Atlético Madrid 1 – 0 Rayo Vallecano: A Tiny Earthquake in the Global Order MADRID, 26 May – Somewhere between the seventh minute and the ninety-third, the entire planet kept turning, stock markets fluctuated, and three different governments quietly changed their minds about a cease-fire. Yet inside the Wanda Metropolitano, the only tremor that mattered…
Dinamo Zagreb vs Fenerbahçe: A Balkan Derby for the Age of Geopolitical Free Shipping By Our Man in the Departure Lounge ZAGREB—On Wednesday evening, Maksimir Stadium will host the latest installment of Europe’s longest-running feud between people who insist they’re nothing alike. Dinamo Zagreb versus Fenerbahçe is nominally a Champions League qualifier, but in the…
When Port Vale, a club whose last major silverware predates the fall of the Berlin Wall, lines up against Arsenal—a team currently valued somewhere between a medium-sized sovereign wealth fund and a modest moon colony—the planet tilts, ever so slightly, on its axis. On paper the fixture is an FA Cup third-round mismatch; in the…
Tottenham vs Aston Villa: A North London Derby That Somehow Matters to Your Pension Fund in Singapore By our man in the cheap seats, still waiting for VAR to overturn 2020 The world’s attention this weekend swivelled, briefly, from mushroom clouds over the Pacific and bond yields in Frankfurt to a rectangle of grass in…
Small Town, Big Stage: How Huddersfield Town Became the World’s Accidental Metaphor There are, according to the United Nations, roughly 10,000 inhabited places on Earth that could credibly call themselves “towns.” Statistically, then, the odds of any single one of them mattering to a rice farmer in Java, a crypto-bro in Singapore, or an arms…
The 25th Amendment: America’s Impeachment-Adjacent Happy Meal By Pascal “Pax” Marais – Senior Cynic-at-Large, Dave’s Locker PARIS — While the rest of the planet wakes up to the comforting smell of diesel and existential dread, Washington occasionally flirts with the 25th Amendment, that constitutional escape hatch designed for when the guy with the nuclear codes…
Tottenham Hotspur versus Doncaster Rovers is, on paper, the sort of fixture the footballing gods schedule after a long lunch and three bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. One club recently renovated its stadium to the tune of a small nation-state’s GDP; the other rents its training cones by the hour. Yet when the FA Cup third-round draw…
Live Cricket Scores: The World’s Most Expensive Way to Watch a Dot-Ball By the time you refresh the app for the fourth time in thirty seconds, a Ukrainian drone has probably changed postal codes, a Japanese pension fund has quietly bought another slice of Sri Lankan sovereign debt, and somewhere in Lagos a teenager just…
**The Parmesan Paradox: How Parma vs Spezia Became Football’s Most Delicious Proxy War** While the world’s superpowers flex their nuclear arsenals and central banks play monetary Jenga with the global economy, humanity finds itself riveted by a far more consequential conflict: Parma versus Spezia, a Serie A fixture that proves civilization hasn’t so much evolved…
The World’s Most Overcrowded Club: Notes on the Global Fashion of Calling Someone a “Detainee” By Our Correspondent, currently not detained (but the night is young) From the fluorescent holding pen at Charles de Gaulle to the shipping-container pop-up outside Doha, the word “detainee” has quietly become the diplomatic equivalent of a unisex hoodie: one…
From the banks of the Monongahela River to the back-alleys of global anxiety, Carrick High School in Pittsburgh has become an unlikely avatar for the planet’s collective panic attack. What began as a routine lockdown in November 2023—when a student allegedly posted a “list” of classmates on social media—has now metastasized into a transcontinental case…
The Mega Millions jackpot—now swollen to a cartoonish $1.35 billion—has once again achieved what UNESCO summits and Davos panels can only fantasize about: uniting the planet in a single, perfectly synchronized daydream. From Lagos to Lisbon, from Manila to Manitoba, office printers wheeze out identical spreadsheets of “lucky” numbers, and grandmothers who have never set…
