Midshipman Mikie Sherrill’s four-year slog at Annapolis is already being filed under “quaint historical footnote” in most of the world’s capitals, yet the ripple effects of one well-connected American choosing to play sailor-school continue to lap against foreign shores with surprising persistence. From Brussels to Beijing, officials who spend their days calculating missile arcs and…
Brentford vs Manchester United: A Timeline of Hope, Hubris and the Slow Death of Geography By Our Man in the Departure Lounge Wednesday, 7:42 p.m. GMT. A Boeing 777 banks over Hounslow, passengers half-watch an in-flight map that still shows the Soviet Union, and somewhere below, Brentford’s new stadium flickers like a pop-up ad for…
Erling Haaland is, by most measurable standards, a Viking who wandered south, discovered the offside line was optional, and decided to monetize the revelation. From the fjords of Bryne—population roughly equal to a mid-tier Beyoncé concert—to the Etihad’s air-conditioned vault, the Norwegian cyborg has become a walking quarterly report for the global football-industrial complex. His…
MotoGP: The World’s Fastest Moving Diplomatic Incident By Our Man in the Paddock, nursing a lukewarm espresso and existential dread Every other Sunday, humanity’s most combustible peace talks take place at 220 mph. The delegates wear kangaroo-hide armor, speak exclusively in throttle-body language, and regard national borders as optional curbs. Welcome to MotoGP, the United…
Jackie Chan Spills Across Borders Like Cheap Soy Sauce: A Global Love Affair with Controlled Chaos By Our Man in the Departures Lounge Somewhere over the Sea of Japan, half the passengers on JAL 005 are watching Rush Hour on seat-back screens, while the other half are scrolling TikTok clips of Jackie Chan dangling from…
Jessica Pegula: The Quiet Billionaire Who Turned Wimbledon into a Diplomatic Cocktail Party By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—If you squinted past the green-and-purple bunting at this year’s Roland-Garros, you could almost mistake Jessica Pegula for just another baseline grinder with a sponsorship patch and a dream. That, of course, is precisely the sort of…
Anthony Bourdain Was the Last Diplomat We Ever Sent Overseas—And We Didn’t Even Notice He Was Gone PARIS—Somewhere between a bowl of bun bo Hue in Saigon and a michelada in Tijuana, Anthony Bourdain convinced the planet that dinner could double as statecraft. While career ambassadors were busy stapling talking points to one another in…
Friday Night SmackDown: The World’s Loudest Diplomatic Cable By “Ringside” Rami al-Mansour, Senior Correspondent for Dave’s Locker, filing from a hotel bar in Riyadh where the Wi-Fi is faster than U.S. congressional ethics reform If you happened to tune into WWE SmackDown Live last Friday, you may have noticed something odder than Brock Lesnar’s new…
The Works: A Global Tour of Humanity’s Monuments to Itself There is a moment—usually around 3 a.m. in the departure lounge of a second-tier airport—when the seasoned traveler realizes that “the works” is not a single project, achievement, or apocalypse, but an endless buffet of human folly served on a planetary platter. From Dubai’s rotating…
Marvel, the corporate colossus that once sold ten-cent comics to kids who could still dream without pharmaceutical assistance, now stands as the planet’s most efficient exporter of spandex theology. From Lagos cineplexes to Siberian streaming queues, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become the lingua franca of a planet too exhausted to invent its own myths….
Green Man Festival: When the World’s Existential Dread Dresses Up in Face Paint and Wellies By Our Correspondent, still vaguely damp from last year Brecon Beacons, Wales – Somewhere between the sheep-scented mist and the biodegradable glitter, 25,000 humans have once again assembled to prove that collective anxiety can be marketed as a boutique experience….
PlayStation 5 Pro: A Console So Advanced It Can Render the Collapse of Civilization in 8K By the time the PS5 Pro rolls off its Shenzhen assembly line next month, four continents are already on fire—some literally, some only on social media. Sony’s marketing department, ever the optimists, calls the machine “the future of play.”…
