Lyse Doucet and the Fine Art of Keeping a Straight Face While the World Burns By Dave’s Locker, International Desk of Controlled Despair In the global newsroom—an increasingly fluorescent purgatory where Wi-Fi passwords expire faster than cease-fires—Lyse Doucet is the rare correspondent who can deliver a death toll with the poise of a sommelier announcing…
Amy Hunt, the 22-year-old British sprinter who last month clocked 22.42 seconds over 200 m in California, is being hailed from São Paulo to Seoul as the latest proof that the human race can still outrun its own mediocrity—at least for 22 seconds, give or take a tailwind. Track statisticians, a subspecies that treats every…
Starmer Ascends: Britain Hands the Keys to a Human Lawyer, Earth Scarcely Notices By Our Correspondent, still recovering from the last five UK Prime Ministers in as many fiscal quarters LONDON—In the early hours of 5 July, Sir Keir Starmer walked into Downing Street looking like a man who had remembered to bring the correct…
Chile: The Skinny Country That Keeps Punching Above Its Weight By Our Correspondent Who Still Can’t Pronounce “Aysén” Correctly SANTIAGO—Look at a map and you’ll see a suicidal ribbon of land clinging to South America’s Pacific edge, 4,300 kilometers long and, in places, barely 90 kilometers wide—geography’s answer to a high-wire act without a safety…
Uber One: The Subscription That Knows You’re Too Tired to Walk Three Blocks By Our Correspondent in a City Where Rain Still Costs Extra PARIS—In the grand tradition of selling water to fish, Uber has unveiled Uber One: a single subscription that bundles rides, food, groceries, and presumably the last crumbs of your dignity into…
Ed Sheeran’s Mathematics Tour, now staggering into its third calendar year like a drunk tourist who missed the last ferry, has quietly become the planet’s most efficient soft-power export since the British Empire swapped gunboats for guitar chords. From Jakarta’s traffic-choked Gelora Bung Karno to Warsaw’s defiantly rebuilt National Stadium, the red-haired bard from Suffolk…
Michael Duff: The Accidental Oracle of a World That Forgot How to Listen By Dave’s Locker Global Correspondent Somewhere between the last Brexit extension and the first AI-generated resignation letter, Michael Duff became the most cited man nobody actually reads. A soft-spoken British physicist turned policy whisperer, Duff has spent four decades translating eleven-dimensional supergravity…
Storm in a Teacup, with Global Froth by Our Man in the Departure Lounge The British Isles are once again under official “don’t panic, but do panic” orders as the Met Office issues a fresh flurry of colour-coded weather warnings—amber for wind, yellow for rain, and, in a festive twist, a sort of mauve for…
Georgia Hunter Bell: One Camouflaged Alabaman Who Accidentally Became a Case Study in Global Panic Dateline: Somewhere between a deer stand and a very confused United Nations Every so often the world discovers it has been holding its breath over the wrong person. Enter Georgia Hunter Bell—no, not a new brand of artisanal moonshine, but…
Miami Weather: The Planet’s Steam Room Where the Rich Come to Pretend It’s Still 1999 by Our Special Correspondent, currently hiding in an over-air-conditioned hotel lobby that smells faintly of piña colada and existential dread. There are cities where the weather is a footnote, and then there is Miami, where the weather writes editorials in…
Barbora Krejčíková and the Quiet Collapse of Tennis’ Old World Order by Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Prague – Somewhere between the second espresso and the third existential crisis of the week, Barbora Krejčíková won the French Open again. This time the victory felt less like a coronation and more like an accidental coup: a 28-year-old…
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) may sound parochial—an acronym so British it practically queues for itself—but the fortnightly clank of its payments into 20 million UK accounts is the faint heartbeat of a much larger global organism: the modern welfare state on life support. From Lagos to Lisbon, Seoul to São Paulo, treasuries…
