When the White Ferns met the Women in Blue under the floodlights of Hamilton last week, the planet did not stop spinning, oil prices remained volatile, and the glaciers of Patagonia continued their sullen retreat. Yet, somewhere between the 35th over and the inevitable PowerPoint presentation of “key learnings,” the New Zealand Women versus India…
A Heron Flies the Coop: How the Death of a Discount Grocer Signals the End of Civilisation (Probably) The shuttering of Heron Foods’ last corporate-owned stores this month is, on paper, a tidy little British footnote: 14 shops across post-industrial Yorkshire and Humberside, a few hundred jobs, and a brand that most people outside Grimsby…
The world’s longest, most expensive staring contest is back on. Washington and Beijing have once again squared off across the Pacific, pupils dilated, wallets open, each daring the other to blink first while the rest of us try to remember when this stopped being metaphorical and started costing real money. From semiconductor embargoes that read…
PARIS — Somewhere between a Moldovan data-center and a Singaporean coffee shop that accepts Dogecoin for flat whites, the word “blockchain” has achieved the rare distinction of being simultaneously the most over-promised cure since snake oil and the most under-explained phenomenon since democracy. From Davos panels to Lagos fintech meet-ups, the distributed ledger has become…
If you want a crash course in global inequality, skip the World Bank white papers and simply tailgate an eighteen-wheeler. The moment the bumper kisses asphalt from Marrakesh to Manila, a small army of truck accident attorneys materializes—some in bespoke Milanese suits, others in flip-flops—each ready to translate carnage into compensation with the efficiency of…
Swansea vs Millwall: A Parochial Punch-Up with Global Side-Effects The Liberty Stadium—an innocuous bowl of concrete on the edge of Swansea Bay—hosts this weekend’s Championship fixture between Swansea City and Millwall. On paper it is merely twenty-two athletes, one spherical object, and a chorus of men who sing about their grandfathers’ maritime exploits. Yet, like…
The 27th Birthday of a Search Engine That Knows Too Much International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Today, somewhere between a missile test in Pyongyang and the 347th cryptocurrency meltdown this fiscal quarter, Google turns twenty-seven—an age at which most humans are still figuring out what they want to be when they grow up. Google, however, already…
Binance, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crypto Bomb By Our Man in 200 Jurisdictions (and Counting) If you stare long enough at the Binance logo—two diagonal rectangles forever sliding past each other—you start to see the entire twenty-first-century condition: frictionless, borderless, lawless, and just one fat-fingered trade away from total…
Wrexham vs Derby County: A Global Power Struggle Disguised as a Football Match By Our Man on the Terraces, Currently Three Pints In Let us begin with the obvious: on paper, Wrexham versus Derby County is merely an English third-tier fixture, the sort of midweek distraction that keeps betting apps humming and pub carpets sticky….
Coventry vs Birmingham: A Tale of Two Midlands That Explains the World’s Endless Capacity for Self-Inflicted Misery By the time you read this, the average reader in Jakarta or São Paulo will have already scrolled past a headline about “Coventry vs Birmingham” and wondered why anyone outside the M6 should care. That, dear jet-lagged friend,…
Kai Havertz, Human Rorschach Test: How One Languid German Became a Global Mirror for Our Own Existential Panic by Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk There’s a moment, usually around the 73rd minute, when Kai Havertz decides to jog rather than sprint, and 4.2 billion television pixels collectively wonder if that’s sloth, Zen, or a coded protest…
In the grand casino of professional tennis—where fortunes swing faster than a Kyrgios meltdown—Belgium has quietly pushed another chip onto the green baize. His name is Zizou Bergs, a moniker that sounds less like a tennis prodigy and more like a Scandinavian death-metal band that tours in a repurposed Volvo. Yet behind the syllabic absurdity…
