The Kai Trump Phenomenon: How a 17-Year-Old Golfer Became a Geopolitical Rorschach Test By the time the sun rose over Dubai’s Emirates Golf Club last month, the leaderboard had already become a proxy war. At the top, in neat block letters, stood KAI TRUMP—an American teenager whose surname is less a name than an international…
IND vs SL: A Scorecard for the Apocalypse Lite™ (Disclaimer: No actual locusts were harmed in the making of this fixture) Colombo, Tuesday – While half the planet argued about which billionaire should steer the asteroid-deflecting yacht, 22 men in dazzling whites reminded us that the end of the world will still be interrupted for…
Amad Diallo: The 20-Year-Old Who Outran Global Sanctions, Viral Outrage, and a Congested Right Wing By Our Correspondent Who Once Lost a Passport in Abidjan Abidjan, Ivory Coast — In the grand geopolitical casino, where chips are oil, microchips, and occasionally footballers, Amad Diallo just hit a small but instructive jackpot. On a humid Thursday…
When historians of late-capitalist decadence need a single face to explain how a Manchester United right-midfielder metastasized into a planetary lifestyle brand, they’ll probably pick David Beckham: the haircut that launched a thousand visa stamps. From a cramped East London terrace to the gilded benches of Qatar’s World Cup, Beckham has become the first footballer…
The world, as is its wont, ground to a halt for exactly eight hours and seventeen minutes last Saturday. Planes circled politely above the Bay of Bengal, Bitcoin dipped a respectful 2.3 %, and three minor European monarchs postponed their divorces. All because a spherical piece of leather was being hurled and walloped on a…
Nathan Gill, the Welsh MEP who once looked like the only man in Brussels who could out-bore a chartered-accountant convention, has resurfaced as the poster-child of polite Euroscepticism—proof that even a man who resembles a damp spreadsheet can still rattle the chandeliers of the Berlaymont. From the fjords of Norway to the karaoke bars of…
The Mayor of Manchester (no, not the one in New Hampshire) has become the unlikely protagonist in a global morality play about what happens when a second-tier city decides it’s had enough of being treated like the cheap seats. Andy Burnham—once a forgettable Westminster apparatchik, now rebranded as the human embodiment of northern drizzle and…
Rachel Scott: How One American Teenager’s Murder Became a Global Parable About Bullets, Brands, and Badly-Behaved Nations By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Between the Hague and a Shopping Mall Let us begin, as the world now insists all stories must, with the disclaimer: Rachel Joy Scott was not a geopolitical strategist, a…
India vs. Sri Lanka: A Subcontinental Squabble the World Pretends to Care About By Diego “Seen-It-All” Salazar, Senior Crushed-Idealism Correspondent The Indian Ocean, that overachieving puddle separating Africa from Australia, is once again hosting its favorite blood-sport: the gentle art of two post-colonial siblings trying to look dignified while stepping on each other’s flip-flops. India—population…
Brennan Johnson and the Astonishing Global Reverberations of a Welshman Kicking a Ball When the transfer window finally slammed shut on deadline day, the fax machines stopped wheezing, and the spreadsheet jockeys in beige offices across Europe declared the summer silly season over, one modest footnote kept echoing from Cardiff to Calcutta: Brennan Johnson had…
The Ballad of Hunter Mahan: How a Missed Cut Became a Global Parable The planet keeps spinning—Ukraine smolders, TikTok dances mutate across continents, and somewhere a crypto exchange files for Chapter Eleven—yet for one sun-blasted week in July 2010, the universe pivoted on a single six-foot Texan with a five-iron and a conscience. Hunter Mahan,…
Russ Holliday: The Man Who Outsourced the Apocalypse and Still Missed the Deadline By Our Bureau Chief, Somewhere Between the 38th Parallel and a WeWork in Warsaw PARIS—While most of us were busy doom-scrolling through another Tuesday, a 47-year-old supply-chain savant named Russ Holliday quietly rerouted the planet’s remaining good intentions through a server farm…
