Storm Gabrielle, still politely calling itself a “tropical storm” while auditioning for full-blown hurricane status, has been doing the rounds like an unwanted houseguest who insists on rearranging the furniture and drinking all the good rum. Born somewhere east of the Lesser Antilles, Gabrielle has spent the past week sashaying across the Atlantic, flirting with…
Wolves Score: A Global Tally of Teeth, Trade, and Tabloid Panic By your correspondent, filing from the last bar with Wi-Fi before the tundra begins The phrase “wolves score” ricochets around the planet like a bullet with commitment issues. In Milan it means last-minute heartbreak at San Siro; in Astana it’s the nightly body-count of…
Sri Lanka vs Bangladesh: The Cricket Match the World Pretended to Care About By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk (and a bottle of duty-free arrack) Colombo, 7:30 a.m. local time: the sun is already punishing the pavement, the tea is strong enough to dissolve a spoon, and somewhere on the island formerly known as Ceylon, eleven…
Ohio State’s 2025 Slate: The World Watches a Midwestern Cult Rehearse for War By Jacques Debris, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker International Desk COLUMBUS, OHIO—While the rest of the planet negotiates cease-fires, supply chains, and the slow-motion collapse of the biosphere, the Ohio State Buckeyes have unveiled their 2025 football schedule, a document that, to the…
The 6’8″ Revelation: How a French Teenager’s Serve Became a Geopolitical Weapon By the time Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard had finished pummelling the Adelaide International’s speed gun at 243 km/h last January, three distinct constituencies were already recalibrating their spreadsheets. Tennis Australia’s marketing department began quietly deleting old promos of “friendly” Nick Kyrgios; the International Tennis…
Man United vs Chelsea: A Global Spectacle Where Billion-Dollar Soap Opera Meets Geopolitical Theater It is a truth universally acknowledged that when Manchester United and Chelsea collide, the planet tilts slightly on its axis—mostly because half the world’s foreign-exchange reserves are tied up in their balance sheets. From a windowless flat in Lagos where the…
The Toyota 4Runner, that rectangular slab of steel and stubborn nostalgia, is currently circumnavigating the globe like a well-insured cockroach. From the potholed ring roads of Lagos to the latte-scented cul-de-sacs of suburban Melbourne, the fifth-generation 4Runner—unchanged since 2009, a geological epoch in car years—has become the vehicular equivalent of a passport stamp: proof you’ve…
Freeze Warning: A Global Icy Stare in a Heating World by Our Correspondent, somewhere between the last functioning tavern and the first broken thermostat Dateline: Geneva, 03:17 a.m. local time—because even the sun is rationing these days. The World Meteorological Organization has just issued a multinational “freeze warning,” a bureaucratic euphemism for “brace yourselves, Earth,…
The planet keeps smouldering—literally in some latitudes—but 1.2 billion eyeballs still found time last week to watch 22 women in mint-green and navy-blue polyester chase a red leather sphere across a rectangle in Mumbai. Australia Women vs India Women—sounds almost quaint, like an academic debate on colonial legacies, except the only thesis being defended was…
The Unlikely Diplomat: How Jeremy Newmark’s Quiet Ambition is Rewriting the Rules of Global Influence Jeremy Newmark is not the sort of man who gets invited to Davos, yet if you follow the faint scent of compromise and caffeine along the corridors of Brussels, London and—oddly—Doha, you will eventually bump into him. Newmark, former chair…
Daniil Medvedev, the 6’6″ Russian scarecrow with the demeanor of a man who just discovered his espresso was decaf, has spent the last decade proving that tennis can be both geopolitical chess and performance art. To the casual observer he’s merely another baseline metronome, but to the rest of us—squinting from Warsaw to Wuhan—he is…
In the grand geopolitical circus that is Planet Earth 2024, where wars are crowd-funded and elections are decided by whichever septuagenarian can stay awake the longest, the most subversive act of rebellion might just be a 26-year-old Russian who smashes tennis balls instead of ballot boxes. Meet Andrey Rublev—world No. 5, part-time abstract expressionist with…
