England vs South Africa: Two Nations, One Cricket Match, and the Illusion of Global Significance By Our Correspondent Who’s Learned to Love the Absurd London—For 48 hours this weekend, the planet’s most urgent diplomatic crisis is not Ukraine, Gaza, or the slow-motion implosion of the Antarctic ice shelf, but whether a red leather sphere can…
Ethereum: The World’s Digital Steam Engine, Now Running on Pure Collective Delusion By Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk Zug, Switzerland – In a pastel-painted office block that moonlights as a crypto-bro monastery, a dozen hoodie-clad programmers chant “Merge, merge, merge” while burning incense made from shredded fiat currency. This is the global headquarters of Ethereum,…
Global Thermostats and Frozen Pockets: The Winter Fuel Payment as a Geopolitical Mood Ring By Your Correspondent, Still Wearing Three Scarves LONDON—While the British government’s annual Winter Fuel Payment (£200–£300 sent to pensioners like an edible bouquet of lukewarm hope) is technically a domestic affair, its reverberations are felt from the slushy streets of Seoul…
Phillies Score: A Humble Tally That Could Tilt the Planet From a rooftop bar in Istanbul—where the Bosphorus glitters like a bribed official and the muezzin competes with Euro-trash pop—tonight’s Phillies score scrolls across the ticker: Philadelphia 7, Opponent 3. The barflies, mostly German tech consultants who think RBI is a new cryptocurrency, raise their…
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,…
