Port Charles Has Fallen and It Can’t Get Up: A Dispatch on the Global Aftershocks of General Hospital Spoilers By C. V. Blackstone, International Affairs Correspondent Rumors out of upstate New York—specifically that picturesque hamlet where half the population has been shot, resurrected, or re-cast—now travel faster than a Swiss bank transfer. A single leaked…
The Asia Cup points table is, on its surface, a tidy ledger of wins, losses, net-run-rates and the occasional no-result that keeps actuaries awake at night. Yet step back far enough—say, from a satellite drifting above the Indian Ocean—and it starts to resemble the world’s most flamboyant mood ring. A flick of green for Pakistan,…
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport—three initials that sound like a failed boy band and a footprint roughly the size of Manhattan—has quietly become the world’s most convincing argument that geography is now optional. Wedged between two modest Texan cities whose combined population could fit into a Shanghai subway car, DFW somehow moves 75 million souls a…
Stuttgart vs St. Pauli: A Tale of Two Germanies, Sponsored by Late-Stage Capitalism By Dave’s Locker International Desk Düsseldorf—From a safe distance, the Bundesliga fixture between VfB Stuttgart and FC St. Pauli looks like a simple Saturday afternoon collision of football philosophies: Swabian precision versus Hamburg anarcho-hipster chic. Zoom out, however, and the match becomes…
Port-au-Prince, Kigali, and a dimly lit soundstage in Burbank have more in common than you might think. Each, in its own melodramatic way, hosts a “general hospital,” that universal theatre where birth certificates, death notices, and insurance forms tango under flickering fluorescent lights. From the cholera wards of Kinshasa to the for-profit palaces along Dubai’s…
Rio Ave versus Porto: the fixture sounds like an under-funded travel documentary, but inside the Estádio dos Arcos on Saturday it will feel closer to a geopolitical micro-drama. On paper it’s match-day 29 of Portugal’s Primeira Liga; in practice it is a neat précis of how the 21st-century world really works—one corner of the Iberian…
Stuttgart FC: How a Swabian Football Club Became the Canary in Global Capitalism’s Coal Mine By Our Man in the Cheap Seats Stuttgart – The first thing you notice at the Mercedes-Benz Arena on match day is the smell. It’s equal parts bratwurst, burnt rubber from the autobahn flyover, and the faint whiff of existential…
The Ballad of Olympique Lyon: A French Club for the End of the World By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, still wearing last night’s despair like a scarf LYON, France — On paper, Olympique Lyon is merely a mid-table Ligue 1 side with delusions of grandeur and a stadium that looks like a UFO abandoned by aliens…
The Quartermaine Doctrine: How a Fictional Matriarch Became the UN’s Unofficial Moral Compass By Dave’s International Bureau of Implausible Soft-Power Assets GENEVA—While the Security Council bickered over grain corridors and submarine cables last week, an emergency Zoom convened by the WHO quietly added a new slide to pandemic-preparedness briefings: “What Would Monica Quartermaine Do?” The…
The Bundesliga has many derbies, but few carry the geopolitical baggage of VfB Stuttgart versus FC St. Pauli. On paper it’s merely 18th-placed Stuttgart trying to clamber over 17th-placed St. Pauli in the relegation playoff spot, a desperate scramble to stay among the Teutonic elite. In practice it is a proxy war between Swabian industrial…
The Colin Kaepernick Story, or How One Knee Became the World’s Most Controversial Body Part By “Roaming” Rodrigo Valente, Dave’s Locker International Affairs & Popcorn Correspondent If you had told a Zurich bond-trader in 2012 that a backup quarterback from Turlock, California would one day be cited by German parliamentarians, South African students, and Japanese…
Rugby: the game where grown adults willingly hurl themselves into one another’s clavicles for eighty minutes and then spend the after-party pretending their ears aren’t about to fall off. For decades this ritual was marketed as the exclusive domain of men whose necks are wider than their heads. Then someone in a blazer finally noticed…
