Duluth, Minnesota—population 86,000, annual snowfall measured in existential dread—has spent the last four days pretending the planet isn’t busy rehearsing for the apocalypse. The 48th Duluth Fall Festival wrapped Sunday night with the traditional release of biodegradable lanterns that promptly drifted into Canadian airspace, causing NORAD to scramble two CF-18s and at least one very…
The Missing Link: Humanity’s Favorite Excuse for Not Reading the Footnotes By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from Yet Another “Game-Changing” Press Conference ZURICH—For the fifth time this decade, the world awoke to headlines screaming that the “missing link” has finally been found. This week’s specimen—an exquisitely preserved 47-million-year-old primate dubbed *Darwinius masillae 2.0*—was unveiled in…
Keith Andrews, the Irish midfield thundercloud that once hovered over the Premier League and now drifts benignly across European television studios, is the rare footballer whose surname doubles as an instruction to every pundit within earshot. Yet beyond the banter and bruised egos, the global career of this Dubliner offers a miniature history of the…
The Curious Case of Benjamin Šeško, or How a 20-Year-Old Slovenian Became the Geopolitical Football Nobody Knew They Needed We live in an age when a single transfer clause can nudge the euro higher and a hamstring tweak can tank the forint, so it should surprise no one that Benjamin Šeško—RB Leipzig’s lanky Slovenian striker…
Russia Runs on Empty: A Global Masterclass in How to Turn Oil into Anxiety By Our Correspondent in the Departures Lounge, Somewhere over the Caspian Moscow, late May—At the very moment when Russian state television was boasting that the Motherland’s hydrocarbons could power Europe until the sun burned out, motorists in Krasnodar were queuing for…
Jordan Henderson and the Geopolitics of a Midfield Pivot By our man in the departure lounge, still waiting for the connecting flight to Doha There are moments in world affairs when the tectonic plates of sport, commerce and morality grind together loud enough to drown out the commentators. One such moment arrived last July when…
Igor Thiago: The Brazilian Striker Who’s Quietly Making the Whole World Care About Club Brugge By Dave’s Locker International Desk For most mortals, Belgium is a polite smudge between France and the Netherlands where diplomats go to feel relevant and chocolate enjoys better healthcare than humans. Yet in this accidental nation, a 22-year-old named Igor…
Getafe vs. Levante: A Microscopic Clash in the Macrocosm of Late-Stage Football Capitalism By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent, still wearing yesterday’s cynicism MADRID—On a Tuesday night so bland even the pigeons looked bored, Getafe and Levante jogged out at the Coliseum Alfonso Pérez to contest a La Liga fixture that felt less like a football…
MADRID—Somewhere between a flamenco bar and a NATO summit, Atlético Madrid and Real Madrid will again collide tonight in a fixture that doubles as a municipal civil war and a quarterly earnings call. The match is nominally about three points in La Liga, but—like most things in 2024—it is really about soft power, trans-continental brand…
In the grand, greasy carousel of global gastronomy, where every other week a turmeric-stained chef is hailed as the Gandhi of ghee, Nisha Katona has managed the rare trick of not becoming a caricature. While the rest of us were doom-scrolling through war crimes and crypto collapses, the Liverpool-based barrister-turned-restaurateur quietly built a curry empire…
Atlético vs Real: A Century-Long Civil War in Minature, Sponsored by Your Favorite Multinational By Lucas “Weathered Passport” Moreau, filing from a tapas bar that still thinks Franco is on the throne. Madrid, 1903 – The first recorded skirmish takes place in a field that would eventually be paved over by IKEA. Atlético, still called…
The Eternal Recurrence of Sky-Blue Sisyphus: A Global Timeline of Manchester City vs Burnley, 2010-2024 by Our Correspondent in Exile, somewhere between Doha and a dodgy VPN I. 2010–2012: The Pre-Cambrian Era In the ancient days before sovereign wealth funds monetised the concept of nostalgia, Burnley still believed they could beat City on merit. A…
