PORTLAOISE, Ireland – While the rest of the planet argues over whose apocalypse is scheduled first—climate, debt, or the next smartphone update—three hundred men in pastel slacks have retreated to a sodden island to ritualistically chase a ball and pretend the 21st century isn’t happening. Welcome to the Irish Open, the European Tour’s annual reminder…
Phil Collins, the balding British everyman whose drumsticks once thundered across stadiums like low-yield artillery, has become an unlikely barometer of planetary decline. While the man himself now shuffles on titanium hips through a quiet life in Switzerland—tax-efficiently close to his Geneva vault—his back-catalogue has metastasised into a global lingua franca of resignation. From Manila…
Today’s Weather: A Global Forecast of Mild Panic, Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Existential Dread By Dave’s Locker International Bureau (a.k.a. one slightly jet-lagged correspondent with a dying phone battery) Good morning, afternoon, or whatever temporal fiction you’re clinging to in your corner of the planet. While you debate whether that suspicious cloud is…
Rory McIlroy: The Last Romantic in the Age of Sport-Washing By Our Man in the Rough DUBAI — While the rest of us are busy price-checking canned beans and wondering which hemisphere will ignite first this summer, Rory McIlroy is still out there trying to hit a tiny sphere into a slightly larger hole with…
Sun vs. Sky: A Global Cage Match Sponsored by Existential Dread Dave’s Locker, International Desk – 12 June 2024 Somewhere above the Malacca Strait, a container ship the length of a small principality steams east while its captain squints at the sun like a man trying to read the fine print on a doomsday contract….
The NFL schedule release used to be a quaint domestic ritual: a few million Americans arguing on sports-talk radio about whether the Patriots had been given too many prime-time slots. Now, thanks to the league’s tireless evangelism—and the unquenchable global appetite for anything loud enough to drown out the news—the 18-week fixture list is parsed…
Martha’s Rule: When the World Learns to Listen—Sort Of By Dave’s Locker International Desk Geneva—Another week, another acronym. This time it’s “Martha’s Rule,” a protocol named after a 13-year-old London schoolgirl who died of sepsis in 2021 because nobody in the hospital bothered to ask the patient—or her parents—what they thought. In simpler terms, the…
Vladivostok, Russia’s red-headed stepchild on the Sea of Japan, has spent most of its life being politely ignored by Moscow until someone remembers the Pacific Fleet rusting at anchor and decides to throw a party. This week the city hosts the Eastern Economic Forum, a jamboree where oligarchs, nervous diplomats, and the occasional North Korean…
Community, Circa 2024: A Field Report from the Glorious Ruins of Togetherness By L. M. Valdez, Foreign Correspondent, presently somewhere between a WeWork in Singapore and a refugee tent in Gaziantep — The word “community” once conjured images of kindly grandmothers swapping soup recipes over white picket fences. Today, the same word is more likely…
PARIS—While the rest of the planet argued about whether World War III would begin with a submarine ping or a TikTok trend, Lizzo—flute in one hand, disco ball in the other—managed to become a one-woman diplomatic incident on three separate continents last week. If you missed it, congratulations: you were probably busy watching glaciers file…
London’s Tube Strikes Go Global: A Tale of Rust, Rage, and the Universal Art of Not Getting to Work By the time the first picket sign hit the pavement outside King’s Cross, the ripple was already lapping at distant shores. Commuters from São Paulo to Singapore glanced up from their phones to discover that London—once…
The Blackout That United—and Divided—Us All By A. M. Vance, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker SÃO PAULO—At 09:17 GMT last Tuesday, the PlayStation Network coughed, sputtered, and finally flat-lined. Across 72 countries, 117 million registered accounts watched their digital worlds evaporate into a single, smug error code: WS-116520-5. In a heartbeat, Fortnite warriors in Jakarta found…
