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…
The Curious Case of Malik Nabers: How a 20-Year-Old from Louisiana Became the Canary in the NFL’s Global Coal Mine By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere over the Atlantic If you had told a Parisian sommelier, a Singaporean crypto-evangelist, and a Lagos ride-hailing driver to place bets on the next American export likely…
Lesotho vs. South Africa: A David-and-Goliath Match Nobody Asked For By Our Man in Maseru Who’s Learned to Never Order a Steak in Either Country If you squint at the map long enough, Lesotho looks like South Africa’s kidney stone—small, painful, and lodged precisely where Pretoria can’t ignore it. This week, however, the two countries…
Benin vs Zimbabwe: A Tale of Two Economies, One Currency Crisis, and the Global Circus That Watches By the time the final whistle blows in Cotonou this weekend, the real score won’t be on the pitch—it’ll be in the IMF’s inbox. Benin versus Zimbabwe isn’t just an Africa Cup of Nations qualifier; it’s a geopolitical…
Peter Kyle and the Great British Firewall: How One Minister Accidentally Became the World’s Most Reluctant Cyber-Czar By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the second flat white and the third existential crisis of a Wednesday, Peter Kyle—the UK’s Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology—found himself promoted from obscure MP for Hove to…
Steve Reed and the Curious Resilience of the Provincial Everyman on the World Stage By Our Cynical Correspondent, Somewhere Between Gatwick and Gatling If you mention “Steve Reed” in a bar in Brooklyn, a bodega in Bogotá, or a boardroom in Beijing, the reaction is a blank stare followed by polite nodding—the universal sign for…
