Battlefield 6: The World’s Most Expensive Geopolitical Mood Ring By Dave’s Locker International Desk It’s 3:14 a.m. in Reykjavík when the servers finally breathe, and somewhere in Lagos a teenager wearing noise-canceling headphones learns the Swedish word for “cover me.” That’s the moment you realize Battlefield 6 isn’t really a videogame—it’s the planet’s least supervised…
Rihanna, the Barbadian pop mercenary turned beauty oligarch, now sits at the nexus of every geopolitical tremor the planet can muster. Once upon a distant 2005, she was merely asking us not to stop the music; in 2024, she could halt entire supply chains with a single Fenty restock. From Dakar to Dubai, customs officers…
Autopen: The Signature That Travels the World While Its Owner Stays Home By Our Correspondent Who Has Signed Too Many Expense Reports to Ever Trust Handwriting Again PARIS—Somewhere in the Élysée Palace sits a squat beige machine that can reproduce Emmanuel Macron’s looping “E” and Napoleonic “M” faster than you can say “Article 49.3.” Across…
The view from the Radisson Blu Plaza’s 34th-floor bar is, to be polite, unnervingly tidy: a Lego diorama of fjords, forests and social democracy, all lit by the low-wattage glow of collective guilt about being too comfortable. Oslo—population smaller than a Shanghai rush-hour platform—has managed to turn itself into a global Rorschach test. The rest…
The word “brave” used to come with a body count. Leonidas at Thermopylae, Harriet Tubman on the Underground Railroad, the anonymous soul who first looked at a blue-ringed octopus and thought, “I wonder how that tastes.” Today, the term is more likely to describe a middle-manager who posts a selfie from his standing desk captioned…
Dinamo Zagreb vs Fenerbahçe: A Balkan Derby for the Age of Geopolitical Free Shipping By Our Man in the Departure Lounge ZAGREB—On Wednesday evening, Maksimir Stadium will host the latest installment of Europe’s longest-running feud between people who insist they’re nothing alike. Dinamo Zagreb versus Fenerbahçe is nominally a Champions League qualifier, but in the…
Betis vs. Nottingham Forest: A Dispatch from the Edge of Civilization Somewhere in the Mediterranean twilight, Real Betis is preparing to host Nottingham Forest in a fixture that, on paper, looks like a quaint Europa League group-stage curiosity. In reality, it is a geopolitical mood ring, flashing crimson every time the global order hiccups. On…
If you want to understand the geopolitical temperature of any given decade, forget the think-tank white papers; simply watch what a fighter pilot must do before being allowed near a $100-million jet. The Air Force Physical Fitness Test—three events, sixty total points, and more angst per capita than a Milan runway—has quietly become the planet’s…
Aer Lingus and the Shamrock-Shaped Shadow It Casts on the World By the time the average passenger has wrestled their 10-kilo “personal item” into Aer Lingus’ overhead bin, four different currencies have probably lost value, one trade pact has quietly expired, and a hedge fund in Connecticut has shorted the euro on the assumption that…
Annapolis, Maryland – a postcard-perfect colonial port where the U.S. Naval Academy trains future admirals and the state legislature still meets in the only American capitol building older than the country itself. From half a world away, the place looks like a set piece from a Disney+ series about enlightened republics. Yet walk the narrow…
Red Star, Green Money: A Balkan Derby With Global Side-Effects By Dave’s Balkan Bureau (currently operating from a café whose Wi-Fi password is “NATO2000”) Belgrade—When Crvena Zvezda and Celtic jog out onto Rajko Mitić Stadium tonight, the floodlights will illuminate more than just twenty-two footballers in various states of hair-gel. They will spotlight two competing…
Fermi, the Enigma That Keeps the Lights On—and the Existential Dread Flowing by Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between a Roman metro ticket and the edge of the observable universe sits Enrico Fermi, the chain-smoking, chalk-dust-slinging physicist who managed to be both the midwife of the nuclear age and its first critic. Mention his name…
