Waterloo Road, Series 16: How a Fictional Manchester Comp Re-Educated the Planet By the time Series 16 of Waterloo Road dropped on BBC iPlayer, the world had already endured two years of pandemic home-schooling, one attempted coup in the United States, and the quiet realisation that most teenagers now learn geopolitics from TikTok. Against that…
Oklahoma Football Schedule: How a Flyover-State Fixture Became a Geopolitical Mood Ring By the time the Sooner Schooner makes its first thundering lap this autumn, grain silos from the Texas Panhandle to the edge of the Flint Hills will have already spent weeks parsing the Oklahoma football schedule like it’s a leaked NATO communiqué. To…
Roger Clemens: The Rocket Who Never Quite Escaped Earth’s Orbit By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent PARIS—While the rest of the planet wrestles with inflation, AI-generated popes, and whatever fresh geopolitical dumpster fire is trending on Elon’s latest toy, the ghost of Roger Clemens still hovers over baseball like a foul-smelling memory you can’t quite Febreze…
Franco Mastantuono: The 16-Year-Old Who Just Made Grown Men Cry into Their Overpriced Beer Buenos Aires, Wednesday, 2:14 a.m.—while half the planet doom-scrolled another geopolitical meltdown, a child still legally required to attend math class nutmegged a 31-year-old Brazilian defender and sent River Plate’s Monumental into the sort of collective delirium usually reserved for currency…
PARIS — Somewhere between a smoky jazz bar in Montparnasse and a fluorescent-lit co-working space in Singapore sits John Mateer, a man whose surname translates to “morning” in Catalan yet whose career has unfolded almost exclusively under the dim glow of late-night deal-making. To the uninitiated, he is simply the latest American executive to pivot…
The planet’s most durable reality-TV franchise—let’s call it “Make America Gawk Again”—has been renewed for another season, and the season premiere is set in Kyiv. Once again, Donald Trump’s gravitational pull is bending diplomacy into late-night infomercial prose: “Act now, supplies of U.S. security guarantees are limited!” From Berlin to Bangkok, chancelleries that spent four…
Kylian Mbappé, the boy king of a sport that still pretends to be a game, has once again reminded planet Earth that the 21st-century economy runs less on oil than on adolescent thigh muscles and a left foot that can bend space-time. When he announced, via a choreographed yawn on social media, that he would…
Dateline: Somewhere between the last functioning satellite and the next scheduled blackout It took a decade, three pandemics, two recessions, and the collapse of at least one liberal democracy, but Bethesda has finally confirmed that The Elder Scrolls VI is real enough to merit a thirty-second trailer. The announcement, delivered with all the gravitas of…
Noel Fielding and the End of the World as We Know It By Dave’s International Desk, somewhere over the Atlantic, nursing lukewarm coffee and existential dread PARIS—Somewhere between a croissant and a Gauloise, it struck me that Noel Fielding might be the only British export currently outperforming inflation. While sterling stumbles like a drunk tourist…
Jarvis Brownlee: How One Man’s Mid-Season Swap Became a Geopolitical Mood Ring By the time the tweet finally detonated, it was already 3 a.m. in Singapore, lunchtime in Lagos, and the exact moment in London when polite society pretends to be scandalised by things it privately adores. Jarvis Brownlee—cornerback, former Louisville Cardinal, now passport-carrying citizen…
AC Milan and the Global Theatre of Meaningless Glory By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic Somewhere between a Singaporean crypto-bro’s private jet and a Cairo Uber stuck in Ramses Square, the phrase “AC Milan” still lands like a well-aimed throwback Thursday. It’s not just football; it’s a multi-national coping mechanism,…
Amazon Fresh Stores: The Checkout-Free Crusade to Make Lines Obsolete—And Maybe Humans Too By the time you finish reading this sentence, Amazon Fresh will have opened another store somewhere on the planet, harvested another cartload of behavioral data, and quietly retired another cashier who used to know your ex’s coffee order. The expansion is swift,…
