Tokyo, 2025 – The World Athletics Championships have returned, this time to a city that already hosted an Olympics nobody was allowed to attend. The symbolism is hard to miss: 2,000 elite athletes will once again perform for an audience of empty seats, cardboard cut-outs, and the world’s most expensive television contracts. Welcome to the…
Driver, noun: the poor soul legally obliged to sit in traffic while the rest of us scroll. Across six continents and 195 fragile nation-states that still insist on calling themselves countries, the driver remains the only worker whose office moves but whose salary doesn’t. From Lagos’ danfo cowboys to Oslo’s silent Tesla monks, from Mumbai’s…
Stephen Lawrence: The One Murder Britain Couldn’t Bury – A Global Masterclass in How Not to Run a Justice System By Dave’s Locker International Desk London, United Kingdom – There are only two kinds of murder cases: the ones that quietly rot in filing cabinets, and the ones that metastasize into national identity crises. The…
GLOBAL REAL ESTATE: THE LAST BOARD GAME WHERE EVERYONE CHEATS BUT STILL LOSES By the time you finish reading this paragraph, a two-bedroom flat in Singapore will have appreciated by roughly the price of a used Toyota. Meanwhile, a crumbling farmhouse in rural Sicily—complete with an olive tree that looks like it lost a bar…
From the vantage point of a smoky bar in Tbilisi—where the rugby highlights flicker beneath Cyrillic subtitles and the barman swears Fitzmagic is just Georgian for “cheap wine”—Ryan Fitzpatrick has become an unlikely export. The Harvard-educated quarterback has never hoisted a Lombardi Trophy, yet his passport stamps rival those of most diplomats: Buffalo, Cincinnati, Tennessee,…
Ryan Seacrest and the Manufacture of Global Ambivalence By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, at 2:14 a.m. GMT, Ryan Seacrest is probably smiling. Not because he’s awake—he is, thanks to a proprietary blend of cold brew and contractual obligation—but because that smile has become a sort of soft-power export, like corn subsidies or…
AUSTIN SLATER AND THE GRAND GLOBAL DELUSION By Our Man in Left Field It is 03:47 in Zürich, and a bond trader who once tried to walk on at Nebraska-Omaha is watching grainy iPhone footage of Austin Slater turning on a 96-mph heater. He doesn’t know why. The Nikkei is tanking again, EU inflation just…
In the pantheon of American dynastic surnames, “Kraft” evokes a very particular aroma: not cheese, but the unmistakable scent of money marinated in NFL glory. Josh Kraft—yes, the middle son of Patriots emperor Robert Kraft—has spent most of his 58 years orbiting a football empire the way lesser mortals orbit Wi-Fi. From Lagos boardrooms to…
Terry McLaurin, Wide Receiver, Washington Commanders, and—if you squint hard enough from across the Atlantic—the last functioning export the United States still manages to ship abroad without a tariff fight. While European newsrooms are busy counting German tanks that can’t start and Chinese microchips that absolutely can, McLaurin keeps running immaculate post routes through the…
The Curious Case of Zarutska’s Last Breath: One Death, Three Time Zones, and a Planet That Just Kept Scrolling by Dave’s Foreign Desk PARIS—Somewhere between the croissant crumbs and the 11 a.m. espresso, word reached the Marais that Kira Zarutska was no longer trending upward, but rather trending six feet downward. The Ukrainian-born, Dubai-raised, London-educated…
Paramount, Skydance, Warner Bros: The World Watches Three Aging Gladiators Swipe Right on Each Other By Our Correspondent in Whatever Time Zone Still Has a Functioning Streaming App PARIS—Somewhere between the croissant crumbs and the existential dread of another trade-war Tuesday, the entertainment-industrial complex just tried a three-way corporate tango. Paramount Global, Skydance Media, and…
Futemax: The World’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure Now Has a Passport By [Redacted] Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk If you’ve ever watched a Champions League quarter-final on a buffering stream that looks like it was filmed on a potato inside a wind tunnel, you’ve met Futemax. The Brazilian-born pirate site—equal parts Robin Hood, carnival barker, and…
