Afghanistan 284/9 (50 overs) – Sri Lanka 289/7 (49.1 overs) Sri Lanka wins by 3 wickets, Lahore Qaddafi Stadium, 5 September 2023 The scorecard looks tidy enough—like a polite dinner invitation printed on cream card stock—but the subtext is messier than a Kabul back alley after curfew. Two nations, both recently graduated from the ICU…
CrowdStrike’s CRWD: The Cybersecurity Stock That Knows Your Passwords and Your Portfolio Davos, Switzerland – While the global elite sipped overpriced coffee and congratulated themselves on “building back better,” CrowdStrike Holdings (NASDAQ: CRWD) quietly closed another quarter of 30 % year-over-year revenue growth, proving that the only thing expanding faster than the Swiss money supply…
Marita Koch, the Human Stopwatch from the Wrong Side of the Wall, Still Haunts the Track It’s 1985, the planet is busy stockpiling nuclear warheads like limited-edition sneakers, and in Canberra a 28-year-old East German with a perm sharp enough to slice bread glides through the 400 metres in 47.60 seconds. The stadium gasps, the…
**Sri Lanka vs Afghanistan: When Cricket Diplomacy Meets Geopolitical Reality** In the grand theater of international relations, nothing quite captures humanity’s capacity for simultaneous cooperation and competition like watching two nations battle it out over a leather ball while their governments navigate the delicate dance of diplomacy. Such is the case with Sri Lanka versus…
The Gentle Art of Choosing Your Catastrophe: Sri Lanka vs Afghanistan, a Cricket Match for the Ages By Dave’s Diplomatically Cynical Correspondent Dubai, 2023. The air-con hums like a bored drone over the Arabian Gulf, and somewhere between the fifth champagne brunch and the seventh geopolitical crisis, the cricketing universe has decided to stage a…
Amber Alert: One Woman, 400 Metres, and the Planet’s Brief Obsession By our correspondent, still recovering from a four-year hangover called “Tokyo 2020+1” PARIS—In the grand carnival of human self-congratulation known as the Olympic Games, it takes remarkably little to make the world press pause on the apocalypse feed. This week the globe’s collective thumb…
Lauren Daigle and the Soundtrack of a Planet on Fire By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you were to drop a very precise seismograph in Lagos, Ulaanbaatar, and São Paulo all at once, you might detect a faint tremor at 72–76 BPM. That, dear reader, is the approximate tempo of “You Say,” the song that…
Michael Chiklis: The Bald Beacon of American Male Anxiety Goes Global By Diego “D.” Morales, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Some men buy red convertibles; others invade neighboring countries. Michael Chiklis simply shaved his head, glowered into a camera, and became the unofficial patron saint of every paunchy, middle-management male who secretly believes that, if pushed,…
Marlee Matlin and the Quiet Art of Shouting Louder Than Bombs By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk When Marlee Matlin flicked her fingers at the 93rd Academy Awards, half the planet thought she was giving the camera a sly middle-finger salute. In reality she was signing “thank you” in American Sign Language—proof, once again, that misinterpretation…
They say the world is flat, but anyone who has tried to buy a train ticket in India, a SIM card in Nigeria, or a decent bagel outside New York quickly learns the planet is actually shaped like a single, gargantuan Monopoly board—complete with the same four railroads, the same two utilities, and the same…
**Botswana: The Last Honest Man’s Oasis in a World of Banana Republics** The Southern African nation that gave the world the world’s largest diamond and, more importantly, the world’s largest elephant herd, has spent 2024 reminding everyone that functioning democracies still exist—somewhere between the Kalahari and the collective Western nervous breakdown. While the rest of…
Constance Wu and the Global Art of the Career Self-Immolation By the time the first emoji-laden tweet landed in 2019, Constance Wu had already become a planetary Rorschach test: East Asia saw her as the diaspora-dream ingenue who finally made it in Hollywood; North America filed her under “ungrateful TV star”; and Europe—ever the detached…
