Hatton: The One-Word Riddle Currently Ruining Every Foreign Correspondent’s Sleep Cycle By Our Man in a State of Perpetual Jet Lag Every so often the planet coughs up a proper noun that seems to have been devised by a committee of prankish linguists and bored algorithm engineers. “Hatton” is the latest entry in that noble…
Washington, D.C.—On a humid Sunday that felt imported straight from the Mekong Delta, 20,000 pairs of overpriced carbon-plated sneakers slapped the asphalt from the Capitol to Hains Point and back. The DC Half Marathon, an event whose very name is a polite fiction (the advertised 13.1 miles somehow always measures closer to 13.4—clearly the same…
Roma vs Torino: A Serie A Sideshow in the Grand Theater of Geopolitical Chaos By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Somewhere between the Tiber and the Po, two football clubs will kick a ball tonight while the rest of the planet rehearses its usual slow-motion apocalypse. Roma—capital club, eternal city, home to popes, emperors, and the…
Chester, the One-Name Wonder, Goes Global Bylines from Lagos to Lima are suddenly tripping over the same four consonants. Chester—no surname required, like Beyoncé or Cher or that guy who used to sell you weed in college—has become the planet’s most portable piece of gossip. Whether it’s a fraud-tainted West African fintech, a crypto-ponzi quietly…
PARLAY: THE WORLD’S FAVORITE HIGH-STAKES CONVERSATION When the French coined “parler” they merely wanted to talk; when pirates hijacked it into “parlay,” they weaponised chit-chat into a temporary cease-fire so they could haggle over doubloons and throats. Today the term has metastasised across every time zone, a linguistic stowaway riding globalisation’s rum barrel. From hedge-fund…
**The Accidental Diplomat: How a Slovenian Tennis Player Became an Unlikely Geopolitical Pawn** In the grand theater of international relations—where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and oil executives masquerade as climate saviors—it’s refreshing when the spotlight lands on someone who just wanted to hit a yellow ball over a net. Enter Veronika Erjavec,…
A fist, wrapped in eight ounces of regulation leather, is the closest thing the United Nations has ever produced to an enforceable resolution. From Manila’s humid barangay gyms to the neon shrines of Las Vegas, the planet’s boxing champions serve as ambulatory metaphors for whichever national myth needs selling this fiscal quarter. They are trade…
Omaha, Nebraska – a city whose name most of the planet only recognises from a 1995 Soderbergh film or from Warren Buffett’s annual shareholder jamboree, where billionaires pretend that cherry Coke counts as a food group. Yet this modest Midwestern grid of stockyards and start-ups has quietly become a geopolitical Rorschach test: what you see…
The Ballad of Brandon Marsh: How One Man’s Bat Became a Geopolitical Barometer By the time Brandon Marsh’s line drive cleared the left-field fence in Game 4 of the 2023 World Series, the tremor was detectable on seismographs in three languages. In Tokyo, salarymen watching on delay spilled sake on their ties; in Lagos, a…
In a nondescript conference room somewhere between Brussels and Boredom, the world’s defense ministers recently wrapped up another round of what they insist on calling the “Guardians Game.” The term sounds like a Saturday-morning cartoon spin-off, but it’s actually the polite label for a global wargame that runs on classified servers, diplomatic double-speak, and an…
The Olympic flame sputtered its way through Paris last week, and somewhere between the Seine’s bacterial bloom and the €1.4-billion security cordon that cordoned off even the pigeons, a familiar thought flickered: humanity still believes the fastest person over 100 metres can redeem a planet that is literally on fire. From the air-conditioned stadiums of…
UFC 320: When the Octagon Becomes the World’s Most Honest Diplomatic Channel Dave’s Locker International Desk | São Paulo → Las Vegas → Riyadh By the time the blood had dried on the canvas at UFC 320, three continents had already filed diplomatic cables about the main event. Not because the Dagestani champion had delivered…
