Croatia vs. Montenegro: A Balkan Derby the World Pretends to Care About—Until It Doesn’t By Dave’s Locker International Desk The Adriatic has always been a stage for grand entrances and hasty exits. On Tuesday night, the curtain rose once more as Croatia and Montenegro squared off in a “friendly” that felt anything but—unless your definition…
Accra’s Independence Square was already vibrating at tectonic levels when the Black Stars jogged out to face Mali’s Eagles last Thursday night, and somewhere between the first vuvuzela blast and the ninety-third, the match stopped being a mere AFCON qualifier and became a referendum on everything from Chinese soft-power loans to French uranium subsidies. In…
The global religion that requires no churches, only screens, kicked off again last weekend. From Lagos barrios to Lapland igloos, billions of the faithful gathered around flickering rectangles to watch twenty-two millionaires chase a ball and, more importantly, one another’s existential dread. Football on television has quietly become the most successful empire of the 21st…
Kosovo vs Sweden: The Friendly That Forgot to Be Friendly By Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk Pristina—Somewhere between the Balkan hinterlands and the land of IKEA meatballs, a routine Nations League qualifier turned into a masterclass in geopolitical absurdity last night. Kosovo, population 1.8 million and still waiting for the last five UN members to…
Andrea Riseborough’s Oscar-Nomination-by-Whisper: A Masterclass in Global Soft Power and the Fine Art of Not Campaigning Too Loudly By *Dave’s Locker International Desk* PARIS—Somewhere between a croissant and a contemptuous shrug, the 2023 Academy Awards briefly became an international diplomatic incident because a British actress most people had to Google managed to crash the Best…
The Curious Case of Brian Daboll, or How a Bald Guy from Buffalo Conquered the Empire State’s Attention Span By the time you finish this sentence, three European finance ministers will have resigned, two crypto exchanges in Singapore will have imploded, and a small Pacific island nation will have switched allegiance from Taipei to Beijing….
The Day the Cameras Froze: A Global Rehearsal for Silence By “Jet-Lagged” Jules Montenegro, roving misanthrope-at-large ZURICH—At 09:14 CET on a Tuesday that already felt like a Monday’s hangover, Google Meet rolled over and died. Not with a bang, not even with the polite Swiss cough of “We are experiencing technical difficulties,” but with the…
Israel vs. Italy: When a Soccer Qualifier Becomes a Geopolitical Mood Ring Dave’s Locker, Tel Aviv–Rome Express, 5 June 2024 In the grand carnival of global sport, most qualifiers are polite affairs—ninety minutes of hair gel and mild cardiac stress, after which everyone flies home to argue on podcasts. Not this one. Thursday night’s Euro…
PNC Bank Gobbles FirstBank, and the World Pretends Not to Yawn By Hugo Valdez-Cortez, International Finance Correspondent on his third espresso and last nerve When PNC Financial Services announced it would inhale FirstBank Holding Co. for an undisclosed-but-whispered-to-be-jaw-dropping sum, the reaction outside North America was the polite shrug usually reserved for a distant cousin’s third…
Football on TV Tonight: 90 Minutes of Global Theatre, Sponsored by an Online Casino You’ve Never Heard Of Bylined from a hotel mini-bar in Doha, where the peanuts cost more than my first apartment. Tonight, somewhere between the war headlines and the weather report, a ball will be kicked on your screen and half the…
Paris, Thursday — The French government has fallen faster than a soufflé in a wind tunnel, and the rest of the world, nursing its own political hangover, is watching with the kind of sympathetic grimace usually reserved for a friend who just face-planted on the dance floor. Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne handed in her resignation…
Heathrow: The World’s Largest Holding Pen for the Chronically Optimistic By our man in Terminal 5, nursing lukewarm espresso and existential dread LONDON—Somewhere between the perfume cloud at Duty Free and the slow-motion riot that is UK Border Control, Heathrow Airport quietly asserts itself as the planet’s most democratic purgatory. It doesn’t matter if you…
