Tour de 4: How a Four-Letter Acronym Rode a Bicycle Around the World and Conquered Absolutely Nothing By Dave’s Locker’s Globetrotting Correspondent, still shaking sand out of his passport PARIS—The Tour de France is old news. This summer, the world’s attention has pivoted to the “Tour de 4,” a rolling circus of four cyclists, four…
**Highway to Hell: The Global Brotherhood of Truck Accident Lawyers** From the clogged arteries of Mumbai’s Western Express Highway to the fog-choked autobahns of Bavaria, a peculiar species of legal eagle has evolved to feast on humanity’s most spectacular vehicular disasters. The truck accident lawyer—part ambulance chaser, part commercial vehicle sommelier—has become the unofficial tour…
Luanda, Thursday – Somewhere between the oil rigs and the rusting Soviet apartment blocks, Angola has quietly become the punch-line the world pretends it isn’t in on. Once the Cold War’s favorite proxy slug-fest, the country now exports two commodities in bulk: crude petroleum and sardonic lessons in how to survive the twenty-first century with…
A Name That Travels: How “Laken Snelling” Became the World’s Favorite Meme-Cum-MacGuffin By Dave’s Foreign Desk, still jet-lagged in three time zones PARIS—Somewhere between the espresso fumes at Café de Flore and the perpetual drizzle of a British B-road, the words “Laken Snelling” started showing up on every smartphone screen like an unsolicited life-coaching text….
Paris, 8 March – If the planet’s attention span weren’t already shredded into TikTok confetti, you might have noticed that two very large men are about to punch each other into another tax bracket. Saturday night at the Accor Arena, Tom Aspinall and Ciryl Gane will contest the UFC’s “interim” heavyweight title—a belt so interim…
UHM Football: A Tiny Archipelago in the Global Coliseum By Our Correspondent, currently between time zones somewhere over the Pacific If you squint hard enough from the departure lounge of Incheon, you can almost see Honolulu’s Aloha Stadium sinking slowly into the Pacific like a discarded kettle grill. That, dear reader, is the current stage…
The Big Half 2025: How the World Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a 13.1-Mile Existential Crisis LONDON—At precisely 9:03 a.m. GMT on 9 March, 29,876 bipedal mammals in neonate windbreakers set off from Tower Bridge, officially launching the planet’s first post-Brexit, post-truth, post-pandemic half-marathon: The Big Half 2025. To the casual observer it looked…
The Bear Is Global Now: How Ayo Edebiri Became the Accidental Diplomat of Kitchen Rage By Dave’s International Correspondent, still picking confit out of his passport PARIS—In the grand tradition of soft-power exports, the United States has previously given the world jazz, jeans, and that nagging suspicion that democracy ships with optional upgrades. Now, courtesy…
PARIS—On a rain-slick afternoon outside the Olympia, the queue stretches from the brasserie awnings all the way to the Seine, as if the river itself decided to form an orderly line for once. Inside, a 51-year-old Mancunian in a khaki parka is sound-checking the same four chords the planet has been hearing since 1994, and…
Linkin Park and the Global Soundtrack of Managed Despair By Diego “Dust-to-Digital” Morales, Senior Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Pacific They say nostalgia is just grief with better marketing. If that’s true, Linkin Park is the platinum-certified grief counselor to a planet that never quite figured out adulthood. When the band’s surviving members announced a new…
Paris, 03:47 local time – The Daily Telegraph, that stately British broadsheet once nicknamed “The Torygraph” by people who thought they were being original, has been having what the tabloids would call “a moment.” Not the sort of moment that involves a prime minister’s aide, a suitcase of rosé, and a Downing Street swing set—more…
Laila Cunningham Doesn’t Exist (And That’s the Whole Point) By the time the Reuters alert pinged in Lagos, the Financial Times had already drafted her obituary, and a Berlin think-tank had scheduled a webinar on “Cunninghamism and the Collapse of Western Soft Power.” The only snag: no one has ever been able to prove that…
