John Bishop: A Name So Ordinary It Might Just Save the World By Our World-Weary Correspondent, Somewhere Between Duty-Free and Despair There are, according to the latest census of human paranoia, approximately 43,000 John Bishops alive at this moment. If you stacked them all horizontally they would reach from Liverpool to Lisbon—assuming none of them…
Faroe Islands vs Croatia: When the Atlantic Mists Meet Balkan Fire—A Study in Global Asymmetry The North Atlantic, home to more sheep than humans and weather patterns that make London look positively Mediterranean, has coughed up its perennial David: the Faroe Islands. Meanwhile, somewhere along the Dalmatian coast, Croatia has been polishing its Goliath credentials—World…
In the pantheon of contemporary tragedies that flicker across our screens before being swallowed by the algorithmic void, the Megan Boswell case stands as a particularly grim postcard from Appalachia—one that somehow manages to be both uniquely American and universally human in its grotesque particulars. While the name might not ring bells in Dubai or…
BMW’s iX3 Neue Klasse: A Bavarian Electromobile in a World Still on Fire By Dave’s Locker International Desk Munich, Shanghai, Timbuktu—wherever you are, the planet is overheating and your neighbor just bought another SUV. Into this planetary sitcom BMW has lobbed its latest punchline: the iX3 Neue Klasse, a battery-powered crossover whose very name is…
Alcaraz vs Djokovic: The Gladiator Match in Which the Colosseum Is Everywhere By Dave’s Locker Global Sports Bureau (with a flask in the press box) PARIS – On a late-spring afternoon when the Seine smelled only faintly of industrial despair and the Eiffel Tower’s lights blinked like a malfunctioning slot machine, two men in white…
Kodai Senga and the Global Art of Vanishing Stuff When Kodai Senga uncorks his ghost-forkball somewhere over the Atlantic this summer, the pitch will do more than dive like a drunk albatross—it will carry with it the weight of two countries’ mid-life crises, the hopes of a billion-dollar television deal, and the faint smell of…
From the Shard to São Paulo, a quiet corporate ghost has been flitting through medicine cabinets and quarterly earnings calls: Kenvue, the Johnson & Johnson spin-off that now owns everything from Tylenol to the sticky little BAND-AID you applied last week while pretending your kitchen knife skills were better than they are. In 2023, the…
Paris, May – Somewhere between the baguette crumbs and the drone debris, the Franco-Ukrainian pas de deux has entered its third year, and the orchestra is still tuning the same dissonant chord. On the surface, Emmanuel Macron plays the dashing understudy to Volodymyr Zelensky’s blood-spattered lead, pledging Mirage jets, long-range missiles, and—because this is France—an…
Italy vs Estonia: A Mediterranean Opera Meets a Baltic Ballad—And the World Watches the Encore By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk ROME—Picture the scene: on one side, a boot-shaped colossus that once taught the planet how to conjugate love, war, and pasta. On the other, a country whose population could fit inside a single Roman…
Chelsea vs Manchester City: A Global Gladiator Match Sponsored by Petro-Dollars and Regret By Our Man in the Upper Tier with a Flask of Cheap Bourbon LONDON—In the beginning there was the ball, the grass, and the faint smell of geopolitical anxiety. Somewhere between the Thames and the Irwell, two English clubs owned by an…
Kyiv, 3:00 a.m. local—while most of Europe was snoring beneath its weighted blanket of post-industrial angst, 60-odd Ukrainians in yellow and 11 world-weary Frenchmen in navy were busy reminding the planet that geopolitics can still be settled by twenty-two pairs of lungs and one very opinionated ball. The scoreboard said Ukraine 2–1 France (B), but…
COPENHAGEN—Somewhere between hygge and haggis, the North Sea has coughed up its latest episode of geopolitical improv: Denmark versus Scotland, a friendly so punctual it could be mistaken for a Swiss train colliding with a Highland stag. The fixture, scheduled for a brisk Parken Stadium evening, arrives just in time for the planet to remember…
