Nep vs WI: When a Tiny Himalayan Kingdom Meets the Caribbean’s Perpetual Underdogs—and the Rest of Us Just Watch KATHMANDU, 03:47 local—While half the planet pretends to sleep, the other half is pretending not to care that Nepal, population roughly the size of a midsize Chinese apartment complex, is trying to out-bat the West Indies,…
Robert Barnett: The Lawyer Who Makes Dictators Nervous and Billionaires Nervous-er By Dave’s International Desk of Perpetual Jet Lag If the global elite ever bother to hold a reunion, Robert Barnett will probably be the only person in the room who has both advised a sitting U.S. president on debate prep and negotiated a seven-figure…
Bradford, England — The world’s diplomats may be busy arguing about tariffs, spy balloons, and whose turn it is to accidentally leak classified documents, but 7,000 miles away from every emergency G7 summit, a more primal drama unfurled beneath the West Yorkshire drizzle: Bradford City versus Blackpool, League Two, Valley Parade, Saturday, 3 p.m. local,…
The Criminal Lawyer: Global Baggage Handler for Humanity’s Carry-On of Sin By a correspondent who has spent too many nights in fluorescent airports and even more in dimly lit courtrooms From the marble-paneled war crimes chambers in The Hague to a tin-roofed magistrate’s shed outside Freetown, the criminal lawyer is the one indispensable travel adaptor…
Shawn Clark’s Final Curtain Call: A Death Small Enough for the World to Ignore Paris—In the grand circus of global mortality, the passing of Shawn Clark, 42, registered somewhere between a hiccup and a shrug. Clark, a mid-tier supply-chain analyst from Columbus, Ohio, died last week of what the coroner cheerily labeled “complications from an…
Atlético Madrid vs Real Madrid: A Civil War With Sponsors and Stock Tickers If the Cold War had been played on grass, it would have looked a lot like Saturday night at the Metropolitano. Two halves of the same city, one obsessed with status symbols, the other with grievance and grit, meet for the 234th…
Leeds United vs Bournemouth: A Microscopic Clash in the Colosseum of Meaningless Significance by D. Lockhart, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the Brexit hangover and the TikTok apocalypse, 22 men in fluorescent socks will chase a sphere across a rectangle of chemically enhanced grass in West Yorkshire. The planet, meanwhile, will keep spinning at…
It was, in the end, a very American sort of dénouement: the Federal Bureau of Investigation—an outfit that once chased bank-robbing folk heroes through the Dust Bowl—announced it had finally arrested one of its own for allegedly tipping off the Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd. Special Agent McKinley, a man whose career arc…
Watford 1–1 Hull City: A Global Summit of Modest Ambition By Our Man at Vicarage Road, Nursing a Lukewarm Pie and Diminishing Faith in Humanity The world stage rarely stoops to the modest plastic seats of Vicarage Road, but Saturday’s 1–1 draw between Watford and Hull City proved, if nothing else, that geopolitics and relegation…
The last time a single American linebacker caused this much trans-Atlantic chatter, the Berlin Wall was still standing and fax machines were considered cutting-edge espionage tech. Yet here we are in 2024, and Lavar Arrington—retired gridiron demigod, part-time philosopher, full-time podcast provocateur—has somehow become the unofficial yardstick by which the rest of the planet measures…
When Bayer Leverkusen’s chartered bus rolled past the Reeperbahn at 2 a.m. on matchday, the players probably mistook the red lights for brake lights. Welcome to Hamburg, where even the brothels close early to catch the late kick-off, and FC St. Pauli—pirates of the Bundesliga—prepare to mug Europe’s newest juggernaut. For the globe-trotting couch potato,…
Fred Dibnah, Steeplejack of Empire and Last Man to Hear the World Before It Got Too Loud By Our Man in Bolton-by-Satellite Bolton, England – The planet’s remaining chimneys are now Instagram backdrops for artisanal coffee or luxury flats, but there once lived a man who climbed them for sport, stripped them brick by brick,…
