The Curious Case of Bob MacIntyre, or How a Scotsman Quietly Bent the Universe By the time the final putt dropped on the 72nd hole of the Scottish Open, Bob MacIntyre had not so much won a golf tournament as issued a low-key memo to planet Earth: gravity, money, and geopolitical anxiety remain optional accessories…
The Ballad of Justin Rose, or How a Very Polite Englishman Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Weather Vane By Our Man in the Fairway, Still Nursing a Hangover from Geneva In the grand casino where nations hedge their soft-power bets—Olympic villages, World Cup stadiums, the occasional F1 paddock—golf was long dismissed as the pastel-colored safe space…
The Ryder Cup: A Weekend Where Continental Egos Are Stroked, Then Deflated, All for a Tiny Gold Trophy By Our Man in Marco Simone, Nursing an Espresso and Existential Dread MARCO SIMONE GOLF & COUNTRY CLUB, ITALY — If you squinted past the emerald fairways and corporate skyboxes this weekend, you could almost see the…
OSLO, NORWAY – Somewhere above the Arctic Circle, a 25-year-old Norwegian is single-handedly proving that the apocalypse can wait at least until Sunday. Viktor Hovland, who looks like he just walked out of a J.Crew catalog that moonlights as a death-metal album cover, has become the unlikely diplomat of an anxious planet. While governments bicker…
Europe’s Ryder Cup Team: Twelve Angry Men in Pringle Knitwear By L. M. Harrow, International Correspondent (Dave’s Locker – Geneva Bureau) The Ryder Cup is golf’s answer to trench warfare—only the trenches are perfectly manicured and the combatants apologize after every volley. Every two years, the European squad assembles like the world’s most passive-aggressive NATO…
Just Picture It: A Planet-Wide Thought Experiment in the Age of Collapse By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Foreign Bureau GENEVA—Close your eyes for a moment—unless you’re reading this while driving a Tesla on autopilot on the outskirts of Shenzhen, in which case, please keep them open. Now, just picture it: every human being alive simultaneously trying…
The Swedish Meteor That Missed Every Radar Screen By our correspondent in the bunker beneath Geneva’s Palais des Nations GENEVA—In a week when the planet busied itself with the usual carousel of missile tests, crypto collapses, and whichever royal duchess is currently suing a tabloid, a 24-year-old from Esbjerg (yes, that’s in Denmark, but try…
By the time you finish this sentence, the word “aberg” will have been Googled in 37 languages, meme-ified on six continents, and politely ignored by the three governments that actually know what it means. Welcome to the latest linguistic contagion to slip past customs without declaring anything more dangerous than curiosity. Aberg began life as…
A Variant by Any Other Name: The World’s Latest Microscopic Plot Twist By Our Bureau of Recurrent Déjà Vu GENEVA — Just when you thought the planet had finally exhausted its supply of novelty, Virology’s favorite franchise has dropped Season Four, episode “XBB.2.3.1-π” (pronunciation optional, fear mandatory). The World Health Organization, whose travel budget now…
PARIS—In an age when nuclear superpowers trade threats on social media and the global thermostat is set to “apocalypse pre-heat,” the world’s attention briefly swivelled last week to an altogether more genteel battlefield: the upper deck of a charter bus parked outside Le Golf National. There stood Tommy Fleetwood, freshly minted Ryder Cup points-machine, being…
The Prime Directive: How a Seattle Membership Card Quietly Became a Passport to Modern Life By Paulo “No-Rush Shipping” Mendes, roving correspondent and reluctant citizen of Planet Amazon Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok dances, humanity agreed—without a vote, plebiscite, or even a particularly lively group chat—to let…
Michael Jordan Doesn’t Do Borders, but Borders Do Him Bylines from Belgrade to Beijing still tremble when the man’s silhouette appears on a screen—like a Rorschach test for late-stage capitalism. Thirty-plus years after he first levitated from the free-throw line, His Airness remains the planet’s most efficiently exported American: more durable than democracy, lighter to…
