Drew Brees and the Global Art of Turning a Spiral into Soft Power By Our Paris Bureau Chief, nursing a 2005 Bordeaux and a mild case of existential dread PARIS—Somewhere between the pâté and the second bottle of Burgundy, it dawned on the assembled diplomats, hedge-fund escapees, and one very confused Senegalese rapper that the…
The Fixture List as Geopolitical Weather Report By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere between the Etihad and the end of history It begins, as all modern catastrophes do, with a PDF. At 09:00 BST precisely, Manchester City’s 2024-25 fixture list drops onto millions of phones from Lagos to Lahore, each ping a tiny…
The Old Firm’s Little Brother Throws a Tantrum: Celtic vs Hibernian as Global Metaphor By “Wee Davie” McAllister, International Correspondent-at-Large Somewhere above Edinburgh’s slate rooftops, a satellite the size of a Fiat Panda beams 1080p images of Celtic versus Hibernian to a Mumbai sports bar, a Perth (Australia) betting shop, and a silent dorm room…
When the Moon, that modest hunk of recycled Earth-crust, decides to photobomb the Sun, humanity briefly stops arguing about tariffs and TikTok to stare skyward like a planetary flock of mildly anxious pigeons. The Great North American Eclipse of 8 April 2024 was only the latest in a long line of celestial guilt trips reminding…
**The Global Ballet of Aston Villa Fixtures: How Birmingham’s Football Schedule Quietly Rules the World** While diplomats in Geneva debate the fate of nations and central bankers adjust interest rates with the gravitas of cardiac surgeons, an arguably more consequential calendar quietly dictates the emotional rhythms of millions: Aston Villa’s fixture list. Yes, that Aston…
Arsenal: A Global Inventory of How Humans Never Learn By Our Correspondent Who’s Counted the Bullets and the Irony It is tempting to think of “arsenal” as merely a North London football club whose fans oscillate between hope and despair with the reliability of a Swiss watch. Yet step back from the Emirates Stadium and…
When Does Barcelona Play? A Question That Moves the Planet’s Pulse By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you ask Google “a qué hora juega el Barcelona” from a bar in Lagos, a co-working space in Singapore, or a bomb shelter in Kharkiv, the answer is 21:00 CET—give or take the five bureaucratic time zones your…
**The Beautiful Ballet of Broken Bones: How America’s NFL Injury Report Became the World’s Guilty Pleasure** While the planet grapples with climate change, economic instability, and the occasional attempted coup, roughly 4% of humanity finds itself transfixed by the weekly medical melodrama known as the NFL Injury Report—a document that reads like a medieval torture…
Leverkusen vs. Mönchengladbach: Two Postcards from the Rhine, One Global Existential Crisis In normal times, the 25-kilometre stretch between Leverkusen and Mönchengladbach is just a meander of the Rhine and a few autobahn exits. On derby day, however, it mutates into the fault line where Bayer’s corporate optimism collides head-on with Borussia’s artisanal pessimism, and…
SEOUL—Somewhere in the gleaming, algorithmic hive of Gangnam, a man named Michael Kim is quietly re-writing the rules of global capitalism, one leveraged buyout at a time. To the average Seoulite he is merely another well-tailored ghost gliding through steel lobbies; to the rest of the planet he is the Korean Midas who turns conglomerate…
Andrew Kolvet: The Global Bureaucrat Nobody Asked For, Yet Somehow Can’t Escape By the time the sun rose over Brussels—simultaneously rising, as always, on the debt clocks of Athens, the surveillance drones of Shenzhen, and the influencer breakfast tables of Los Angeles—Andrew Kolvet had already updated the footnotes on page 47-B of a report that…
In a World on Fire, the World Sits Down for Grits By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Geneva, Switzerland — While the UN Security Council convened its 2,847th emergency session on the precise shade of existential dread we should adopt this month, a parallel diplomatic channel was quietly unfolding three thousand miles away in a Tennessee-themed…
