The Pyrenees’ Best-Kept Punchline: Andorra as Metaphor, Microstate, and Tax-Haven Theme Park By Dave’s Locker International Desk Most maps treat Andorra like an ink blot on the French-Spanish border—an accidental Rorschach test the world collectively ignores. Yet look closer and this 468-square-kilometer smudge is a perfect satire of the 21st-century order: a country with no…
Björn Borg, the Ice-God Who Taught the World How to Melt Gracefully By Dave’s Locker International Desk Paris, 1981. An entire continent was still arguing over whether disco was dead, the Soviet Union was cheerfully invading Afghanistan for sport, and shoulder pads were considered a legitimate fashion choice. Into this maelstrom of questionable taste strode…
Rolex: The Swiss Crown That Rules Every Boardroom, Battlefield, and Bail Hearing Geneva—At 7:00 a.m. on a fog-choked tarmac in Dubai, a Gulfstream G650 disgorges a man wearing flip-flops and a Daytona that costs more than the median annual wage in 153 countries. By 9:00 a.m. the same watch is being slipped off a wrist…
From Riyadh to Reno, the name Tommy Fury is currently being spoken in the same fevered breath normally reserved for oil prices, TikTok bans, and whichever Kardashian has most recently filed for divorce. To the uninitiated, he’s a 24-year-old British light-heavyweight who has never fought a top-ten contender. To the rest of us—sipping lukewarm coffee…
New York—The United States Tennis Association announced Tuesday that the 2025 US Open will distribute a record US$75 million in prize money—roughly the GDP of Vanuatu if Vanuatu were populated entirely by Instagram fitness coaches. The headline figure is up 11 % from last year, prompting the usual global gasp: Americans call it “progress,” Europeans…
Global Footnotes: How Jake Moody’s Right Foot Briefly Became a Geopolitical Talking Point by Our Man in the Cheap Seats For most of the planet, Jake Moody remains the sort of name that slides off the tongue like lukewarm tap water—forgettable, slightly metallic, gone before the swallow. Yet on 12 February 2024, somewhere between the…
The Ministry of Defense calls it “Reggie White,” which is either a nod to the late NFL evangelist or proof that someone in Procurement has a bleak sense of humor. Either way, the world now has a 27-ton bundle of American steel, rubber, and wounded optimism parked in a Polish forest, its paint scheme so…
The Empire’s Tennis Ball: How US Open Champions Quietly Rule the World By a correspondent who once got food poisoning at Arthur Ashe and still blames capitalism NEW YORK—Every September the United States dutifully stages its fortnightly imperial coronation disguised as a sports tournament. The US Open crowns a new sovereign of string and neon,…
Green Bay’s Roster Shuffle: A Cheesehead Saga Reverberating from Lagos to Lhasa By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large (currently hiding in a Reykjavik bar where the Wi-Fi is stronger than most governments) If you think the annual reshuffling of the Green Bay Packers roster is just a provincial footnote in the American sports coliseum, congratulations—you have successfully…
From the Beltway to the Beijing Belt-and-Road—Trent Williams as Global Rorschach Test —————————————————————– PARIS — Somewhere between the 50-yard line and the International Date Line, Trent Williams ceased being merely the NFL’s most overqualified bodyguard and became a geopolitical inkblot: what you see in the San Francisco left tackle says more about your hemisphere than…
The Curious Case of Ben Johnson: How a Sprinter Still Outruns the World’s Moral High Ground By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk There are moments in global history that feel like cosmic punch-lines, and the fall of Ben Johnson is one of the few that keeps giving—like a re-gifted fruitcake laced with stanozolol. Thirty-six years…
Brandon Aiyuk and the Geopolitics of a Jersey Tantrum By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and a bistro that still pretends cigarettes are a food group, the name Brandon Aiyuk is being whispered like a dirty secret. To the French, who treat labor strikes as a…
