The Scottish Premiership: A Cold, Damp Mirror Held Up to the World By Our Correspondent, freshly thawed after a Glasgow night bus Somewhere between the North Sea and the North Atlantic lies a league that is routinely mistaken for a weather report. The Scottish Premiership—twelve clubs, four seasons in one afternoon, and the global economy’s…
Meg Jones Is Not a Person—She’s a Mirror the Whole Planet Keeps Checking By the time you read this, the name “Meg Jones” has already ping-ponged through a dozen time zones, been mistranslated in three alphabets, and trended in at least one country whose leader still thinks Wi-Fi is witchcraft. From Lagos laundromats to Siberian…
Celtic Score: How a Football Tally in Glasgow Became the World’s New Favorite Rorschach Test In the grand, perpetually malfunctioning casino we call planet Earth, nothing travels faster than a scoreline—except, perhaps, the hot takes that follow. When Celtic Football Club rattled in five unanswered goals against Slovan Bratislava on a damp Wednesday in Glasgow,…
The Dictator of Decibels: How Max Verstappen Became the World’s Loudest Metaphor By the time the Dutch national anthem crackled over the floodlit Yas Marina last November, Max Verstappen had already finished ruining the narrative arc for every other racing series on Earth. Formula 2, Formula E, IndyCar, and your nephew’s indoor kart league were…
Marcus Freeman’s Sideline Swagger: How an Irish-American Coach Became the Accidental Face of Soft-Power Diplomacy Paris, 28 November – Somewhere between the Seine’s grey drizzle and the perpetual gridlock on the Boulevard Périphérique, a curious diplomatic cable landed on the desk of a junior attaché at the Quai d’Orsay. Subject line: “Freeman, Marcus – possible…
Jeremiyah Love: The Global Phenomenon of a Name That Refuses to Behave By the time Jeremiyah Love’s latest highlight reel hit 3.2 million views on a cracked smartphone in Lagos, the joke was already stale in São Paulo. “Another American running back with a name that sounds like a failed boy band,” muttered a Brazilian…
The Himalayas versus the Caribbean: a matchup that sounds like the set-up to a geopolitical joke nobody remembers the punchline to. Yet here we are, watching Nepal—population 30 million, per-capita GDP roughly the price of a decent rum cocktail in Barbados—square off against the West Indies, a collection of islands whose combined GDP still struggles…
KENYON SADIQ AND THE AGE OF THE BORDERLESS SCANDAL Dave’s Locker International | 600 words There are only two kinds of global citizens left: those who have never heard of Kenyon Sadiq, and those who pretend they haven’t. From the glass towers of Singapore to the crumbling cafés of Algiers, the name now circulates like…
The Red Card That Rules the World by A. Corvus, roving correspondent, somewhere between the locker room and the Hague On a damp Thursday in Dortmund, the referee reached into his breast pocket and produced what looked like a laminated square of doom. One crimson rectangle later, Jude Bellingham was trudging off the pitch, 80,000…
Kansas Football and the Art of Cosmic Insignificance by Special Correspondent Luka Petrovic, filing from a hotel bar that still thinks Prohibition is negotiable Somewhere on the vast, wheat-swept oblong Americans call “the Heartland,” 53 scholarship athletes in crimson and blue keep losing football games with the dependable rhythm of a Swiss cuckoo clock that’s…
Somewhere between the tarmac of Dulles and the potholed fantasies of every commuter on Earth sits the U.S. Secretary of Transportation—a title that sounds thrillingly omnipotent until you remember it mostly involves begging Congress for money to replace bolts installed during the Ford administration. Still, for the rest of the planet, the office is less…
Nottingham Forest vs Sunderland: A Tale of Two Post-Industrial Cities Reduced to Globalized Gladiators for Our Weekend Entertainment By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker LONDON—Somewhere between the IMF’s latest plea for “fiscal prudence” and Elon Musk’s latest plea for attention, two proud English cities best known for closed pits and cancelled car factories will re-enact their ancient…
