Bob Barnett’s Name Travels Faster Than He Does By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent (currently self-exiled in a Lisbon café that still allows indoor smoking) If you blinked last Tuesday, you probably missed the moment Bob Barnett became a global Rorschach test. One minute he was an unremarkable trademark lawyer in Washington; the next, his surname…
Jake Knapp’s Girlfriend: The Quiet Woman Steering a Billion-Dollar Swing Byline: Geneva, with satellites orbiting Las Vegas, Singapore, and the 19th hole at Valhalla In the geopolitics of professional golf, where every sponsor patch is a micro-treaty and every swing is live-broadcast to traders in three time zones, the phrase “Jake Knapp girlfriend” has become…
RIYADH—In a kingdom where the price of oil can swing elections on the other side of the planet, Monday night’s Al-Ittihad versus Al-Nassr match felt less like a domestic fixture and more like an off-Broadway morality play with a nine-figure budget. The Jeddah side, coached by the eternally aggrieved Nuno Espírito Santo, lined up against…
NOTTINGHAM, England — Every October, when the northern hemisphere tilts reluctantly into winter and daylight becomes a rationed commodity, the city of Nottingham unclenches its civic jaw long enough to regurgitate the Goose Fair. One thousand odd years young, the event began as a medieval poultry pop-up where farmers hawked surplus geese before Michaelmas rent…
John Deacon: The Quiet Man Who Wired the World’s Last Great Rock Band and Then Vanished Like a Diplomatic Bag in Foggy Geneva By the time most mortals reach the age of 27, they are either climbing the corporate cheese grater or posting inspirational quotes in Comic Sans. John Deacon, meanwhile, had already soldered together…
Cameron Young: When a Quiet Golf Prodigy Becomes the World’s Latest Metaphor for Everything By the time Cameron Young’s tee shot at the 151st Open Championship settled 370 yards down the fairway—roughly the distance between London and Brussels on an emotional map—the planet had already begun its usual act of projection. A 26-year-old from Scarborough,…
The World Sings Along to a Caribbean Bastard’s Revenge Fantasy By L. Marín, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker From the barrios of Buenos Aires to the karaoke booths of Seoul, the planet has spent the better part of a decade chanting “I’m not throwing away my shot” while clutching overpriced cocktails and pretending the Founding Fathers…
Blackpool’s Fireworks: A Pyrotechnic Mirror for a World That’s Already on Fire By the time the first shell arcs over the Irish Sea and detonates in a chrysanthemum of magnesium and regret, half the planet is watching—some via livestream, others through the grainy lens of a refugee-camp phone charger jury-rigged to a car battery. The…
The man in the grainy 1970 colour footage looks like he’s just been handed the keys to a fallout shelter seconds before the sirens start wailing. Tony Jacklin, hair still behaving like it has somewhere better to be, lifts the claret jug above his head at Royal Lytham while the BBC commentator tries not to…
Ben Griffin and the Global Ripple of One Man’s Quiet Rebellion By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Geneva and Despair The name “Ben Griffin” does not, at first blush, ring many international bells. It lacks the Hollywood sheen of a Zelensky or the market-moving swagger of a Musk. Yet in the smoky backrooms of security conferences…
From the fairway to the fault lines: the quiet global resonance of JJ Spaun’s 67 on Sunday You probably didn’t notice, somewhere between the 14th Russian drone strike on Kyiv and the 400th TikTok of a cat playing Jenga, that a 33-year-old San Diegan named JJ Spaun fired a bogey-free 67 at the Mexico Open…
Population Boomerang: How the UK’s Sudden Growth Spurt is Everyone Else’s Problem Too The Office for National Statistics dropped its latest head-count last week and, lo, Britain has quietly swollen to a record 68.3 million souls—roughly the population of Thailand, but with markedly worse weather and a keener interest in queue etiquette. At first glance…
