When the Lions Meet the Leopards: A Dispatch from the Tropic of Irony By Dave’s Locker International Desk Harare to Windhoek is only a two-hour hop on Air Zimbabwe—assuming the airline has remembered to fuel the plane that morning—yet the distance between the two countries keeps widening like a bad marriage. Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket…
Maxine Peake and the Globalist Hamlet: How a Lancashire Actress Became a One-Woman IMF of Ideas By The World-Weary Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic There are two kinds of fame in 2024: the kind that ends up on a commemorative plate in an Istanbul bazaar and the kind that leaks into UN side-events on cultural…
Ella Toone and the Geopolitics of a Top-Bin Finish Dave’s Locker, global bureau of mildly disillusioned correspondents Manchester, England – The planet has spent the last decade arguing about tariffs, troll farms, and whether democracy was just a limited-run series, yet this week it briefly pivoted to a small patch of grass where a 24-year-old…
The Champagne Is Still Cold, but Rolls-Royce Shares Are Starting to Sweat By Dave’s Senior Continental Misery Correspondent LONDON—Across trading floors from Mayfair to Mumbai, the mere mention of “Rolls-Royce” usually evokes two mental images: hand-polished walnut dashboards and the faint whirr of taxpayer money being sucked into jet engines. Yet on Wednesday, the share…
Tim Booth and the Accidental Soft Power of a Mancunian Shaman By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from Glastonbury Mud, Somewhere Over the Atlantic It is a truth universally acknowledged that when the world tilts toward apocalypse, people reach for either canned goods or anthems. In 2024, while governments squabble over submarine cables and semiconductor embargoes,…
Bradley Cooper: The Last American Export That Still Works GENEVA—While the U.S. dollar wobbles like a drunk tourist on the Pont des Arts and Silicon Valley’s greatest minds debate whether reality is merely a subscription tier, one product from the former superpower continues to clear customs without a cavity search: Bradley Cooper. Yes, the man…
Radio X: The Little Frequency That Outran the World by Our Man in the Ionosphere, filing from everywhere at once Somewhere above the 49th parallel, a transmitter the size of a garden shed is humming at 101.9 FM. Locals call it Radio X; geographers might call it 45.5017° N, 73.5673° W; the CIA probably calls…
Chris Wilder, Sheffield United, and the Global Art of Not Quite Dying By our correspondent in the away end, nursing a £7 pie and an existential crisis The official line is that Sheffield United “parted company” with Chris Wilder on 25 March, which is boardroom code for “we fired him by WhatsApp while the rest…
House Spiders: The Eight-Legged Diplomats Quietly Outmaneuvering Humanity in Every Hemisphere By the time you finish this sentence, approximately 3,800 house spiders will have successfully negotiated new rent-free leases in human dwellings from Lagos to Ljubljana. While we obsess over trade wars, carbon credits, and whose algorithmic overlord has the shiniest new update, the true…
Billy Idol: The Last British Export That Survived Globalization, Brexit, and TikTok By the time most pop careers have been recycled into supermarket soundtracks and ironic T-shirt slogans, Billy Idol – perpetual sneer, leather that looks older than several EU member states, and a sneeze-and-you-miss-it baritone – is still prowling stages from Santiago to Singapore….
The 2025 Ryder Cup will tee off next September on Long Island’s Bethpage Black, that charming municipal brute where the rough is thicker than a Moscow winter and the locals greet visitors with a warmth normally reserved for parking tickets. For one week the planet will pretend golf is life-or-death, which is adorable considering several…
Storm Amy: A Mild Tempest in the Global Teacup By Our Correspondent Who Has Covered Actual Hurricanes and Still Pays Rent in Euros COPENHAGEN—Somewhere between the Baltic’s sullen drizzle and the North Sea’s theatrical sighs, Storm Amy made landfall last night. The Danish Meteorological Institute dutifully hoisted a yellow warning, which in Scandinavian color-coding roughly…
