NFL Schedule Today: A Global Broadcast of Helmeted Diplomacy, Sponsored by Your Local Despot By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent at Large While most of the planet wakes up wondering whether the grain corridor will reopen or if the Pacific will soon host a live-fire sequel, roughly 180 million people across 196 countries will instead refresh…
Global Dispatch: The Sun — Still There, Still Underappreciated By Santiago “Sunny” Valdez, Senior Irradiated Correspondent Dateline: Somewhere on the daylight side of Earth, where 7.9 billion of us are simultaneously squinting at our phones to complain that it’s “too bright.” The sun—that 4.6-billion-year-old ball of nuclear gossip in the sky—has once again risen without…
The Oche World Order How a pub game from Leicestershire became the planet’s last honest theatre of war By the time the final dart thunked into double-top in the Sheikh Zayed Stadium, Abu Dhabi, the 64 men still conscious in the Irish bar next door cheered like hostages who’d just heard ransom negotiations succeeded. It…
NFL Week 2: A Global Audit of the American Gladiator Circus by Matteo “The Passport” De Luca, International Affairs Desk KIGALI—While the Central Bank of Rwanda debates whether to de-dollarize before or after lunch, 73 million Americans are busy screaming at a flat-screen because a man in Cincinnati failed to throw an inflated bladder in…
Hatton: The One-Word Riddle Currently Ruining Every Foreign Correspondent’s Sleep Cycle By Our Man in a State of Perpetual Jet Lag Every so often the planet coughs up a proper noun that seems to have been devised by a committee of prankish linguists and bored algorithm engineers. “Hatton” is the latest entry in that noble…
Washington, D.C.—On a humid Sunday that felt imported straight from the Mekong Delta, 20,000 pairs of overpriced carbon-plated sneakers slapped the asphalt from the Capitol to Hains Point and back. The DC Half Marathon, an event whose very name is a polite fiction (the advertised 13.1 miles somehow always measures closer to 13.4—clearly the same…
Southampton vs Portsmouth: A Tiny English Rivalry That Explains Why the World Keeps Shooting Itself in the Foot The M27 Derby, as locals sniffily call it, is a 19-mile grudge match between two port cities whose combined population could fit—standing room only—into a Shanghai metro carriage. Yet when Southampton and Portsmouth square off this Saturday,…
**The Global Circus of World Athletics: Where National Pride Meets Pharmaceutical Innovation** The World Athletics Championships have concluded in Budapest, leaving behind the usual debris of shattered records, broken dreams, and the faint whiff of performance-enhancing substances that somehow always manages to permeate these international gatherings of humanity’s most chemically-enhanced specimens. This year’s spectacle featured…
Old Empires, New Glitches An international dispatch on the latest episode of London City vs Manchester United, the soap opera that doubles as a football match. By the time the final whistle blew somewhere between Peckham and Piccadilly, diplomats in twenty-one time zones had already updated their risk assessments. In Singapore, a hedge-fund algorithm that…
Burnley F.C. vs Liverpool F.C.: A Timeline for the End of Days Turin, Tuesday. While G-7 finance ministers argue over whose printer still has ink, the real summit of civilisation is quietly unfolding on a rectangle of grass in Lancashire. The Burnley–Liverpool fixture may look provincial to anyone who thinks football is merely twenty-two millionaires…
Roma vs Torino: A Serie A Sideshow in the Grand Theater of Geopolitical Chaos By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Somewhere between the Tiber and the Po, two football clubs will kick a ball tonight while the rest of the planet rehearses its usual slow-motion apocalypse. Roma—capital club, eternal city, home to popes, emperors, and the…
From the Highveld to the High Seas: Teddy Bridgewater’s Quiet Rebellion Against the NFL’s Global Circus By Our Man in the Departures Lounge MIAMI—Somewhere between a half-eaten Cuban sandwich and the faint smell of jet fuel, Teddy Bridgewater stands on the tarmac like a man who has read the fine print on the back of…
