World Cup Qualifiers Europe: Where National Hopes Go to Die (and Occasionally Resurrect) The biennial continental bloodletting known as the UEFA World Cup qualifiers is back, and with it the reassuring spectacle of 55 nations pretending their geopolitical relevance hinges on 22 men chasing a ball. From Reykjavik to Tbilisi, passports are brandished like swords…
The Fjord and the Vineyard: Norway vs Moldova in the Theater of the Absurd By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker International Desk If you squint at Europe from a weather satellite suffering from late-stage capitalism, you will see two blips flickering like mismatched LEDs on the same aging motherboard. One is Norway, sleek and smug, reclining on…
Wales vs Canada: Two Tiny Countries Pretending to Matter on the World Stage By the time you finish this sentence, the Canadian prime minister will have apologized for something and the Welsh rugby squad will have broken into a three-part harmony about coal. That, in microcosm, is the difference between a nation that weaponizes politeness…
Volcanic Ash and Haute Couture: France vs. Iceland and the Glorious Futility of Trying to Out-Cool the North Atlantic PARIS—Somewhere between the Champs-Élysées and Reykjavík’s geothermal hot-dog stands, the world is once again being asked to choose between champagne flutes and glacier runoff. France versus Iceland—on the surface, a Euro 2024 qualifying fixture that could…
The Curious Case of Sébastien Lecornu: Europe’s Defense Wunderkind and the Art of Looking Busy While the World Burns By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—In the grand, slightly mildewed ballroom of European politics, where every minister arrives with a rehearsed sound bite and a half-eaten canapé, French Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu has managed the…
Apple’s share price—those three crisp capital letters that look so tidy on a Bloomberg terminal—has become the planet’s most polite form of geopolitical warfare. From the glass canyons of Shenzhen to the granite lobbies of Frankfurt, the daily flicker of AAPL is now less a measure of gadgets sold than a referendum on who still…
AirPods Pro 3: The World’s Newest Passport to Oblivion By Miles Blackstone, International Affairs Desk, Dave’s Locker GENEVA—In the shadow of the Jet d’Eau, where diplomats still argue about carbon ceilings they’ll never meet, Apple quietly slipped another sliver of white plastic into humanity’s collective ear canal. The AirPods Pro 3, unveiled yesterday in a…
Bad moods have gone global, and the planet is now exporting irritability in 4K resolution. From the fluorescent-lit call centers of Manila where operators practice smiling at 3 a.m. to the fog-shrouded cafés of Copenhagen where everyone is still somehow content, humanity has discovered that sulking scales. Moody is no longer a temperament; it is…
In the grand theater of international relations, where every handshake is a potential dagger and every pipeline a geopolitical jugular, the sudden romance between Azerbaijan and Ukraine is less a love story than a mutually beneficial hostage situation. One country sits atop enough oil to make a Saudi prince blush, while the other has become…
Connelly Early, for the handful of readers who haven’t already doom-scrolled past his name, is the sort of mid-tier American bureaucrat whose sudden elevation to global talking-point tells you everything about how thin the membrane between order and chaos has become. Until last Thursday he was an assistant under-secretary for something so forgettably titled that…
Baku to Kyiv: Two Wars, One Playbook, Zero Refunds By Our Man Who’s Stopped Expecting Miracles If the planet were a casino, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe would be those smoky back tables where the house always wins and the players keep doubling down on losing hands. This week, while the world’s attention swung like…
Ouagadougou’s Stade du 4 Août, 10 p.m. local time, and the mercury is still flirting with 38°C. The turf looks like it’s been blow-dried by a Saharan hair-dryer, which is fitting: everything about Burkina Faso vs Egypt these days feels like a slow-motion tumbleweed of geopolitical slapstick. On paper it’s a football qualifier—2026 World Cup,…
