West Ham vs Chelsea: A London Derby in the Age of Geopolitical Collateral Damage By our man in the cheap seats, still clinging to sarcasm as the pound plummets Kickoff is 16:30 GMT, which means it’s 23:30 in Pyongyang, 08:30 the next morning in Sydney, and 03:30 in New York—prime time only for the insomnia-riddled…
The Philadelphia Eagles’ 2025 fixture list dropped last week, and—because the NFL now behaves like a rogue hedge fund with shoulder pads—its tremors were felt well beyond the Delaware Valley. From a rain-soaked pub in Galway where the game is broadcast at 2:17 a.m. local time, to a Shanghai sports-bar chain that has started charging…
Walmart Recalls Frozen Shrimp—Again—Because Listeria Never Got the Memo About Borders By our man in Geneva, where even the caviar has trust issues GENEVA—When Walmart announced last week that it was recalling 8,000 cases of “Aqua Star Cooked, Peeled & Deveined Tail-On Shrimp” for possible Listeria contamination, the corporate press release came wrapped in the…
Lorenz Kraus and the Quiet Art of Engineering the Apocalypse By Dave’s Locker International Desk VIENNA—Somewhere between the Sacher torte and the existential dread of living in a city that perfected both waltzes and world wars, a balding Austrian civil servant named Lorenz Kraus has become the planet’s most reluctant household name. While the rest…
GENEVA — While the Amazon burns and bond yields do things that make central bankers reach for the Maalox, the planet’s most ambitious act of collective imagination is quietly re-shuffling its hierarchies. Fantasy football rankings dropped Tuesday, and from Dakar to Dublin the faithful are parsing spreadsheets like Talmudic scholars on amphetamines. Somewhere, a Syrian…
Rayo Vallecano vs Sevilla: A Micro-Drama for a Macro-Mess By Dave’s Locker’s man in Madrid, still wondering why we’re all pretending football is more important than the heat death of the universe. MADRID — Somewhere between the Chinese spy balloon drifting over Latin America and the International Monetary Fund politely asking Argentina not to set…
A modest fishing town on England’s south coast and a once-mighty Merseyside port—two places whose combined GDP couldn’t buy a decent flat in Hong Kong—will on Saturday send eleven men apiece onto a rectangle of grass to chase a sphere of stitched polyurethane. To the uninitiated this is merely Brighton & Hove Albion versus Everton,…
President Nelson Has Left the Building: A Farewell to the Man Who Tried to Govern the Globe By the time the official telegrams started pinging in at 03:47 GMT, half the planet was already awake doom-scrolling. President Nelson—yes, the one who once accidentally called the Swedish PM “Switzerland” during a live climate summit—has reportedly shuffled…
Ryder Cup Today: When Europe and America Agree on Nothing Except Their Mutual Disdain for the Metric System By the time the dew lifted off the Marco Simone fairways this morning, the Ryder Cup had already achieved what the UN Security Council has not: a peaceful—if utterly passive-aggressive—trans-Atlantic summit. On one side, a dozen Americans…
Villa Park, Birmingham – or, as the planet’s satellite dishes prefer to call it, “another Saturday data-point in the global Premier League soap opera.” Aston Villa versus Fulham sounds like a quaint Midlands postcard until you remember that the match is beamed to 188 territories, translated into 22 languages, and watched by insomniacs from Jakarta…
BEIJING—When the gates of the repurposed National Speed-skating Oval swing open on 28 September 2025 for the China Open, the planet will do what it always does: pretend tennis is merely sport. The truth is messier. What happens inside the “Ice Ribbon” (now mercifully de-iced and re-grassed) is a Rorschach test for the 21st-century condition—equal…
Across the planet—whether you’re sipping cortado in Madrid, slurping borscht in Minsk, or pretending to enjoy oat-milk flat whites in Los Angeles—one truth unites us: somewhere, a screen is playing Kate Beckinsale in slow-motion, hair billowing like a UN flag for our collective existential dread. The British actress, once a polite Oxford ingenue, has become…
