Somewhere above the Adriatic, at 38,000 feet and a cruising speed that would make most commercial pilots weep quietly into their headsets, the planet’s most expensive pair of sneakers is doing what it does best: being airborne, invisible to civilian radar, and theoretically capable of launching thermonuclear Armageddon while its owner finishes dessert. Welcome aboard…
Fat Bear Week: When the World Stops to Gawp at Gluttony While Glaciers Melt By our Foreign Desk bear-observer, filing from somewhere with reliable Wi-Fi and unreliable morals Every October, while COP delegates haggle over a single sentence on carbon markets, a quiet corner of Alaska stages the only election the planet still trusts: Fat…
Dying Light: The Beast – or How to Sell the End of the World Back to Us, One Parkour Zombie at a Time From the warped newsrooms of Dave’s Locker | 12 June 2025 There are two kinds of apocalypse in 2025: the slow-motion one playing out in real time—record heat in Delhi, record floods…
Every spring, while a quarter of the planet argues about whose passports deserve asterisks and which strongman has the bigger nuclear yacht, a quieter, more honest form of imperialism plays out on manicured rectangles of grass. The UEFA Champions League—once a modest continental knock-out, now a 32-nation carnival of leveraged buy-outs and geopolitical soft power—returns…
Clelin Ferrell and the Merciless Geography of Athletic Fame By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Mid-Atlantic Somewhere between the 38th parallel and the 49-yard line, Clelin Ferrell’s name still echoes—mostly in the form of incredulous laughter from Raiders fans who once believed the 2019 draft was their deliverance from perpetual mediocrity….
Club Brujas – Mónaco: A Tale of Two Tax Havens and One Very Public Break-Up By the time the first drone shot of the super-yachts hit Instagram, half the planet was already rubber-necking. Club Brujas—an ultra-exclusive, invitation-only “private members society” founded by a Belgian telecom heir and a retired Colombian reggaeton manager—had chosen the Port…
Leverkusen, a modest Rhineland city whose name sounds like a pharmaceutical after-dinner mint, has spent most of its life politely clearing its throat in the shadow of Cologne’s cathedral. Yet this spring it has swaggered onto the global stage like an intern who just discovered expense accounts. The cause: Bayer 04 Leverkusen’s first-ever Bundesliga title,…
It began, as most planetary distractions do, with a shrug in Turin. When UEFA first paired Manchester City with SSC Napoli in the 2011-12 Champions League group stage, global markets barely blinked; the euro was wobbling, Occupy tents had colonized lower Manhattan, and the world’s attention was fixed on the slow-motion car crash called the…
Club Brugge vs Monaco: Where Medieval Cobblestones Meet Tax-Haven Glitter, and the World Pretends It Cares By Our Man in Bruges, nursing a Duvel and a mild existential crisis In a universe where COP summits end in polite applause and zero emissions, and the UN Security Council can’t even agree on lunch, it is oddly…
Robo Shankar and the Global Panic Over a Man Who Dared to Laugh There’s something grimly poetic about the fact that the same week the World Health Organization upgraded “burnout” to a full-blown diagnosis, an Indian comedian named Robo Shankar became the planet’s newest export-grade controversy. While G-7 finance ministers fretted over whether to call…
Frontier Airlines: The Spirit of the American West, Now Available in a Middle Seat Near You By: Our Man in the Departure Lounge DENVER—Somewhere over the North Atlantic, a Lufthansa A350 glides toward Frankfurt like a well-funded social-democracy, sipping fuel and serving Riesling. Ten thousand feet below, an Airbus A320 with a raccoon on the…
Newcastle United vs. Barcelona: A Timeline of Colliding Delusions By Our Man at the End of the World (and the Duty-Free Bar) 1997 – The Fairs Cup Final, First Leg, St James’ Park The last time Europe smiled at Newcastle without simultaneously checking its wallet. A 3-2 win for the Toon, fueled by pre-Brexit pints…
