Curiosity and the Global Vanity Project By Our Man in the Void, Geneva Bureau If you stand on the roof of the Palais des Nations at 3 a.m.—a vantage point once reserved for spies and nicotine-addicted translators—you can almost imagine the Martian wind that has been buffeting NASA’s Curiosity rover for the past decade. Almost,…
Victoria Beckham: Globalization’s Loudest Whisper in a Pair of £900 Flats By Our Correspondent in Exile, Somewhere Over the Duty-Free Abyss It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a Spice-Girl past and a footballer husband must be in want of a fashion empire. Enter Victoria Beckham, the woman who…
Ipswich Score: How a Second-Tier English Result Quietly Terrifies the Entire Global Order By the time the final whistle blew at Portman Road last night, most of the planet was busy doom-scrolling about the next war, the next recession, or the next celebrity divorce. Yet in a modest Suffolk town—best known internationally for a serial…
Dewald Brevis: The 21-Year-Old Human Highlight Reel Who Makes Cricket’s Old Guard Wonder Why They Bothered Showing Up By the time most people turn twenty-one, their greatest accomplishment is successfully assembling IKEA furniture without a leftover screw. Dewald Brevis, meanwhile, has already turned international bowlers into anxious spreadsheets and forced broadcasters to pre-book superlatives like…
The Geopolitics of a Googly: How Adil Rashid’s Wrist Flick Echoes from Birmingham to Beijing by Our Man in the Press Box, nursing a lukewarm Nescafé and existential dread In a world where trade wars are announced via tweet and summits collapse over dessert choices, it is oddly comforting that a 35-year-old leg-spinner from Bradford…
PARIS — The name Ercan Osmani has started popping up on encrypted Telegram channels, in the margins of EU parliament briefings, and, most improbably, on the laminated “Person of Interest” cards carried by bored bodyguards at Davos. Who, you ask, is this man now orbiting the same stratosphere as sanctioned oligarchs and TikTok prophets? Allow…
Monty Don: The Last Gardener Standing Between Us and Planetary Mulch An International Dispatch from the Frontlines of Foliage Dateline: Somewhere over the Atlantic, where cabin pressure and geopolitical pressure feel eerily similar. If you’ve never heard of Monty Don, congratulations—you’ve successfully dodged British state television’s most sedative export since the Shipping Forecast. Yet from…
Weatherfield’s Latest Export: How Becky Swain’s Coronation Street Cameo Quietly Conquered the World By Ludo Voss, Senior Cynic-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Manchester—home of drizzle, industrial decline, and an implausibly resilient fictional postcode—has done it again. Becky Swain, the former head of learning at the Royal Shakespeare Company turned “script consultant” for Coronation Street, slipped into Wednesday…
WrestleMania 43: The Last Empire’s Circus Comes to Riyadh JEDDAH—If the Roman Empire had survived into the age of fiber-optic thongs and pre-show drone ballets, it would have looked exactly like WrestleMania 43. On a makeshift desert moonscape ten miles outside Riyadh, 82,000 pilgrims—half of them jet-lagged Americans clutching prescription heartburn medication, the rest a…
Benfica-Santa Clara: A Small Portuguese Match That Explains the Entire Planet’s Descent Into Spectacle by “Lisbon’s Least Optimistic Correspondent” On the surface, last night’s Liga Portugal fixture between Benfica and Santa Clara was merely 22 men, one ball, and 90 minutes of choreographed cardio. Yet on a planet where every toddler’s tantrum is live-streamed to…
Frankfurt FC and the Global Art of Pretending to Care About Football By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, still clutching a boarding pass that smells of duty-free gin and existential dread Frankfurt am Main, 3:47 a.m. local time—the hour when even the airport’s pretzel ovens go quiet and the currency-exchange kiosks stare blankly at…
The Rise and Mildly Inconvenient Fall of Chuba Akpom, or How a Striker’s Goal Glut Became Collateral Damage in Football’s Endless Transfer Carousel By Our Man in the Departure Lounge ISTANBUL—Somewhere between the kebab smoke and the Bosphorus haze, Chuba Akpom has discovered that fame, like Turkish tea, cools quickly once the cup is empty….
