The Scottish Premiership: A Cold, Damp Mirror Held Up to the World By Our Correspondent, freshly thawed after a Glasgow night bus Somewhere between the North Sea and the North Atlantic lies a league that is routinely mistaken for a weather report. The Scottish Premiership—twelve clubs, four seasons in one afternoon, and the global economy’s…
Celtic Score: How a Football Tally in Glasgow Became the World’s New Favorite Rorschach Test In the grand, perpetually malfunctioning casino we call planet Earth, nothing travels faster than a scoreline—except, perhaps, the hot takes that follow. When Celtic Football Club rattled in five unanswered goals against Slovan Bratislava on a damp Wednesday in Glasgow,…
The Red Card That Rules the World by A. Corvus, roving correspondent, somewhere between the locker room and the Hague On a damp Thursday in Dortmund, the referee reached into his breast pocket and produced what looked like a laminated square of doom. One crimson rectangle later, Jude Bellingham was trudging off the pitch, 80,000…
Somewhere between the tarmac of Dulles and the potholed fantasies of every commuter on Earth sits the U.S. Secretary of Transportation—a title that sounds thrillingly omnipotent until you remember it mostly involves begging Congress for money to replace bolts installed during the Ford administration. Still, for the rest of the planet, the office is less…
Robert Barnett: The Lawyer Who Makes Dictators Nervous and Billionaires Nervous-er By Dave’s International Desk of Perpetual Jet Lag If the global elite ever bother to hold a reunion, Robert Barnett will probably be the only person in the room who has both advised a sitting U.S. president on debate prep and negotiated a seven-figure…
Rugby World Cup: When 15 Men and a Ball Become the UN Security Council’s Only Functional Sub-Committee By Our Correspondent, currently elbow-deep in lukewarm stadium lager somewhere between the Tropics and Lat. 34°S The Rugby World Cup kicked off again this autumn—because apparently we needed another quadrennial reminder that human beings will happily volunteer to…
The Missing Link: Humanity’s Favorite Excuse for Not Reading the Footnotes By Our Correspondent, Still Recovering from Yet Another “Game-Changing” Press Conference ZURICH—For the fifth time this decade, the world awoke to headlines screaming that the “missing link” has finally been found. This week’s specimen—an exquisitely preserved 47-million-year-old primate dubbed *Darwinius masillae 2.0*—was unveiled in…
Clemency: The World’s Most Selective Pardon Program, Brought to You by Whoever’s Still in Power By the time you read this, some unlucky soul in a far-flung prison is probably discovering that mercy—like decent Wi-Fi—remains rationed by geography. From the marble-lined corridors of the U.S. Department of Justice to the gold-plated offices of Gulf monarchies,…
The world’s longest, most expensive staring contest is back on. Washington and Beijing have once again squared off across the Pacific, pupils dilated, wallets open, each daring the other to blink first while the rest of us try to remember when this stopped being metaphorical and started costing real money. From semiconductor embargoes that read…
PARIS — Somewhere between a Moldovan data-center and a Singaporean coffee shop that accepts Dogecoin for flat whites, the word “blockchain” has achieved the rare distinction of being simultaneously the most over-promised cure since snake oil and the most under-explained phenomenon since democracy. From Davos panels to Lagos fintech meet-ups, the distributed ledger has become…
Marvel, the corporate colossus that once sold ten-cent comics to kids who could still dream without pharmaceutical assistance, now stands as the planet’s most efficient exporter of spandex theology. From Lagos cineplexes to Siberian streaming queues, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has become the lingua franca of a planet too exhausted to invent its own myths….
The Rookie: A Global Affair in Four Acts By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent (currently hiding from expense-auditors in an airport lounge) Act I – The Universal Script Every nation has its own dialect, but the word “rookie” translates the same everywhere: liability with potential. From the trembling Tokyo recruit bowing 15° too low, to the…
