THE GREAT GRANNY-FREEZE PARADOX: How a £300 British Winter Fuel Payment Became the Canary in the Planet’s Overstuffed Coal Mine Dateline: Somewhere between the Arctic jet stream and the central bank’s printer queue By the time you finish this sentence, another British pensioner will have asked Alexa whether “heat or eat” is the more fashionable…
Red Star Belgrade: How a Serbian Football Club Became the Last Soviet-Era Dictator Still Allowed to Travel By the time the final whistle blew in Salzburg last August, Red Star Belgrade had done something no Balkan politician has managed in three decades: crossed multiple borders without a single customs officer asking awkward questions about where…
Spaghetti Models: The World’s Favorite Guessing Game, Now Sponsored by Climate Anxiety By L. Marchetti, International Desk, Dave’s Locker Every June, as the Northern Hemisphere begins to sweat like a tax accountant in April, a curious ritual unfolds from Tokyo to Trinidad. Meteorologists, naval commanders, insurance actuaries, and doom-scroll addicts converge on the same Technicolor…
Brad Arnold, the Mississippi bar-band refugee who became the voice of every karaoke bar from Jakarta to Johannesburg, is not merely the frontman of 3 Doors Down—he is a living, breathing cautionary tale about what happens when post-Cold-War optimism collides with the algorithmic meat-grinder of the twenty-first century. Two decades ago, “Kryptonite” was the ringtone…
Frances Tiafoe: The Last American Standing on a Planet That’s Forgotten How to Stand Still By Dave’s Foreign Bureau of Existential Scoreboards PARIS, AUGUST—Somewhere between the 13th arrondissement’s overpriced croissants and the clay-stained baseline of Court Philippe-Chatrier, Frances Tiafoe reminded the world that the United States still exports something other than inflation and Marvel spin-offs:…
TradingView: The Neon Church Where the World’s Money Prays to Itself By “Still-Shorting-My-Own-Sanity” Correspondent, somewhere over the dateline with spotty Wi-Fi and cheaper coffee than sense. Somewhere between the collapse of another regional bank in Zurich and the latest crypto-trading hamster flat-lining in Germany, an oddly soothing shade of black-and-green has become the lingua franca…
Istanbul—Somewhere between the scent of cardamom and the existential dread of a 23-minute connection, Turkish Airlines has quietly become the geopolitical equivalent of a frequent-flyer program: everyone complains, yet everyone keeps swiping the card. The carrier now flies to more countries than any airline on earth—131 at last count, or roughly every sovereign patch of…
Simon Jordan: The Mouth That Roared Across Borders By our man in the cheap seats, still recovering from the Premier League’s latest morality play LONDON—Somewhere between a Brexit argument and a heatwave-induced blackout, Simon Jordan is holding court again. The former Crystal Palace owner-turned-broadcaster has become Britain’s loudest export since the vuvuzela: impossible to ignore,…
Russell Howard and the Global Giggle-Industrial Complex A dispatch from the front lines of exported British mirth By the time the plane begins its descent into Singapore, the in-flight entertainment system has already offered me three separate Russell Howard stand-up specials in three different languages. Somewhere over the Bay of Bengal, a Malaysian teenager is…
Bookers of the World, Unite: How a Four-Letter Word Became the Planet’s Quiet Puppet-Master From the neon back-alleys of Lagos to the sterile lobbies of Davos, the word “booker” has mutated into a shape-shifting verb, noun, and, lately, existential threat. In its earliest, most innocent form, it meant the poor soul who wrestled with opera…
Somewhere off the coast of California, two leopard sharks are sizing each other up like delegates at a climate summit: all posturing, no eye contact, and a shared understanding that whatever happens next will be awkward, brief, and entirely for the cameras of passing drone hobbyists. Welcome, dear reader, to the annual congress of Triakis…
When the name Brendan Carr first appears on a foreign desk’s wire feed, the immediate instinct is to ask which hemisphere he’s currently irritating. The answer, reliably, is all of them. As the senior Republican commissioner of the United States Federal Communications Commission, Carr has spent the last decade transforming what used to be a…
