Cushendall, County Antrim—population 1,280, sheep 3,421, Wi-Fi signal occasionally audible—has just been named Northern Ireland’s newest “Eco-Destination of the Year,” a title greeted locally with the same enthusiasm reserved for a second-place raffle ticket. Yet this windswept hook of basalt and drizzle, huddled between the Antrim Glens and the North Channel’s grey indifference, has quietly…
Mike Heslin Wasn’t Famous—Which Makes His Death the Perfect Global Story By Dave’s Locker, International Desk The algorithmic gods who decide whose names trend from Manila to Montevideo have, for once, elevated someone who wasn’t trending while alive. Mike Heslin, 30, actor-producer and walking reminder that the universe enjoys a good plot twist, died on…
Strasbourg vs Marseille: When Two Cities Become a Proxy War for Everyone Else’s Problems By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent It started as a Ligue 1 fixture on a damp Saturday night, but by the final whistle the Strasbourg–Marseille grudge match had metastasised into a geopolitical Rorschach test. One side represented “Europe” (in the sense that…
Terrell Williams and the Accidental Global Revolution Nobody Signed Up For By Our Correspondent in a Café That Still Accepts Cash PARIS—Somewhere between the third espresso and the fourth existential crisis, the bartender leaned in and whispered, “You heard about Terrell Williams?” The name, apparently, has become a kind of international shibboleth: say it in…
Canyon View Junior High: The Geopolitical Fault Line You Never Knew Existed By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk From the air, Canyon View Junior High looks like any other slice of suburban Lego—low-slung brick, a parking lot designed by someone who clearly lost a bet, and a soccer field so geometrically perfect it could be a…
**The Man Who Makes Crashes Pay: Dr. Ian Roberts and the Global Theater of Speed and Safety** In the fluorescent-lit corridors of the FIA’s Geneva headquarters, Dr. Ian Roberts cuts an unlikely figure—a man whose daily commute involves calculating whether a carbon-fiber bathtub traveling at 300 kph can keep a human brain from becoming abstract…
Bayern vs. Werder: A Microcosm of Global Power and the Art of Losing with Dignity By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Somewhere between the Isar River and the North Sea, two German postal codes prepare for their quarterly ritual of hope versus inevitability. Bayern Munich—motto: “If the Bundesliga were Monopoly, we already own Boardwalk and Park…
Jake Knapp and the Quiet Revolution of the 4-Hour Workweek—No, Not That One We open, as all good international dispatches must, in Dubai Duty-Free at 03:14, where the fluorescent lighting is bright enough to perform minor surgery and the perfume fog could anesthetize a camel. Somewhere between the 12-euro Toblerone and the “I ♥ UAE”…
Weather Phoenix: When the Sky Decides to Rebrand, the World Gets Burned By the time the mercury in Phoenix hit 119°F (48°C) last week, the city had already exhausted the English language for “hot.” Locals were reduced to comparing the sidewalk to a George Foreman grill and describing their shoes as “flambé.” But the spectacle…
Al-Ittihad vs Al-Nassr: The Derby That Became a Global Reality Show In the Kingdom where the desert meets the deluge of petrodollars, the Jeddah-Riyadh axis has always been a polite cold war fought with skyscrapers and sovereign wealth. Tuesday night, though, the temperature rose to the precise level required for the world’s most expensive mid-life…
Red Birds and Blue Bears: How a Midwestern Squabble Echoes Through the Collapsing Coliseum of Global Order By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic Somewhere between the missile tests in the Sea of Japan and the latest cryptocurrency implosion in a server farm the size of Liechtenstein, two baseball clubs from…
Stormers vs Leinster: A Small Ball, A Large World By Our Man in the Departure Lounge Cape Town – Somewhere between the roar of the Atlantic and the drone of the Boeing 777s stacked over the Winelands, two rugby provinces are preparing to murder each other politely on Saturday night. The Stormers—once a regional brochure…
