Afghanistan vs UAE: Two Nations, One Desert, Infinite Irony By Our Cynical Correspondent in the Sand-Swept Cheap Seats Here we are again, watching two patches of sun-baked real estate pretend they’re playing the same sport. On one side, Afghanistan—freshly rebranded by its new management as “Talibanistan, Now With 30 % Less Music.” On the other,…
The Last Emperor of Cable: John Malone’s Quiet World Domination Tour By Our Man in Luxembourg, still wondering why his hotel TV has 900 channels and nothing on Somewhere between the fjords of Norway and the favelas of Rio, your monthly broadband bill is being stage-managed by a 83-year-old Coloradan who looks less like Darth…
Transamerica: A Road-Trip Through the Twenty-First-Century Soul by “The Bureau Chief Who’s Had Too Much Airport Coffee” From the cracked sidewalks of San Francisco’s Tenderloin to the fluorescent glow of a São Paulo data-center, the word “Transamerica” no longer belongs exclusively to a 1970s insurance logo or a B-movie about gender transition. It has metastasized…
Issa Rae and the Global Business of Being Seen Dave’s Locker – International Desk Somewhere between the 405 and the A1, Issa Rae stopped being merely “that awkward Black girl from YouTube” and became a stealth export product—part cultural soft power, part quarterly-earnings call. The rest of the planet, always hungry for American dysfunction packaged…
Mortgage Rates Today: A Global Game of Financial Whac-A-Mole by Our Man in Geneva—where the interest is always compounded and the cynicism is tax-free ZURICH—Another sunrise, another spreadsheet. While half the planet doom-scrolls TikTok and the other half doom-scrolls Bloomberg, mortgage rates have crept up again—like that one cousin who always “forgets” his wallet at…
John Alford and the Quiet Art of Global Collateral Damage by our correspondent in the Departures Lounge, Terminal 3 If you blinked somewhere between the Suez log-jam and the latest crypto-meltdown, you probably missed the name John Alford entirely. That’s the point. While the planet’s attention was fixed on grander fiascos—Putin’s war-budget spreadsheet, Musk’s Twitter…
The World Sharpened Its Claws for a Canadian Mutant: Why the Marvel Wolverine Game Matters Beyond Your Couch By Our Man in a Hotel Minibar Somewhere Over the Atlantic PARIS—In the same week that the IMF politely reminded 190 nations they’re collectively broke, and the Arctic Circle filed a missing-person report for winter, humanity did…
Red Arrows Today: A Global Spectacle of Smoke, Mirrors, and Geopolitical Maneuvering By D. Lockhart, Dave’s Locker Foreign Bureau It started, as most things do these days, with a red squiggle on a radar screen in a windowless room outside Brussels. NATO analysts, fresh from their morning croissants and existential dread, noticed nine Hawk T1…
Somewhere between the cloud and the couch, humanity has quietly annexed a new country the size of Rhode Island and twice as cynical. It issues no passports, levies no taxes, and still manages to feel overcrowded. Cartographers call it a “digital collaboration platform”; everyone else calls it Interland. Born inside a Google sub-committee that was…
Scotland’s Football Team: The World’s Favorite Tragicomedy By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, somewhere between Reykjavík and regret If football is the planet’s shared soap opera, Scotland is the long-running subplot that refuses to be cancelled—equal parts heartbreak, punchline, and existential warning label. While other nations merely play the game, Scotland has spent 26…
Sylvester Stallone: The Last American Gladiator Exported to a World That’s Tired of Heroes By Dave’s Locker, International Affairs Desk (and occasional boxing correspondent) Geneva, 2024. While the United Nations debates whether artificial intelligence should be allowed to write its own resignation letters, a 77-year-old man in a Panama hat just landed at Cointrin airport…
The Curious Case of Ian Murray: A Small Scottish MP Who Accidentally Became a Global Weather Vane By the time the BBC’s London graphics department had finished animating Ian Murray’s face over a spinning globe, the man himself was probably still stuck on the 07:48 from Edinburgh to London, reheating a Pret croissant between his…
