Bitcoin: The Glorious Global Game of Make-Believe We All Pretend Has Rules By A Correspondent Who Still Owns Some, Just in Case Marrakesh, Morocco – While the call to prayer echoed over the medina last Friday, a French tourist in a linen suit tried to buy saffron with Bitcoin. The shopkeeper, who has survived three…
The Azores: Nine Volcanic Pawns in the Atlantic Chess Match By the time you finish reading this sentence, a Chinese container ship, a Russian spy trawler, and an American drone will all have glided past the same mid-ocean speck of basalt that Europeans once mistook for the lost continent of Atlantis. Welcome to the Azores—nine…
KATHMANDU—When Nepal’s parliament swore in Sushila Karki as the Himalayan republic’s 38th Prime Minister last week, the world’s reaction was a polite golf-clap followed by the usual Google search: “Nepal still has a government?” Indeed it does, though like most things Nepali—yaks on airport runways, Everest traffic jams, constitution-drafting that outlasts the average houseplant—it arrives…
Monmouthshire: The Little County That Couldn’t Quite Decide Which Country It’s In By the time you finish this sentence, a Silicon Valley startup will have rebranded itself three times, Beijing will have built another island, and Monmouthshire will still be quietly arguing with itself about whether it belongs to Wales, England, or some liminal car-park…
The Rugby Championship—formerly the Tri-Nations until Argentina crashed the party in 2012—kicks off again this August, and the planet braces for eight weeks of calibrated carnage. Four nations, one trophy, and the faint hope that the rest of humanity might finally learn to tell a ruck from a maul. Spoiler: we won’t. Still, the tournament…
Arsenal F.C. vs Nottingham Forest: A Timeline of Hope, Hubris, and the Slow Unraveling of Civilization By Our Man on the Touchline, Watching the World Burn One VAR Decision at a Time Arsenal versus Nottingham Forest sounds, to the uninitiated, like a quaint English domestic—two sets of fans politely disagreeing over whose turn it is…
Allen Lazard: The Accidental Geopolitician of Touchdowns and Trade Wars by Dave’s Senior Correspondent for Existential Sports Diplomacy PARIS—The last time an American football player made global headlines for something other than a domestic violence plea deal, it was Tom Brady kissing his son a bit too long on the lips. This week, however, the…
Friday-night stadium lights in Tulsa may look like the same small-town spectacle you can find from Texas to Timbuktu, but zoom out a little and you’ll notice the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association (OSSAA) football season is quietly staging a global morality play—complete with imported drones, European sport-tech investors, and the sort of geopolitical symbolism…
From the cheap seats of history, it’s always the quiet ones who end up scribbling in the margins of global ledgers. Enter Patrick Bailey—an unassuming 38-year-old civil servant from Wellington who, until last Tuesday, was best known inside New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for color-coding spreadsheets and an uncanny ability to source flat whites…
Pumas, the World’s Sleekest Bureaucrats By Dave’s Foreign Desk, somewhere between a press buffet and a UN climate summit The puma—alias cougar, mountain lion, panther, or, if you’re feeling dramatic, “ghost cat”—has quietly upgraded from regional apex predator to unwitting geopolitical consultant. While humanity argues over carbon credits and TikTok bans, Puma concolor has been…
Noah Fifita and the Great Pacific Quarterback Pipeline: How a 5’10 Hawaiian Kid Became a Geopolitical Sleeper Agent By the time Noah Fifita dropped a 40-yard dime on national television last Saturday, three continents were already arguing about him on Reddit. That’s the new math of college football: one Samoan-Hawaiian kid from Anaheim who still…
From the High Desert to the Pacific Palisades: How a College Basketball Scorecard Became the UN Security Council of 2023 By the time the final buzzer mercifully sounded in Las Vegas, diplomats in Geneva were already arguing whether the 68-63 upset by New Mexico over UCLA constituted a soft-power shift on par with Brexit or…
