Proxy War of Futility Played Out on Imported Grass By the time the Washington Nationals and the Chicago Cubs finish their three-game set this week, roughly 75,000 hot dogs will have vanished, 1.2 million beer cups will clog Midwestern landfills, and two sets of fans will convince themselves that “momentum” is…
