Joe Swash: How a Former EastEnders Barista Became an Unlikely Global Metaphor for the Age of Perpetual Side-Hustles By Our Man in the Departure Lounge There are, in this fractured century, only two kinds of celebrity: those who accidentally ignite geopolitical crises and those who quietly embody them. Joe Swash—yes, the grinning geezer who once…
The Fjord and the Vineyard: Norway vs Moldova in the Theater of the Absurd By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker International Desk If you squint at Europe from a weather satellite suffering from late-stage capitalism, you will see two blips flickering like mismatched LEDs on the same aging motherboard. One is Norway, sleek and smug, reclining on…
Portugal: Europe’s Charming Afterthought That Keeps Accidentally Mattering By the time most foreigners remember Portugal still exists, the rest of Europe has already moved on to its next collective panic attack. Yet like a polite guest who shows up late but brings excellent wine, Lisbon keeps slipping back into global relevance just when the room…
Pedro Pascal, the Chilean-born actor who now looks permanently exhausted in eight different time zones, has become the first truly global celebrity of the post-hope era. From Seoul subway ads hawking The Last of Us to Berlin bus shelters promising “more daddy issues than you can fit in a Bundesliga stadium,” Pascal has achieved that…
Ferrari 849 Testarossa: A Global Love Affair with Speed, Sin, and Selective Amnesia By Dave’s Locker International Desk Maranello, Italy – The world’s billionaires have a new collective crush, and its name is the Ferrari 849 Testarossa. While the rest of us queue for eggs that cost more than last year’s rent, the planet’s .001…
Channel 4: Britain’s Publicly-Owned Misfit and the Global Spectacle of Selling Your Weird Uncle By the time you finish this paragraph, at least three governments on three separate continents will have floated the idea of flogging their state broadcasters to the highest bidder. Yet only the United Kingdom has managed to turn the ritual into…
Elliot Anderson and the Sudden Global Obsession With a Name That Wasn’t Even His PARIS—Somewhere between a croissant-induced sugar crash and the third espresso of the morning, the world’s newsrooms discovered they had been chasing a ghost. “Elliot Anderson,” the supposed 19-year-old wunderkind who allegedly crashed the Tokyo derivatives desk of Sumitomo-Glencore with nothing more…
ITVX: How Britain’s Late-Entry Streamer Plans to Win a War Already Lost to Netflix, TikTok, and Your Own Short Attention Span By Our Correspondent Who Once Watched an Entire Season of “Love Island” on a Ukrainian Night Bus LONDON—In the grand tradition of showing up to a gunfight with a butter knife, Britain’s ITV has…
Mitrovic: A Name that Travels Like a Bad Passport Photo By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk (Sarajevo bureau, second‐floor bar) The surname Mitrovic—Serbian in its DNA, Balkan in its swagger—has recently slipped past the border guards of regional gossip and is now loitering in the departure lounge of global conversation. Whether you first met it while…
Wales vs Canada: Two Tiny Countries Pretending to Matter on the World Stage By the time you finish this sentence, the Canadian prime minister will have apologized for something and the Welsh rugby squad will have broken into a three-part harmony about coal. That, in microcosm, is the difference between a nation that weaponizes politeness…
Larry Gies: How One Mid-Western Billionaire Accidentally Became a Global Economic Weather Vane By the time the news reached a café terrace in Lisbon, the name “Larry Gies” was already doing the rounds in four languages and two conflicting conspiracy theories. To the hedge-fund analysts hunched over €7 cortados, Gies’ latest $150 million pledge to…
Volcanic Ash and Haute Couture: France vs. Iceland and the Glorious Futility of Trying to Out-Cool the North Atlantic PARIS—Somewhere between the Champs-Élysées and Reykjavík’s geothermal hot-dog stands, the world is once again being asked to choose between champagne flutes and glacier runoff. France versus Iceland—on the surface, a Euro 2024 qualifying fixture that could…
