Sean Clifford and the Geopolitics of a Backup Quarterback By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere over the Atlantic The name Sean Clifford does not, at first blush, rattle the chandeliers at the UN or trigger emergency sessions of the G7. He is, after all, a 25-year-old American football player who was selected 149th…
From Kiev to Kyoto, district attorneys are rarely the stuff of diplomatic cables. Yet in the spring of 2024, Fulton County’s Fani Willis has become the unlikely protagonist in a morality play that is being binge-watched from Brussels to Bangkok. While her name still sounds to European ears like a cheerful budget airline, the reverberations…
IREN Stock: The World Learns to Love a Battery-Powered Lottery Ticket By the time you finish this sentence, IREN’s ticker will have flickered somewhere between a green smile and a red grimace on three continents. The Australia-based lithium-ion recycler—née “Neometals,” reborn with a name that sounds like an IKEA desk lamp—has spent 2024 ricocheting from…
Riley Green’s Tour: How a Red-Dirt Bard from Alabama Accidentally Became a Global Soft-Power Asset By Dave’s Locker, Foreign Bureau There are moments—rare, fleeting, and usually soundtracked by steel guitar—when the American South leaks into the wider world, and the wider world, baffled, decides it likes the taste. Enter Riley Green, the former University of…
Rugby: The World’s Most Polite Blood-Sport By Dave’s Locker International Desk If there is a single pursuit that proves human beings will ritualise anything short of nuclear war, it is rugby: a game invented when an English schoolboy allegedly picked up a football in 1823 and thought, “Let’s add concussions.” Two centuries later, that boyish…
Spotify, the Swedish-born jukebox that now soundtracks the apocalypse, has quietly become the most influential diplomatic force never to sit at the UN. From Lagos to Lima, commuters ride buses whose rattling engines are masked by algorithmic playlists named things like “Chill Vibes for Existential Dread.” The platform boasts 489 million users, or roughly the…
Jess Hull: The Quiet Aussie Who Just Taught the World to Run Scared of Its Own Stopwatch By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between a Berlin Beer Garden and Existential Despair Paris, 7 August—In the grand amphitheater of human folly that we call the Olympic Games, where nations bankrupt themselves for the fleeting dopamine hit of a…
Socialism Has Entered Its Midlife Crisis—And Brought the Whole Planet Along for the Therapy Session By the time the Parisian café Marxist finishes his overpriced espresso and the Shenzhen tech-bureaucrat closes her state-capitalist spreadsheet, the word “socialism” has already shape-shifted more times than a Swiss bank account. From Caracas’ empty shelves to Copenhagen’s bicycle superhighways,…
Somewhere between the burnt-orange smog of Beijing and a Reykjavik pub that still smells like 2008 financial panic, the name “J.T. Miller” is being uttered in languages that can’t even decide how many vowels to keep. To North American hockey fans, Miller is the Vancouver Canucks’ resident chaos engine: equal parts point-per-game center and contractual…
Gaza Strip: 140 Square Kilometres of Perpetual Headlines By the time you finish reading this sentence, some foreign minister somewhere will have issued a “deeply concerned” press release about Gaza. That is the Strip’s greatest export: statements of concern, delivered in impeccable officialese, then promptly filed next to the coffee-stained draft on climate change and…
Shoppers of the World, Unite: Retail Sales Data as Our New Global Blood Pressure Reading By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent If you want a quick, painless biopsy of planetary morale, skip the WHO mental-health surveys and just glance at the monthly retail-sales print. Released in a rolling 24-hour relay from Beijing to Berlin to Brasília,…
Brett Goldstein: The British Scowl That Conquered a Planet Already in Therapy by “Dave’s” Global Correspondent, currently hiding in a Copenhagen airport lounge that smells of herring and regret PARIS—At 2:14 a.m. on a Wednesday, when most of the world is doom-scrolling about melting ice caps or the latest crypto-casino implosion, a 43-year-old man from…
