The Palmetto Putsch: How One Tiny U.S. College Rivalry Quietly Explains the End of the World As We Know It By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Global Desk Columbia, South Carolina—population 136,632, humidity 200 percent, general bewilderment immeasurable—was briefly mistaken for a geopolitical flashpoint last Saturday when South Carolina State and the University of South Carolina met…
Mexico: The World’s Favorite Punchline That Keeps Punching Back By Dave’s Foreign-Desk Misanthrope-in-Residence Mexico wakes up every morning to the sound of three alarm clocks: one made in China, one programmed by Wall Street, and one fashioned from the recycled brass of deported dreams. Each ring reminds the country that its sovereignty is a participatory…
Minsk, Belarus – Somewhere between the last Ryanair flight that was politely hijacked and the next Olympic athlete who suddenly discovers an urgent desire to defect, the word “Belarusian” has become a kind of geopolitical punch line. To the west, it’s shorthand for “Europe’s last dictatorship.” To the east, it’s a convenient buffer zone with…
Wimbledon, that annual fortnight in which the grass grows greener, the strawberries grow more expensive, and the British upper lip achieves Olympic-grade stiffness, has once again unfurled its ivy-draped flag over the international conscience. From Lagos to Lima, screens flicker with images of perfectly manicured lawns—lawns that cost more per square meter than a downtown…
Minsk, Belarus – The only European capital where arriving diplomats still keep their luggage on the seat beside them, just in case the plane has to turn around mid-tarmac. That small, paranoid courtesy tells you everything about how Belarus—population smaller than greater Los Angeles, GDP smaller than Delaware’s rainy-day fund—manages to punch so far above…
SEOUL—Somewhere between the DMZ and an overpriced craft-coffee bar in Gangnam, the United States and South Korea are still trying to convince the rest of the planet that their 70-year entanglement is merely “strategic,” not “codependent with nuclear accessories.” The alliance, born in the ashes of 1950 and held together ever since by a mixture…
iPhone 17: The Global Ritual of Queuing for Tomorrow While Today Burns By the time you finish reading this sentence, at least three tech blogs will have published “exclusive” renders of the iPhone 17, complete with a hitherto-unimaginable shade of midnight-eclipse-mauve and a camera bump that could double as a helipad for very small drones….
Middle Tennessee vs Wisconsin: A Microscopic Proxy War for a Planet That Can’t Even By the time the final whistle blows in Murfreesboro this Saturday, roughly 97 % of humanity will be blissfully unaware that Middle Tennessee and Wisconsin just re-enacted the global balance of power in 60 tidy minutes of American football. That’s fine;…
Wake Forest Football and the Global Theater of Mild Rebellion By Dave’s International Bureau of Existential Sportswriting If the planet were a pub, American college football would be the loud regular in the corner insisting his regional lager is the finest brew ever fermented. From the outside, the spectacle looks like a gilded civil war…
PARIS—On the red-clay courts of Roland-Garros this week, a curious sideshow has been unfolding next to the strawberries-and-cream set: Donald Trump Tennis, an unofficial, unsanctioned, yet oddly magnetic phenomenon that began when the former U.S. president’s name was spotted on the reservation sheet of an indoor court in Palm Beach and then ricocheted across continents…
Yerevan—The Armenian capital smells of apricots, diesel, and the faint, metallic whiff of existential dread that hovers over any nation whose neighbor keeps tanks on the lawn. On Thursday night, that bouquet was joined by grilled sardines and Cristiano Ronaldo’s cologne as Portugal rolled into town for a Euro qualifier. The final score—Portugal 3, Armenia…
Andora—pronounced with the same breathy reverence a sommelier reserves for a 1945 Château Pétrus—has quietly become the planet’s most exclusive gated community that nobody can actually find on a reliable map. Tucked between two quarrelling Iberian neighbors who can’t even agree on ham regulations, the 468-square-kilometre sovereign speck is what happens when medieval real-estate arbitrage…
