Leicester City vs Coventry: A Microcosm of Global Football’s Existential Crisis, Now With Extra Rain By the time the final whistle blew at the King Power Stadium—somewhere between the 94th minute and the heat death of the universe—the only people still pretending this was just another East Midlands derby were the accountants at Sky Sports….
**The Tiffany Paradox: How a Little Blue Box Became the World’s Most Expensive Security Blanket** In a world where nuclear codes change hands like baseball cards and democracy itself seems to be having a midlife crisis, humanity has found its true north: a robin’s-egg-blue box that promises everything will be okay if you just pay…
Death and taxes, the old joke goes, are the only two things you can’t dodge—unless you’re very rich, in which case you hire people whose entire job is to teach you the Macarena around both. Enter inheritance tax, the world’s most awkward after-party: the moment the music stops, the lights come up, and the state…
**When Giants Fall: The Global Schadenfreude of a Dodgers Dynasty** The San Francisco Giants’ ritual humiliation of the Los Angeles Dodgers—baseball’s answer to a Goldman Sachs quarterly report—has achieved that rarest of feats: making the rest of the world give a damn about American baseball. From Singaporean hawker centers to São Paulo’s metro stations, humans…
**The Glorious Mundanity of Ordinary People: A Global Tragedy in 7 Billion Acts** Somewhere between the self-congratulatory TED talks and the latest apocalyptic climate report, we’ve forgotten to notice the world’s most reliable performers: ordinary people. You know the ones—those unfortunate souls who can’t trend on Twitter because they’re too busy keeping civilization from collapsing…
Wycombe Wanderers and the Beautiful Art of Glorious Failure By Dave’s International Desk of Diminishing Returns High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire – population 125,000, elevation 100 meters above sea level, elevation of expectations approximately three pints above sea level on a Tuesday. To the uninitiated, Wycombe Wanderers FC is a modest English club currently marooned in League…
**Dow Today: A Global Barometer of Hope, Hype, and Human Folly** NEW YORK—While the Dow Jones Industrial Average flirted with yet another arbitrary numerical milestone this morning, approximately 7.9 billion humans across the planet continued their daily struggle to eat, breathe, and pay rent. But let’s focus on what really matters: thirty carefully selected American…
**Property Empress Sarah Beeny and the Global Cult of Domestic Aspiration** In the grand theater of late capitalism, where we collectively pretend that watching strangers renovate their homes constitutes entertainment, Sarah Beeny emerges as something of a minor deity. The British property guru has spent two decades transforming the mundane act of buying and selling…
The Global Pastime Nobody Asked For By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Pacific Baseball, that pastoral hallucination of America’s 19th-century leisure class, has spent the last century smuggling itself across borders like a bored customs officer with a side hustle. What began as an excuse for Union soldiers to avoid Civil…
A Tale of Two Extremes: How “Highest to Lowest Movie” Became the Perfect Metaphor for a Planet Sliding Downhill By the time the algorithm spat out “Highest to Lowest Movie” on every streaming dashboard from Lagos to Lima, it wasn’t clear whether the title referred to a film or to humanity’s credit rating. One click…
Mumbai: A City-Sized Metaphor for the Planet’s Nervous Breakdown By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, still jet-lagged from the last red-eye Mumbai, formerly Bombay, currently “Beta Test for the Apocalypse,” doesn’t so much welcome visitors as it frisks them for loose change and existential dread. Step off the plane at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International—Terminal 2, where the…
