Armenia vs. Ireland: The Friendly That Wasn’t—A Global Post-Mortem on a Football Match Nobody Wanted to Win DUBLIN—On a damp Tuesday evening in the Aviva Stadium, the Republic of Ireland and Armenia played out a 1-1 draw so gloriously mediocre that UEFA briefly considered awarding both teams negative points. The match was billed as a…
NEWS FROM THE NUMBERS COALFACE 10-Year Treasury Yield: A Moody Barometer for a World That Can’t Decide If It’s Dying or Just Napping SINGAPORE—Every morning, somewhere between the first espresso and the last muttered curse at Bloomberg, traders around the planet glance at one figure the way medieval sailors once checked the North Star: the…
Yerevan to Dublin: Two Nations, One Shared Talent for Existential Despair By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, still nursing a suspiciously metallic in-flight coffee The world’s attention—what little remains after the latest celebrity asteroid scare—has pivoted to a football qualifier that sounds less like a fixture and more like the set-up to an Ionesco…
Nigeria vs South Africa: A Fever-Pitch Rivalry That Outshines Your Netflix Queue The world’s attention has once again pivoted to the patch of Earth that cartographers once labelled “sub-Saharan” but marketing teams now call “Africa’s Growth Belt.” This week, Lagos and Johannesburg are locked in the sort of contest that makes Eurovision look like a…
**The Curious Case of Deshon Elliott: How One Safety’s Journey Reflects Our Global Obsession with Gladiators in Spandex** From the bustling streets of Mumbai to the quiet pubs of Yorkshire, humanity has always harbored a peculiar fascination with watching exceptionally large men chase an oddly-shaped ball for astronomical sums of money. Enter Deshon Elliott—the latest…
Ofsted Unleashes ‘New Framework’ – World Watches in Mild Panic By Our Correspondent in an Undisclosed Café, Somewhere Between Heathrow and Existential Dread LONDON—Yesterday, in a conference room scented faintly of instant coffee and impending judgment, Ofsted unveiled its latest inspection framework. Across the planet, education ministers from Seoul to São Paulo leaned forward like…
Jabrill Peppers and the Global Theater of One Man’s Hamstring Byline: Helmut van der Linde, filing from a hotel bar in Doha where the Wi-Fi is sponsored by a regime that thinks “ACL tear” is a political slogan. Jabrill Peppers tore his ACL last week. Somewhere in East Rutherford, New Jersey, a franchise that has…
DOHA, Qatar – Somewhere between the perfume fog of Duty Free and the existential dread of Gate C-23, Hamad International Airport has quietly become the planet’s most polite choke-point. Every minute, 750 souls—fresh from Bangkok, Boston, or Bamako—shuffle through this $16-billion marble lung, clutching boarding passes like indulgences sold by a particularly efficient pope. They…
PARIS—Somewhere between the 17th arrondissement’s endless strikes and the existential dread hanging over the Seine like cheap cigarette smoke, the name Isaiah Foskey has begun to echo in the sort of bars where expats argue about American football as if it were a UN resolution. The irony, of course, is delicious: a pass-rusher from Walnut…
Sinaloa Cartel Arrests: A Global Game of Whac-a-Mole Where the Mole Has a Swiss Banker By the time Mexican marines politely invited Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Joaquín Guzmán López to leave their private jet in El Paso last Thursday, the price of cocaine in Rotterdam had already dipped 8 % and the peso had…
Kathmandu – It takes a special kind of optimism to balance a national budget when your country is wedged between two nuclear frenemies, your rivers are swelling with glacial tears, and your most reliable export is the occasional viral Sherpa meme. Enter Bishnu Prasad Paudel, Nepal’s freshly re-appointed Finance Minister, a man whose smile manages…
The Barclays Center, that rust-coated UFO that crash-landed at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush, is less a basketball arena than a diplomatic embassy for the global religion of spectacle. Opened in 2012 by a Russian oligarch, bankrolled by a British bank, and programmed to keep American attention spans twitching, it is the perfect three-nation…
