Real Oviedo vs. Barcelona: When David Books Goliath’s Private Jet Estadio Carlos Tartiere, 21:00 local time—an hour when most of Europe is either asleep or pretending to be. Yet on Spain’s rainy northern coast, 28,000 Asturian souls cram into a stadium whose last major renovation was paid for by the peseta. The occasion? A Copa…
Amazon’s $8.5 Million Prime Settlement: The World Watches a Subscription Circus Pack Up Its Tent International Correspondent: Dave’s Locker, Geneva Bureau The news arrived on a Tuesday—because bad news always prefers Tuesdays, when the coffee’s lukewarm and hope has already filed for bankruptcy. Amazon, the digital colossus that once promised to deliver everything from A…
Barcelona Schedule: A Global Itinerary for the Morally Flexible By the time you finish reading this sentence, Barcelona will have altered its “definitive” fixture list at least twice, once for television, once for some sheikh’s nephew’s birthday, and once because the city council suddenly remembered that Las Ramblas can’t actually accommodate both a marathon and…
The Tony Earls Jr. case—an Atlanta shooting that turned a parking-lot spat into a referendum on American gun etiquette—has now been filed in the global folder marked “Yet Another U.S. Tragedy the Rest of Us Watch Like a Slow-Motion Netflix Series.” For readers outside the Lower-48 who might have missed the subtitles: Earls, a 24-year-old…
The Hack Cast: A Global Theatre Where Everyone’s the Fool and the Script Keeps Rewriting Itself By Diego “Dredge” Moreau, Senior Cynic-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Bureau of Diminishing Returns The phrase “the hack cast” sounds like a rejected Netflix pitch about rogue dermatologists, but in 2024 it is the depressingly accurate collective noun for the planet’s…
Real Oviedo vs. Barcelona: A Tale of Two Balance Sheets Disguised as a Football Match — International Dispatch from the Department of Existential Accounting By the time the referee’s whistle blows in Asturias this weekend, roughly 127 foreign television crews will be pretending the planet’s fate hinges on 22 men kicking a sphere of polyurethane….
Colombo, Sunday night—while the rest of the planet was doom-scrolling inflation graphs and betting on which democracy would topple next, a modest stadium on an island slowly sliding into the Indian Ocean staged a spectacle that, for 210 neurotic minutes, made 1.7 billion people forget their unpaid electricity bills. The Asia Cup final—India versus Sri…
**The Jasmine Revolution Comes to Albert Square: How a Fictional EastEnders Character Became an Unlikely Symbol of Global Resistance** In the grand theater of international affairs, where nuclear powers play chicken and billionaires cosplay as space explorers, the world has found itself captivated by an unlikely protagonist: Jasmine from EastEnders. Because apparently, when civilization teeters…
Sale vs Gloucester: When a Provincial English Punch-Up Becomes the World’s Loud, Drunken Metaphor By Dave’s International Affairs Correspondent (currently hiding in a Moldovan wine cellar) SALE, a former mill town whose civic pride now resides in a rugby stadium and a defunct Debenhams, versus GLOUCESTER, a cathedral city whose most famous export is the…
Moscow, late spring. The lilacs are blooming along Tverskaya and the traffic cops are extorting drivers with the same languid grace their grandfathers practiced in the Brezhnev era. It’s comforting, in a perverse way: empires collapse, currencies crater, but the bribe rate for an illegal U-turn remains reassuringly stable—like a Central Bank for petty corruption….
From thirty-thousand feet, the Miramar Air Show looks like the world’s most expensive light-switch rave. F/A-18 Super Hornets pirouette above San Diego’s sun-bleached suburbs, leaving contrails the color of bruised peaches, while toddlers in aviator sunglasses cheer from folding chairs that cost more than the GDP of Tuvalu. The scene is quintessentially American—equal parts county…
When the BBC announced in July 2017 that Jodie Whittaker would be the thirteenth Doctor, the collective gasp could be heard from Cardiff to Kuala Lumpur. Suddenly a franchise older than most African constitutions had decided that a two-hearted alien who routinely cheats death could, in fact, be a woman. International Twitter did what it…
