The Rookie: A Global Affair in Four Acts By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent (currently hiding from expense-auditors in an airport lounge) Act I – The Universal Script Every nation has its own dialect, but the word “rookie” translates the same everywhere: liability with potential. From the trembling Tokyo recruit bowing 15° too low, to the…
31 Atlas: A Cartographic Joke with No Punchline By “World-Weary” Watanabe, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Somewhere between the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Despair lies the 31 Atlas, a new, crowd-sourced map that claims to chart “the world as it actually exists, minus the delusions.” Released last Tuesday by an anonymous collective that…
A GLOBAL GUIDE TO THE POLITICAL WEATHER FORECAST: WHY EVERYONE CHECKS THE BAROMETER OF OTHER PEOPLE’S VOTES By the time you read this, the pollsters of at least three continents have already revised their “final” numbers twice, quietly deleted a tweet, and blamed the dog for eating the crosstabs. General election polling, once the modest…
Melbourne’s Docklands Stadium—known, with the same straight-faced nationalism that names a 24-hour convenience store “The Great Australian Dream”—hosts the 2024 AFL Grand Final this Saturday. While the locals call it “the biggest day on the national calendar,” the rest of the planet, preoccupied with wars, bond yields, and the slow-motion TikTok suicide of attention spans,…
At 350 km/h, the only thing louder than a MotoGP bike is the collective ego of the paddock. From the glass towers of Doha to the rice terraces of Mandalika, the circus pitches its carbon-fiber tents, promising the planet a two-stroke antidote to its own slow-motion collision with reality. We tune in to watch twenty-four…
Notre-Dame vs Arkansas: A Collision of Cathedrals, Cotton, and the Collapsing World Order By Our Man in the Departure Lounge, Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Paris, 03:14 a.m. CEST—While the rest of Europe debates whether to heat the flat or the croissant first, roughly 7,000 kilometers away in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a different temperature is rising. Saturday…
MELBOURNE—Somewhere between the 21-gun salute and the 21st schooner, it became clear that the 2025 AFL Grand Final is no longer merely an Australian curiosity watched by expats at 3 a.m. in Shepherd’s Bush pubs. Instead, it has quietly become the planet’s most efficient metaphor for late-capitalism: 100,000 people paying a week’s rent for a…
Wordle Answer of the Day Sparks Diplomatic Incident, Mass Existential Crisis, and Mild Inconvenience in 47 Countries By the time Australian insomniacs were refreshing their browsers at 2 a.m. AEDT, the Wordle answer had already detonated across three continents. The five-letter word—rumored to be “TAPIR,” “SLOTH,” or another mammal nobody has actually seen outside a…
From the banks of the Mersey to the megacities of the Pacific Rim, the phrase “Liverpool Echo” is no longer just the local paper your nan clips coupons from; it has become a cultural sonar ping that bounces off every corner of late-stage capitalism. To outsiders it is, at first glance, a provincial rag: shouty…
The Good Place: A Global Audit of the Afterlife’s Balance Sheet By Dave’s Locker International Desk Let us begin with the obvious: if the universe were a multinational corporation, The Good Place would be its glossy sustainability report—equal parts aspirational fiction and creative accounting. While NBC’s sitcom wrapped in 2020, its premise keeps ricocheting around…
The word “peacemaker” used to come with a halo and a résumé full of Nobel Prizes. These days it travels with a heavier carry-on: bodyguards, nondisclosure agreements, and a suspicion that the halo might be plated, not solid. From Geneva to Gaza, from the South China Sea to a Zoom breakout room in Brussels, the…
The Ballad of Eric McAlister: One Man’s Midlife Crisis as a Mirror to a Planet on Fire By our jaded Paris correspondent, nursing a third espresso and counting the days until the next “once-in-a-generation” crisis Eric McAlister, 47, former logistics manager from Des Moines, has become the latest unwitting protagonist in the world’s longest-running tragicomedy:…
