The World According to Alcaraz: How One 20-Year-Old from El Palmar Turns Global Panic into Forehand Therapy Dave’s Locker | International Desk | 14 June 2024 It is a truth universally acknowledged that whenever the planet feels as though it’s sliding down a compost heap of wars, inflation, and algorithmically generated pop stars, humanity demands…
Arthur Ashe Stadium, Flushing Meadows, New York—where the world’s best tennis players come to grunt in eight languages while a global television audience pretends to understand line-call replays. From the upper deck, you can see LaGuardia’s planes descending like anxious pigeons, reminding everyone that even aircraft want a closer look at a facility named for…
Novak Djokovic is no longer just a tennis player; he is a walking diplomatic incident wearing sweat-wicking polyester. To the untrained eye he chases fuzzy yellow balls, but to immigration officers, constitutional lawyers, and Balkan conspiracy theorists he is a one-man geopolitical crisis who happens to have a two-handed backhand. In the grand carnival of…
Shabana Mahmood: The Woman Reheating Britain While the World Burns By our correspondent in a climate-controlled bunker somewhere neutral Ladies, gentlemen, and whichever gender the algorithm assigned you today, meet Shabana Mahmood—Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood, Shadow Justice Secretary, and, to the surprise of everyone who still thinks Britain’s biggest export is self-deprecation, a potential…
Norman, Oklahoma—population 128,000, longitude 35.22° N, latitude 97.44° W—doesn’t usually appear on the radar of the average Berlin stockbroker, Lagos software contractor, or Singaporean port-logistics clerk. Yet every autumn, when the Sooner Schooner rolls onto Owen Field and 80,000 crimson-clad pilgrims howl at a sky the color of dried blood, the University of Oklahoma football…
CARLOS ALCARAZ: THE 20-YEAR-OLD WHO MADE THE WORLD REMEMBER TENNIS STILL EXISTS By our International Desk—where the coffee’s bitter and the optimism is imported duty-free Madrid, Riyadh, Melbourne, New York—pick your time zone and you’ll still find Carlos Alcaraz’s backhand ricocheting off every screen like a geopolitical ping-pong ball. In an era when the planet’s…
Ljubljana, May 2024 – Slovenia, population two million and change (roughly the head-count of a midsize Shanghai apartment block), is once again being invited to punch well above its Alpine weight. The opponent this week is Sweden, whose population is larger than the entire Western Balkans combined, whose arms exports keep half the world’s warlords…
Saints vs Warriors: A Global Scorecard of Moral Glory and Collateral Damage Byline: Dave’s Locker, International Affairs Desk Across continents, the phrase “saints vs warriors” no longer belongs to stained-glass windows or dusty history books. It’s trending on Manila TikTok, trending in Kyiv basements, trending wherever the Wi-Fi still works. From the Vatican’s corridors to…
Aurora Borealis Forecast: When the Sky Starts Trolling the Northern Hemisphere By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk If you’ve spent the last decade doom-scrolling through melting ice caps, collapsing supply chains, and whatever fresh horror has popped up on your phone this morning, the universe has decided to throw us a cosmic lollipop: an unusually…
RABAT-NAMEY CORRIDOR — Somewhere between the mint tea in Casablanca and the dust storms in Niamey, two sovereign states have decided to treat the planet to a very North-African edition of “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” On paper, the spat between Morocco and Niger looks like a standard diplomatic lovers’ quarrel: the Moroccan ambassador was…
Apple TV: The Tiny Black Box That Conquered the World’s Living Rooms—Or at Least Tried To By the time you finish reading this sentence, Apple will have sold another three Apple TV units somewhere between Reykjavík and Riyadh. That’s the official corporate line, anyway; the real figure is probably closer to one unit and two…
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…
