Jessie J and the Global Pop Machine: One Woman’s Quest to Remind Us We’re All Just Idiots with Headphones By Dave’s Locker International Bureau PARIS—If you squint past the Eiffel Tower’s nightly seizure-inducing strobe show, you’ll notice a faint, familiar wail drifting from the cafés along Rue de la Paix: “I’m feeeeelin’ sexy and freeeeee.”…
UNC vs UCF: A Microscopic Lens on the Macroscopic Collapse of Western Soft Power By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, Somewhere Over the Atlantic On the surface, Saturday’s gridiron tussle between the University of North Carolina (motto: “Lux libertas,” roughly “Debt and daylight”) and the University of Central Florida (motto: “Reach for the stars—then…
Kent State vs Florida State: When a March Madness Play-In Becomes a Geopolitical Microcosm By the time the final buzzer sounded in Dayton, Ohio, the planet had already spun 1,670 kilometers eastward and several million tweets had reduced the game to a five-second GIF. Yet for those of us watching from time zones where “March…
Udinese–Milan: A Provincial Derby in the Age of Global Collateral DÜSSELDORF — In a saner universe, a mid-table Serie A fixture on a damp Thursday night would register somewhere between the price of turnips in Tashkent and the new season of whatever Netflix has green-lit to pacify the algorithm. Yet here we are, live-blogging Udinese…
Valencia C. F. vs Athletic: A Cosmic Barometer for Civilization’s Slow-Motion Collapse By Dave’s far-flung correspondent, filing from a café whose Wi-Fi password is “apocalypse2024” On the surface, the Sunday night collision between Valencia C. F. and Athletic Club at Mestalla is merely another La Liga fixture—ninety minutes of choreographed panic, questionable haircuts, and VAR-induced…
Connecticut, the nutmeg-scented buckle of America’s Northeastern belt, issued another Amber Alert last week, a digital flare shot into the night sky that pinged phones from Mystic to Mumbai. In theory, the alert is a humble, localized SOS for a missing child. In practice, it ricochets through undersea cables and low-orbit satellites, reminding six billion…
The Cucurella Doctrine: How a Spanish Left-Back Became the Canary in Capitalism’s Coal Mine By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Barcelona, Stamford Bridge, and a nondescript industrial town in Extremadura—Marc Cucurella has now contaminated all three with the same virus: hope. Once a sprightly La Masia graduate who looked like he’d been raised on tapas and…
Jasmine Harman and the Global Cottage-Core Arms Race By Our Correspondent in the Department of Soft-Furnishings Geopolitics You may know Jasmine Harman as the relentlessly upbeat presenter who once persuaded a retired couple from Southend to trade a three-bed semi for a crumbling finca in Alicante on A Place in the Sun. What you probably…
Madrid, Spain – The sun still rises over the Plaza Mayor, but only after it has checked the La Liga standings on its phone. At the top, Real Madrid sit with that monarchical inevitability which makes republicans quietly despair. Ancelotti’s gentlemen lead Girona by a margin so slim it could be negotiated away over a…
Alavés vs. Sevilla: A Tiny Basque Town and Andalusia’s Orange-Blossom Aristocracy Remind the Planet Why We Still Bother With Football By Correspondent-at-Large, still jet-lagged in Vitoria-Gasteiz The match program handed out at Mendizorroza Stadium is printed on recycled paper, ostensibly to save the Amazon but mostly because the club’s photocopy budget was blown on a…
Villarreal vs. Osasuna: A Microscopic Civil War in the Macroscopic Chaos From the vantage point of a satellite drifting somewhere above the Strait of Gibraltar, tonight’s La Liga fixture between Villarreal CF and CA Osasuna looks less like football and more like two neighboring villages hurling artisanal grenades across a river of global anxiety. At…
Storm Gabrielle, still politely calling itself a “tropical storm” while auditioning for full-blown hurricane status, has been doing the rounds like an unwanted houseguest who insists on rearranging the furniture and drinking all the good rum. Born somewhere east of the Lesser Antilles, Gabrielle has spent the past week sashaying across the Atlantic, flirting with…
