Ross-on-Wye: The World’s Most Politely Apocalyptic Town By “Dave’s Locker” Global Affairs Desk If the planet ever opts for a soft landing into oblivion, it will probably do so in Ross-on-Wye, a riverside confection in Herefordshire whose half-timbered Tudor façades look like they were assembled by a Brexit-era IKEA, complete with missing democratic screws. From…
The Curious Global Afterlife of Graham Roberts, the Footballer Who Refused to Die on Schedule By Our Man in the Departure Lounge Somewhere between a FIFA ethics inquiry and the 14th replay of Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God,” the name Graham Roberts flickers across a Lagos sports-bar screen, then a pub in Tallinn, then a…
The Man Behind the Curtain Who Isn’t Even in the Room By Our Correspondent in Exile, Somewhere Over the Atlantic Morgan McSweeney does not tweet, rarely gives interviews, and—according to people who have met him—prefers to speak in the hushed tone usually reserved for funeral directors or arms dealers. Yet, from Warsaw to Washington, his…
The UN Security Council has debated nuclear proliferation, genocide, and who forgot to mute their microphone during closed sessions, but it has yet to confront the true axis of evil: Drosophila melanogaster, better known as the common fruit fly. From the fermented-mango stalls of Bangkok to the overpriced organic basil at a Brooklyn farmers’ market,…
Anthony Martial: The Last Frenchman Standing Between Your Club and Existential Dread By Our Man in the Transfer Tavern (and Everywhere Else) There are moments—usually around the 73rd minute when the score is 0-0 and the floodlights look like interrogation lamps—when Anthony Martial appears to lose interest in the entire human project. He drifts left,…
Adobe Stock: The World’s Largest Panic Room for Visual Culture By Dave’s International Bureau of Existential Downloads Somewhere above the 38th parallel of the internet, Adobe’s servers hum like a displaced Swiss bank vault—only instead of numbered accounts, they store 200 million high-resolution reminders that human creativity now comes shrink-wrapped, royalty-free, and suspiciously well-lit. Adobe…
Sean Avery Is the Bad Boy Who Went Global, and We’re Still Watching the Replays By Dave’s Locker International Desk From the fjords of Finland to the noodle bars of Shanghai, references to “Sean Avery” now serve as shorthand for a very particular flavor of chaos: the kind that sells jerseys, court cases, and—if you…
Alabama State University: A Small Campus in the American South That Still Manages to Matter to the Rest of the Planet By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Montgomery, Alabama – While the rest of the world obsesses over which septuagenarian will next get the nuclear codes, a modest cluster of red-brick buildings on the banks of…
Brett Kavanaugh’s ascent to the United States Supreme Court in 2018 was less a judicial appointment and more a live-fire exercise in American self-parody, watched by the rest of the planet with the same fascination reserved for slow-motion bus crashes or a particularly spicy episode of reality television. From cafés in Paris to conference rooms…
From the ashram to the algorithm: Jay Shetty’s planetary takeover By Our Correspondent, somewhere between Heathrow and existential despair If you’ve flown long-haul recently, you’ve probably seen Jay Shetty’s face staring at you from the seat-back screen like a benevolent flight attendant who’s swapped safety demos for Sanskrit aphorisms. The former Hindu monk turned “urban…
**The Little Historically Black University That Could (and Did) While the World Burned** In an era when American higher education has become a grotesque parody of itself—where universities resemble luxury resorts with football teams and student debt rivals the GDP of medium-sized nations—Hampton University stands as a peculiar anomaly. This 156-year-old institution in coastal Virginia…
PARIS—Across the boulevard from a café where the espresso costs more than the average monthly wage in Sri Lanka, an elderly French banker folds his copy of The Wall Street Journal with the reverence of a priest dismissing a sacred text. The gesture is more telling than the Dow’s latest tantrum: to the world beyond…
