Jaylon Johnson and the Great American Sportswashing Machine By Dave’s Global Affairs Desk, somewhere between the 50-yard line and the International Date Line In the grand, greasy carnival of American football—where concussions are rebranded as “learning opportunities” and 30-second beer commercials cost more than most nations’ GDPs—Jaylon Johnson has quietly become a geopolitical curiosity. The…
The British have always had a gift for understatement, but even by their own standards, “We may raise the pension age a tad” ranks alongside “The Titanic has taken on a bit of water.” The latest Whitehall wheeze is to nudge the UK state pension age from 66 to 68 sometime in the mid-2030s, a…
Holly Valance and the Great Geopolitical Karaoke: How a Neighbours Alumna Accidentally Mirrors a Fracturing World SYDNEY–LONDON–BELGRADE, 3:14 a.m. somewhere over the Black Sea—If you’ve ever wondered how a former Ramsay Street resident can become a living Rorschach test for global anxiety, look no further than Holly Valance. To Australians she’s the girl who once…
Jamie Laing and the End of Empire: How a Candyman’s Heir Became the Perfect Metaphor for Britain’s Soft-Power Sunset By our correspondent in the departures lounge of Terminal 5 Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, between the soggy remains of a BA breakfast tray and the gravitational pull of Netflix’s algorithm, Jamie Laing is probably filming a…
Adam Schefter and the Global Gladiator Economy By Dave’s Locker International Desk On any given Tuesday, while most of the planet is busy filing taxes or dodging drones, 8.7 million people—an audience roughly the size of Switzerland—stop everything to watch a 57-year-old man in a tailored suit read text messages aloud. That man is Adam…
Verona FC: A Provincial Opera with a Global Libretto by Dave’s Locker, International Desk If you stand at the intersection of Via Leoncino and the 21st-century attention economy, you’ll find Hellas Verona FC—an Italian football club whose greatest export is not goals but exquisite, slow-motion tragedy. The world now watches via dodgy streams, half-cut on…
Mark Labbett: The Global Colossus of Trivia Who Makes the World Feel Inadequate By the time the satellite feed crackles into life in a windowless studio in Cardiff, a dozen time zones are already wincing. From Lagos to Lima, insomniacs and commuters alike are watching a 6’7″ British man in an off-the-rack suit annihilate another…
The Last Curtsey: How the Duchess of Kent’s Funeral Became the World’s Most Polite Power Struggle By our jaded correspondent in London, still recovering from the complimentary sherry The coffin rolled out of St George’s Chapel on Tuesday with the same understated pomp that Britain perfected during the Blitz—just enough gilt to remind everyone who…
Chase Edmonds and the Global Cargo Cult of the NFL’s Disposable Heroes By Our Correspondent in a Time Zone You’ve Probably Never Heard Of On the surface, Chase Edmonds is merely a 28-year-old running back who recently packed his playbook and signed a one-year deal with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers—hardly the stuff of midnight UN…
Hugh Jackman: The Last Global Movie Star Standing Between Us and Catastrophic Boredom By Our Cynical Correspondent, filing from three time zones and still jet-lagged Somewhere over the Pacific, wedged between a snoring hedge-fund manager and a toddler who speaks four languages better than I do, it occurred to me that Hugh Jackman might be…
Umtiti: A Knee, a Contract, and the Slow-Motion Car Crash We All Watched Together By Dave’s International Desk Somewhere between the soy-latte utopia of Barcelona’s Eixample and the fluorescent purgatory of a Qatari physio room, Samuel Umtiti’s left knee became a global Rorschach test. To culés it was betrayal in ligament form; to accountants in…
RUMBLE: THE WORLD’S NEWEST GLADIATOR RING, SPONSORED BY YOUR AUNT’S FACEBOOK FEED Dave’s Locker – International Desk PARIS—If you squint at the Place de la République on a Friday night, you can watch two realities collide with the grace of a shopping cart down a flight of stairs. On one side, a gilet jaune live-streams…
