Today’s Weather: A Planet-Wide Mood Ring That Refuses to Cooperate By Dave’s International Desk, still waiting for the sun to show up to its own press conference Somewhere between the Sahara and Siberia, the atmosphere is once again playing roulette with our collective sanity. From Ulaanbaatar to Ushuaia, “today’s weather” is less a forecast than…
Coventry Building Society Arena: A Carpeted Coliseum for the Age of Perpetual Rebranding By Our Man in Limbo, filing from a hotel minibar somewhere east of everywhere In the grand tradition of naming rights gone wild, the Coventry Building Society Arena stands as a monument to late-capitalist nomenclature—half gladiatorial bowl, half mortgage brochure. To the…
Country to Country 2026: A Global Hoedown Where Apocalypse Meets Banjo By Our Correspondent, filed from an undisclosed airport lounge with suspiciously sticky floors Somewhere between Reykjavik and Riyadh, the marketing department for Country to Country 2026 has decided the world is finally ready for a three-day, multi-continental yee-haw, complete with corporate-branded Stetsons and carbon…
Kasabian: The Word That Refuses to Stay Buried By Dave’s Foreign Desk PARIS—Every so often a single syllable ricochets across continents like a drunken tourist who’s lost his passport. “Kasabian” is that syllable—pronounced kuh-SAH-bee-un to the Brits, ka-SAH-bian to the Americans, and “turn that racket down” to anyone over 55. Internationally, the word now carries…
Greatest Hits Radio: The Planet’s Collective Nostalgia Loop, Now with Ads for Funeral Insurance By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between the 80s and Oblivion There’s a moment, somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, when the in-flight entertainment system offers “Classic Rock Workout” and the opening bars of “Eye of the Tiger” leak from 300 plastic headsets like a…
Bobby Witt Jr. and the Last Empire: How a Kid from Texas Became the World’s Unwitting Soft-Power Asset By Dave’s International Sourpuss-in-Residence Somewhere between a NATO summit and a TikTok dance-off, the planet’s attention economy pivoted last week to a 24-year-old shortstop who still looks like he ought to be carded at a Kansas City…
Amber Davies: The Reality-Star Ripple Effect Sweeping the Globe’s Shallow End BYLINE – Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk, via a hotel bar in Heathrow Terminal 5 If you missed the Amber Davies phenomenon, congratulations: you probably still own attention span. For the rest of us—those who doom-scroll in three languages and measure time in algorithmic updates—Ms….
Erin Dolan, the American sports-betting analyst whose face now beams from every trading-floor television between Manila and Malta, is not so much a person as she is a trans-Atlantic weather pattern. Wherever she lands, liquidity rises, dopamine spikes, and someone in a fluorescent-lit compliance cubicle quietly updates the Responsible-Gaming pop-up. To the rest of the…
The World’s Newest Luxury Export: Shamelessness, Freshly Unwrapped Daily by Diego Márquez, roving correspondent, still jet-lagged since 1998 There was a time when the word “shameless” carried the faint whiff of social opprobrium, like stale cigarette smoke clinging to a diplomat’s lapel. No longer. In 2024 it has become the hottest commodity on the planet,…
Malvern, Worcestershire – population 30,000, two Michelin-starred restaurants, one hill that looks like a sleeping dinosaur after a long lunch – has spent centuries pretending to be a quiet English spa town. The illusion is useful: while the rest of the planet busies itself with coups, crypto crashes, and whatever Elon is renaming this week,…
Windhoek, Namibia — In the grand, absurdist theater of international affairs—where billionaires race to Mars while half the planet still lacks clean water—two nations you probably last Googled during a pub quiz are quietly auditioning for the role of Africa’s “next big thing.” Namibia (population: sparse, GDP: diamonds and existential dread) and Kenya (population: bustling,…
The Geopolitics of Chest Hair: How Peter Andre Became an Unlikely Soft-Power Asset for a Post-Brexit Britain By the time the sun rises over the marble colonnades of the European Parliament, negotiators in Brussels are already whispering about “The Andre Doctrine.” Not, as one might hope, a radical new trade policy, but rather the quiet…
