Carol Kirkwood: The Weather Oracle the World Didn’t Know It Needed By Dave’s Locker International Desk In the grand, smoldering tapestry of 2024—where oceans boil, glaciers sulk, and half the planet votes for leaders who treat climatology as a punch line—there stands, improbably, Carol Kirkwood. To the untrained eye she is merely the BBC’s perennially…
The World’s Favorite Divorce: How “Split” Became the Planet’s New National Sport By Matteo Vargas, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the Arctic Circle and the last functional ATM in Beirut, humanity has decided that fission is fashion. From marital splits to sovereign secessions, from stock splits to split infinitives, the global zeitgeist has become…
The World’s Smallest Great Power: Montenegro as a Geopolitical Punchline By Our Correspondent, still hung-over from a rakija-soaked night in Kotor The Adriatic has always been Europe’s liquid catwalk: Venice glides by in designer decay, Croatia flaunts newly-acquired EU pins, and then—barely visible unless you squint—Montenegro struts in borrowed shoes two sizes too big. At…
Mike Evans and the Mirror He Holds Up to a World That Can’t Catch By the time Mike Evans’ latest one-handed, gravity-defying grab hits the highlight reels from Lagos to Lisbon, three things are already certain: (1) the Earth will keep turning, (2) Tom Brady will still be playing somewhere, and (3) at least one…
The Great North Run Starts at 10:40 BST—And the World Holds Its Breath (or at Least Pretends to While Refreshing Twitter) NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE — At precisely 10:40 British Summer Time this Sunday, 60,000 registered humans—plus several hundred opportunistic charity-costumed bananas—will shuffle across the Tyne Bridge in a ritual that looks suspiciously like a mass escape from…
**The Global Empire of Tiaras: How Disney Princesses Became the Most Effective Soft Power Tool Since the British Navy** While the world’s superpowers jostle for influence through trade wars and military posturing, a far more insidious force has been quietly colonizing the collective imagination of children across every continent: the Disney Princess Industrial Complex. From…
Jonas Brothers World Tour: The Last Helicopter Out of Saigon, But Make It Pop If you squint past the confetti cannons, the Jonas Brothers’ 2024-25 world tour looks less like a nostalgia cash-grab and more like a state-sponsored evacuation—only this time the choppers are branded by Pepsi and the evacuees are millennials clutching overpriced VIP…
Cillian Murphy, International Man of Muffled Dread By “Dublin via Geneva via Netflix” Correspondent The planet’s current favorite furrowed brow has done what no trade summit, no vaccine rollout, no cryptocurrency crash has managed: he’s convinced the entire globe to take a collective cigarette break and stare at the same screen. From Lagos living rooms…
**Fredericksburg: Where History Goes to Get Selfie-Sticked and Monetized** The international press corps has witnessed many peculiar American rituals—Super Bowl Sunday, Black Friday stampedes, the quadrennial democratic pageant they call “finding the least objectionable billionaire to govern us”—but few spectacles rival the anthropological wonder of Fredericksburg, Virginia, during tourist season. Here, in this colonial hamlet…
Mexico vs Japan: A Tale of Two Doomsdays Wrapped in a Baseball Jersey By Jorge “Jet-Lagged” Delgado, International Desk, Dave’s Locker In the grand casino of global affairs, nothing quite says “we’re all in this together” like watching two nations—separated by 11,000 kilometers of Pacific neuroses—slug it out over a stitched leather sphere. The 2023…
Anna Wintour, the bobbed sphinx of the Condé Nast elevator, has become less a magazine editor and more a floating exchange rate for global vanity. From Lagos to Lima, her name is whispered with the reverence otherwise reserved for tax havens or antibiotic-resistant bacteria—proof that influence, like dengue fever, can travel first-class. Every September, when…
When the London Underground coughs itself into another 48-hour industrial coma, the world does not exactly stop turning. Traders in Tokyo still open their screens, Lagos bus drivers still outrun physics, and São Paulo’s skyline keeps blinking like a gambler who knows the house always wins. Yet beneath the blasé shrug of globalization, the tube…
