The Curious Case of Paul Doyle: A Parable for Our Interconnected Age By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent Dateline: Somewhere between Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and a half-functional Zoom call Paul Doyle, if the name rings any bells at all, is the mild-mannered Irish civil servant who accidentally set off a trans-continental domino cascade last Tuesday. One…
FLOOD WARNING: A WORLDWIDE INVITATION TO DON’T PANIC (TOO MUCH) By the time you finish this sentence, somewhere between Venice and Vientiane, a municipal loudspeaker will blare the same cheery lie: “This is only a drill.” Translation: the river has broken up with its banks and is now speed-dating entire neighborhoods. From Bangladesh’s Brahmaputra to…
Victoria Station: The World’s Most Overqualified Waiting Room By Our London Correspondent, nursing a tepid flat white and existential dread London, UK – Somewhere beneath the ornamental pigeons and the low, grey sky that passes for weather here, Victoria Station yawns open like a bored Leviathan. Every minute, 2,000 fresh pilgrims—armed with wheelie bags, misplaced…
The Ballad of Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink: A Post-Colonial Dutchman Kicks His Way Through the End of History By Dave’s Locker International Desk Rotterdam – It is tempting to treat Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink as a mere footnote in the great PowerPoint presentation of modern football: a 90s-vintage striker with a howitzer right boot and a surname…
GLOBAL FENDER-BENDERS & THE MERCENARIES WHO LOVE THEM A dispatch on car-crash lawyers from our correspondent who once watched a Lagos traffic jam swallow an ambulance whole Lagos, 8:03 a.m. The danfo minibus kisses the rear bumper of a freshly-imported Tesla—an unholy union of 1990s carburetor and 2020s firmware. Within seconds, two men in fluorescent…
Brewery Lane, Newtownards: A Tiny Street with a Hangover the Size of the World Dave’s Locker, International Desk – Somewhere between the sixth pint of Guinness and the seventh lecture on supply-chain resilience, it struck me that Brewery Lane in Newtownards, County Down, is less a street than a geopolitical metaphor in brick form. The…
Scratch marks the spot—whether on a lottery ticket in Lagos, a DJ’s vinyl in Berlin, or the arm of a refugee who just realized the camp’s Wi-Fi password is “Password123.” The word itself is a global chameleon: noun, verb, existential sigh. Peel back one layer and you find the entire planet trying to itch an…
An International Field Guide to Personal Injury Attorneys, or How to Monetize Gravity By the time you finish reading this sentence, at least four people on four different continents will have slipped, tripped, or otherwise obeyed Newton’s least-favorite law and discovered that the ground is not, in fact, optional. Enter the personal injury attorney—part litigator,…
The Transnational Ballet of Gargantuan Steel and Litigious Grace By Diego “Diesel” Morales, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the Malacca Strait and the M6 outside Birmingham, an eighteen-wheeler hauling Vietnamese sneakers took a corner too fast, scattering its cargo like a piñata of global capitalism. Within minutes, a German insurer, a Singaporean logistics firm,…
NEWSROUND: THE PLANET’S DAILY DOSE OF WHIPLASH, NOW WITH EXTRA SCHADENFREUDE By Our Correspondent, filed from Somewhere with Spotty Wi-Fi The word “newsround” used to sound quaint—like something a BBC announcer chirped between puppet segments while your toast burned. Today, however, it is the metronome of global anxiety: an endless, algorithm-curated carousel of triumph and…
Sun vs. Sky: A Global Cage Match Sponsored by Existential Dread Dave’s Locker, International Desk – 12 June 2024 Somewhere above the Malacca Strait, a container ship the length of a small principality steams east while its captain squints at the sun like a man trying to read the fine print on a doomsday contract….
Martha’s Rule: When the World Learns to Listen—Sort Of By Dave’s Locker International Desk Geneva—Another week, another acronym. This time it’s “Martha’s Rule,” a protocol named after a 13-year-old London schoolgirl who died of sepsis in 2021 because nobody in the hospital bothered to ask the patient—or her parents—what they thought. In simpler terms, the…
