Giants vs. Commanders: A Microcosm of Empire, Ego, and the Eternal Art of Missing the Point By Our Correspondent, filed from a press box that smells faintly of spilled lager and geopolitical anxiety The contest between the New York Giants and the Washington Commanders is, on paper, a mid-table NFC East scuffle with playoff implications…
Manchester United: The Empire That Won’t Stop Rebranding Itself By our man in the global bazaar, nursing a lukewarm lager and a colder sense of inevitability Every empire eventually becomes a parody of its own founding myths. Rome minted coins with dead emperors; Manchester United prints third kits in a shade of bruised mango and…
KANSAS, USA—From a distance of 6,000 miles, the place looks like a sociological petri dish left too long under the heat-lamp of good intentions. Europeans who can’t tell Topeka from TikTok still speak of Kansas in the hushed tones normally reserved for extinct volcanoes: it blew once—something about The Wizard of Oz, wheat, and the…
Mike Huckabee: The World’s Favorite American Uncle—Whether It Invited Him or Not By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, still jet-lagged in Terminal B Mike Huckabee has never held a passport stamped by the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, yet somehow his presence is felt from the bazaars of Istanbul to the karaoke bars of Manila. In an…
Badenoch’s Long Shadow: How a British Right-Winger Became Everyone Else’s Problem By “Dave’s Locker” International Desk At first glance, Kemi Badenoch is simply another ambitious Conservative MP who can recite Hayek in her sleep and still manage to look faintly disappointed that the wine list doesn’t run to Chilean reds. But step back—way back, somewhere…
The Gregorian calendar, that cheerful fiction we all agreed to pretend is real, insists the Formula 1 circus is in town once again—this time in Jeddah, a city whose coastal corniche looks suspiciously like Monaco after a particularly aggressive sand-blasting. Somewhere between the call to prayer and the call to Netflix, millions of humans will…
Brendan Cole: the name that once echoed through British living rooms like the clink of a teacup has now drifted into the broader, bleaker auditorium of global pop culture. For those who missed the memo between missile launches and crypto crashes, Cole is the New Zealand-born ballroom dancer who spent fifteen years gliding across the…
When the Gulfstream G650 carrying Zia Yusuf touched down in Riyadh last month, the collective sigh of relief in Zurich could be heard all the way to Singapore. Not because the Swiss missed him—quite the opposite—but because global capital markets had finally located their missing puzzle piece. The man who once navigated the labyrinthine corridors…
Countryfile: The BBC’s Rustic Sedative, Exported to a World Already Half-Asleep By the time the opening credits roll—mist over a buttercup meadow, a Labrador doing its best impression of a civic mascot—roughly 82 million people outside the United Kingdom have already seen something today that made them want to lie down in a field and…
The Global Village Has a New Village Explainer – and He’s Still Not Sure Why We’re Here By our Special Correspondent, currently self-isolating with a thermometer in one hand and a passport in the other From a cramped flat in São Paulo to a yurt on the Mongolian steppe, the name “Brian Cox” now travels…
Andy Burnham, the self-styled “King of the North,” has spent the past decade perfecting the rare political art of sounding rebellious while still cashing Whitehall’s cheques. To the outside world, the Mayor of Greater Manchester is a municipal curiosity—somewhere between a regional mascot and a low-budget Game of Thrones extra. Yet in an era when…
**Night City Goes Global: How Cyberpunk 2077 Became a Mirror for Our Dystopian Present** In the grand tradition of humanity’s capacity for missing the point entirely, CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 has transcended its humble origins as a buggy video game to become something far more remarkable: a global Rorschach test for our collective anxiety…
