The Ballad of Darius Slay, or How a Cornerback Became the Pentagon’s Favorite Metaphor By Our Paris Correspondent, nursing a third espresso and the suspicion that the world peaked in 1997. It begins, as so many modern fables do, on Twitter. Darius Slay—Philadelphia Eagles cornerback, human highlight reel, and possessor of a surname that sounds…
BREAKING: British Tennis Prodigy Retires to Pursue Full-Time Career in Being Photographed By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between SW19 and Abu Dhabi Laura Robson, the woman who once made Wimbledon Centre Court sound like a Beatles reunion, has officially hung up her racket at the age of 28—an age at which most players in Eastern Europe…
Istanbul – Somewhere between the kebab smoke and the sangria haze, Turkey and Spain have decided to flirt again. The rendezvous is billed as a “strategic partnership summit,” which in diplomatic French means “let’s see how much we can irritate everyone else while pretending we’re just talking trade.” The rest of the world, of course,…
Dolphins 34, Jets 13—an American gridiron footnote that, in saner times, would be of interest only to Floridian barflies and the three people in London who pretend to “get” the NFL. Yet the moment the final whistle shrilled across Hard Rock Stadium, the scoreboard’s neon digits were already ricocheting through fiber-optic cables, inflicting themselves on…
The Glorious, Illegal Afterlife of Football: A Totalsportek Travelogue By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between a Moldovan data center and a server rack in Curaçao—jurisdiction shopping at its most romantic—the website Totalsportek continues to thrive like a cockroach after nuclear winter. It is, depending on which intellectual-property lawyer you ask, either the last true…
Skattebo Syndrome: How a Tiny Swedish Tax Shelter Became a Global Morality Play By “Lars-with-the-Burnout,” roving correspondent, Dave’s Locker Stockholm—If you squint hard enough at the map, Skattebo is barely a freckle on the Baltic’s pale cheek: 42 red houses, one ICA supermarket that doubles as post office, and a bus stop optimistically labeled “Central.”…
NFL SCORES, OR HOW THE WORLD LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE A 6–3 THRILLER Dave’s Locker – Global Desk If you’re reading this from a café in Lagos, a metro tunnel in Seoul, or a bomb shelter in Kharkiv, congratulations: you’ve already outlasted several American quarterbacks. Last weekend’s NFL scores—Chiefs 27, Ravens 24; Cowboys…
Kenneth Gainwell, the Memphis-born running back whose surname sounds like a self-help seminar for hedge-fund managers, is currently the most geopolitically intriguing 5-foot-9, 200-pound American in cleats. While the planet debates tariffs, tundra melt, and whether this year’s Eurovision will be decided by tactical drone strikes, Gainwell quietly embodies the late-capitalist paradox: a man whose…
Tyreek Hill’s 170 km/h Florida Joyride: Why the Whole Planet Should Buckle Up By the time the Miami-Dade Police Department’s helicopter finally caught up with Tyreek Hill on Sunday morning, the Dolphins wide receiver had already treated the MacArthur Causeway like his personal Autobahn, clocked speeds a Gulfstream jet would consider respectable, and reminded the…
The Yankees play a meaningless mid-week tilt against whichever AL Central also-ran is currently in town. Meanwhile, the world keeps burning—literally in some latitudes—but 46,000 ticket-holders still shuffle through the turnstiles because, well, what else is there to do while waiting for the apocalypse? From the upper deck of Yankee Stadium you can almost see…
From the Frozen Tundra to the Thawing World: The Green Bay Packers as Accidental Geopolitical Metaphor By Our Correspondent Somewhere North of Reason If you mention the Green Bay Packers to a pub full of Berliners, the reaction will be roughly the same as if you’d asked them to recite the Wisconsin state fish: polite…
The English Channel, that soggy trench of history where Napoleon’s fleet once bottled up and where the White Cliffs of Dover have served as the world’s most over-celebrated retaining wall, has lately become the planet’s most watched aquatic catwalk. Every dawn, satellite lenses, coast-guard drones, and tabloid long-lenses zoom in on a flotilla of inflatable…
