When Does Barcelona Play? A Question That Moves the Planet’s Pulse By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you ask Google “a qué hora juega el Barcelona” from a bar in Lagos, a co-working space in Singapore, or a bomb shelter in Kharkiv, the answer is 21:00 CET—give or take the five bureaucratic time zones your…
**The Beautiful Ballet of Broken Bones: How America’s NFL Injury Report Became the World’s Guilty Pleasure** While the planet grapples with climate change, economic instability, and the occasional attempted coup, roughly 4% of humanity finds itself transfixed by the weekly medical melodrama known as the NFL Injury Report—a document that reads like a medieval torture…
SEOUL—Somewhere in the gleaming, algorithmic hive of Gangnam, a man named Michael Kim is quietly re-writing the rules of global capitalism, one leveraged buyout at a time. To the average Seoulite he is merely another well-tailored ghost gliding through steel lobbies; to the rest of the planet he is the Korean Midas who turns conglomerate…
Andrew Kolvet: The Global Bureaucrat Nobody Asked For, Yet Somehow Can’t Escape By the time the sun rose over Brussels—simultaneously rising, as always, on the debt clocks of Athens, the surveillance drones of Shenzhen, and the influencer breakfast tables of Los Angeles—Andrew Kolvet had already updated the footnotes on page 47-B of a report that…
In a World on Fire, the World Sits Down for Grits By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Geneva, Switzerland — While the UN Security Council convened its 2,847th emergency session on the precise shade of existential dread we should adopt this month, a parallel diplomatic channel was quietly unfolding three thousand miles away in a Tennessee-themed…
The Subcontinent’s Cold War, 50 Overs at a Time By our man with a diplomatic flask in the press box, somewhere between the LoC and the long-on boundary The scorecard, for those who insist on such vulgarities, reads: Pakistan 191 all out (42.5 overs), India 192-3 (30.3 overs). India win by seven wickets, Virat Kohli…
An American Football Program, a Mongolian Coal Mine, and the Fate of the Free World How the Virginia Tech Hokies Became an Unlikely Geopolitical Thermometer Blacksburg, Virginia—population 44,000, elevation 2,080 feet, average emotional altitude somewhere between manic hope and existential dread—is hardly the place you’d look for a barometer of planetary health. Yet every autumn,…
Louisville Weather: How a City on the Ohio River Became a Global Thermometer for Human Folly By the time the smoke from Canada’s record wildfires had drifted 1,500 miles south and parked itself over Louisville this past summer, the usual local complaints—too humid, too many mosquitoes, too much bourbon sweating out of the pores—were replaced…
Harry Styles: The Last British Export That Isn’t a Banking Scandal By the time you finish reading this sentence, another nation has just discovered Harry Styles. Maybe he’s touring the neon shrines of Tokyo, maybe he’s strutting through Mexico City’s Zócalo in a sequined jumpsuit that costs more than the average annual wage, or maybe—God…
Infant Remains, d4vd, and the Global Echo Chamber A dispatch from the front line of our collective fascination with tragedy, set to a lo-fi beat. By the time the phrase “infant remains d4vd” began trending from Lagos to Lisbon, most people had already soundtracked their horror with the very track that gave the phrase oxygen:…
**The Land of a Thousand Hills and a Million Narratives: Rwanda’s Global Rebrand** KIGALI—Picture a country that managed to go from genocide to green-washed Davos darling in less than three decades—a sort of national phoenix routine performed without the luxury of a tranquil afterlife. Welcome to Rwanda, the ultimate case study in how to monetize…
From the banks of the Limpopo to the boulevards of Luxembourg, a curious export has been quietly colonizing international group-chat etiquette: Savannah Chrisley, the 26-year-old daughter of U.S. tax-evasion poster parents Todd and Julie, has turned herself into a one-woman diplomatic incident. While her parents serve their respective seven and twelve-year sentences—an American morality play…
