Rumanía—Canadá: A Transatlantic Pas de Deux in the Age of Cheap Flights and Expensive Consequences By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk It began, as most modern tragedies do, with an online sale. Wizz Air offered €19 tickets from Bucharest to Toronto, provided you were willing to change planes in Reykjavík at 3 a.m. and sell a…
UFC Paris: When the Octagon Lands in the City of Light, the World Holds Its Breath (and Wallet) Paris—city of existential dread, overpriced espresso, and, for one humid Saturday in September, the unmistakable thud of shin on ribcage. UFC’s latest European incursion arrived like a diplomatic crisis with better lighting: two dozen elite athletes flown…
Oriol Romeu: The Midfielder Who Became a Geopolitical Punch-Line Without Trying Barcelona—The last time the Camp Nou crowd cheered Oriol Romeu for anything, he was 16 and the world economy still believed in itself. Fast-forward fifteen years and the same man—now bulked up, balded slightly, and carrying the weary expression of someone who’s read the…
The Night Shift of New Zealand Tennis: Erin Routliffe and the Quiet Collapse of National Myths By an over-caffeinated correspondent who once watched a penguin attempt doubles in Antarctica WELLINGTON—While the rest of the planet argues about which billionaire will colonise Mars first, Erin Routliffe has been sneaking around the back alleys of women’s doubles,…
If you want to feel the pulse of a city while simultaneously having your own pulse checked by a stranger’s elbow, there is no finer cardiogram than the London Underground. From Bank to Barking, the Tube is not merely a transport system; it is a rolling petri dish where the world’s grand themes—capitalism, climate anxiety,…
ON A WEDNESDAY NIGHT IN SOUTH YORKSHIRE, the planet’s attention briefly pivoted from proxy wars and supply-chain meltdowns to a more ancient conflict: Sheffield United versus Sunderland, two former industrial citadels now reduced to arguing over second-tier bragging rights like divorced aristocrats squabbling over the good china. From a safe remove—say, a rooftop bar in…
Washington, D.C. – Another intern has gone missing from the marble corridors of power, and the global village is once again pretending to be shocked. The body of 22-year-old Maya Patel, a British-Indian dual national who had been fetching coffee for a Senate subcommittee on something-or-other, was found early Tuesday in Rock Creek Park, that…
Nike’s New Slogan: A Single Syllable for Seven Billion Egos By the time the memo leaked from Nike’s glass-and-privacy-glass campus in Beaverton, half of Jakarta had already screen-grabbed it. “Win.” That’s it—four letters, no exclamation mark, no swoosh-shaped heart emoji. Just the imperative form of the verb that keeps stock markets, border skirmishes, and your…
Emma Reynolds is not famous, yet her name has begun to surface in the kind of hushed, late-night Slack channels where risk officers and cyber-insurance brokers trade gallows humor about the end of civilization. To the wider world she remains a footnote, but footnotes, as any historian will tell you, are where the devil hides…
Jason Manford: The Comedian Who Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Weathervane When the first missiles landed in Kyiv last February, global Twitter feeds briefly synchronized around a single, improbable question: “What would Jason Manford do?” The query, posted by a bored Ukrainian conscript from a Lviv bomb shelter, trended in 42 countries within hours—not because Manford…
Kecoughtan High School: Where American Adolescence Meets the Apocalypse—A Dispatch from the Frontlines of Global Decline By Dave’s International Affairs Desk Hampton, Virginia—If you want to see the future of the planet laid out like a poorly supervised group project, buy a one-way ticket to Kecoughtan High School. From the outside it’s a red-brick rectangle…
It’s 3 a.m. in a Nairobi newsroom, and the overnight editor is scanning a live feed from Washington, watching Jeanine Pirro bark at a camera about “globalist conspiracies” with the volume of a small jet engine. Halfway across the planet, a Brussels policy wonk pours another espresso, wondering how a former small-town district attorney turned…
