EA Play: The Subscription Service Quietly Colonizing the Planet, One Micro-Transaction at a Time By our man in the cloud, still buffering in Ulaanbaatar If you woke up this morning in Lagos, Lima, or Lahore and noticed that FIFA 23 now costs less than a cup of coffee—provided you rent it by the month—you’ve already…
DUMFRIES & GALLOWAY: THE QUIET CORNER WHERE EMPIRES GO TO RETIRE By Dave’s International Affairs Desk From the vantage point of a Kremlin conference room or a Silicon Valley board table, Dumfries and Galloway is the cartographic equivalent of elevator music—audible, inoffensive, instantly forgettable. Yet this southwestern slab of Scotland, population 148,000 and falling faster…
**The Beautiful Game’s Ugly Truth: When Chelsea Meets Bayern, the World Watches Its Own Reflection** In the grand theater of European football, where fortunes rise and fall faster than a cryptocurrency trader’s blood pressure, the eternal dance between Chelsea and Bayern Munich serves as a peculiar mirror to our collective neuroses. From Lagos living rooms…
Copilots for Everybody—Even for the Passengers Who Never Asked to Fly By Dave’s International Affairs Desk The earth is on fire, democracies are pantomiming participation, and half the planet still can’t get clean drinking water—but fret not, for Microsoft, Google, and an ever-expanding cloud of venture-funded hopefuls have dispatched a new class of digital wingman…
**The International Phenomenon of Graham Norton: How One Irishman Became the World’s Therapist, Bartender, and Confessional Booth** In an era where international diplomacy collapses faster than a house of cards in a hurricane and global unity seems about as likely as a vegan barbecue at a Texas rodeo, one bespectacled Irishman has achieved what the…
Black Flag Re-Issue: The World’s Favorite Pirate Simulator Returns Just as Real-World Seas Get Even More Lawless By Our Man in Whatever Port Still Accepts His Expired Press Card If you squint past the tropical glare, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag’s remastered sunrise looks uncannily like the one glinting off a Houthi drone in the…
Rand Paul’s Lonely Filibuster: One Kentucky Ophthalmologist vs. the Pentagon, the CIA, and the Entire Planet’s Attention Span By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic WASHINGTON—While the rest of the world was busy pricing eggs, dodging hypersonic missiles, or wondering whether its currency would still exist by Thursday, Senator Rand Paul…
Wednesday, 17 September 2025, 03:14 UTC – While the rest of the planet keeps sleepwalking toward its next geopolitical migraine, the stars have apparently convened an emergency Zoom call to issue marching orders to 8.1 billion unpaid interns. From the smog-blurred balconies of São Paulo to the neon-hazed rooftops of Seoul, the same cosmic fortune-cookie…
Randolph County, USA: Where Globalization Goes to Die of Sheer Boredom By Our Man in the Provinces, still jet-lagged from passport stamps that read like a suicide note Randolph County—pick your state, they’re franchising the name like a depressed Starbucks—sits at the precise longitude where the 21st-century supply chain forgets to deliver meaning. Fly in…
Senator Bill Cassidy and the Theater of American Healthcare By C. L. Marlowe, International Affairs Desk, Dave’s Locker PARIS—From a café terrace overlooking the Seine, where the house red is cheaper than a Band-Aid in Cleveland, Senator William “Bill” Cassidy looks less like a healer and more like an understudy who keeps forgetting his lines….
In the grand carnival of global cricket—where every dropped catch reverberates from Mumbai bars to Melbourne betting syndicates—few names carry the faintly ecclesiastical ring of Andy Pycroft. To the uninitiated, he sounds like a minor character from an Evelyn Waugh novel who accidentally wandered onto the pitch clutching a gin rickey instead of a bat….
The Love Bug Nobody Swiped Right On A dispatch on Triatoma infestans, Chagas disease, and the world’s most underwhelming pandemic By the time you finish this sentence, roughly twelve people will have been kissed—on the mouth—by an insect that looks like Darth Vader’s moody nephew. The perpetrator is the “kissing bug,” Triatominae for the pedants,…
