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…
When the Name “Chris Mason” Echoes Across Continents: A Dispatch from the Department of Overlapping Identities By Dave’s Locker Foreign Bureau, somewhere between Brussels and existential dread The world has many Chris Masons, and—like certain pandemics—they refuse to stay neatly quarantined in one country. There’s the BBC political editor who politely torments British cabinet ministers;…
Katarzyna Stoparczyk and the Quiet Collapse of Borders By our correspondent in the departure-lounge bar, Gate B12, somewhere east of reason If you have never heard of Katarzyna Stoparczyk, do not feel slighted; the planet’s filing system is famously sloppy. Yet in the humming corridors of Interpol’s General Secretariat in Lyon—where the coffee tastes like…
Eric Tarpinian-Jachym and the Passport Paradox: When One Man’s Identity Crisis Becomes the World’s Problem By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk Geneva, Switzerland – Somewhere in the fluorescent-lit catacombs beneath the Palais des Nations, an intern with a master’s in multilateral studies and a minor in artisanal coffee just stamped the latest iteration of a…
Nationals vs Cubs: A Proxy War of Futility Played Out on Imported Grass By the time the Washington Nationals and the Chicago Cubs finish their three-game set this week, roughly 75,000 hot dogs will have vanished, 1.2 million beer cups will clog Midwestern landfills, and two sets of fans will convince themselves that “momentum” is…
The Liver King’s Global Offal Tour: How One Shirtless American Turned Ancestral Grift into Soft-Power Soft-Serve By the time Brian “Liver King” Johnson landed at Charles de Gaulle last month—bare-chested, war-painted, and clutching a TSA-approved cooler of raw bison liver—European regulators had already filed the paperwork under “biological weapon.” It was, depending on your latitude,…
Siniakova: The Czech Who Became a Global Rorschach Test By an increasingly weary correspondent who once believed sport was just sport PRAGUE—When Katerina Siniakova hoisted yet another trophy over her head last month, the global reaction split neatly into three camps: the flag-waving Czechs who treat every serve as a referendum on national pride, the…
Romania vs. Canada: A Bloodless Cold War Over Maple Syrup, Mici, and Existential Dread By Ileana Drăghiciu, Bucharest Correspondent-at-Large The world’s attention has been trained on flashpoints with better lighting—Gaza, Kyiv, the South China Sea—but quietly, in the fluorescent glow of hotel conference rooms and trade-fair booths, Romania and Canada have been circling each other…
