The Global Citizen: A Noble Label on an Overheating Rock by Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS — Somewhere between the duty-free carousel at Dubai and the third refill of airline chardonnay, the modern traveler decides that “global citizen” sounds better than “seat 37B with mild thrombosis.” The phrase is now stapled to LinkedIn bios, university…
Dow Jones: The World’s Favorite Schadenfreude Index by Dave’s Locker Special Correspondent, somewhere between a Singapore hawker stall and a Frankfurt beer garden When the Dow Jones Industrial Average sneezes, the planet doesn’t bother reaching for a tissue—it grabs popcorn. From Seoul’s crypto-cafés to Lagos’s container-truck bazaars, traders, dictators, and TikTok astrologers alike watch those…
Paris Saint-Germain’s newest opponent isn’t Barcelona, Bayern, or even the ghost of Financial Fair Play. It’s the infinite, shape-shifting concept of “versus”—a three-letter suffix that has become the club’s most reliable marquee signing. Wherever PSG lands, the world shows up to watch not just 11 men in navy and red, but a referendum on money,…
Every October the same ritual: chartered jets full of super-agents, sheikhs, and streaming-service executives descend on Paris like well-dressed locusts to find out whose shin bones are officially the most valuable on Earth. The Ballon d’Or rankings have dropped again, which means it’s time for the planet to pretend that a subjective beauty pageant for…
**The Beautiful Game’s Ugly Cousin: A Timeline of Marseille vs PSG, or How France Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Grudge Match** By the time the first whistle blew in 1971, Olympique de Marseille and Paris Saint-Germain had already mastered the only skill that truly matters in modern sport: holding a grudge. What began…
The curiously code-named “RR stock” has been lurching across trading screens from São Paulo to Singapore like a drunken aristocrat at last call, generating the sort of global buzz usually reserved for royal weddings or minor nuclear incidents. At first glance it appears to be nothing more than the ticker for Rolls-Royce Holdings—yes, the same…
The Global Sigh That Is Russia-Ukraine: A Spectator Sport for the Rest of Us By Our Correspondent Who’s Running Low on Both Coffee and Hope KYIV, MOSCOW, AND EVERYWHERE ELSE—Somewhere between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, two nations have been locked in a pas de deux of artillery and acronyms for so long…
Cathay Pacific Flies Straight Into the Turbulence of a Multipolar World By our correspondent in the airport lounge where optimism goes to die Hong Kong—On paper, Cathay Pacific is just another airline trying to coax human cargo into ever-smaller seats while its accountants figure out how to charge for oxygen. In practice, the 77-year-old carrier…
The silver-gray silhouettes that streak across the Sea of Okhotsk are not just machines; they are postcards from a country that insists on writing in all-caps. Russian fighter jets—Sukhois, MiGs, and that theatrical new kid, the Su-57 “Felon”—have become the Kremlin’s preferred punctuation marks in every geopolitical sentence it deems too subtle. One day they…
**THE CHIEFS OF THORNTON: HOW A SUBURBAN FOOTBALL CLUB BECAME THE WORLD’S MOST IMPROBABLE GEOPOLITICAL METAPHOR** The Thornton Chiefs, for those blessedly unfamiliar with the particulars of English non-league football, are a semi-professional club whose greatest achievement—until recently—was existing in that peculiar purgatory of British suburban life where ambition goes to drink itself into oblivion….
Giants vs. Chiefs: The World Watches Two Mediocre Powers Trade Body Blows By our jaded foreign correspondent, still waiting for the apocalypse to RSVP GENEVA—In the grand coliseum of global affairs, where nuclear codes are swapped like Pokémon cards and trade wars are fought with the gusto of a Black Friday stampede, this week’s marquee…
Montez Sweat: The Defensive End Exporting American Anxiety to a World Already on Edge By the time Montez Sweat was traded from the Chicago Bears to the Washington Commanders last October, the planet had already endured two years of pandemic, spiraling inflation, and the creeping realization that every smartphone notification might herald either a missile…
