Juan Soler: The Argentinian Telenovela Heart-Throb Who Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Rorschach Test By Dave’s Locker Global Desk If you’ve never heard of Juan Soler, congratulations—you’ve successfully avoided Latin America’s most potent export after inflation and existential dread. For the uninitiated, Soler is the square-jawed Argentinian actor whose career has ping-ponged between playing brooding polo…
Pirates vs Braves: The World Keeps Betting on the Wrong Outlaws By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between the Black Sea and the Red Tape If you thought “Pirates vs Braves” was merely a late-night baseball score, congratulations—your innocence is adorable. From Singapore to Somalia, the planet now stages the same tired morality play: men with eye…
Lisa Monaco: Washington’s Fixer-in-Chief Finds the Whole World Is Now the Client WASHINGTON—In the marble mausoleum that passes for the U.S. Department of Justice, Lisa Monaco is the closest thing to a universal adapter plug. Slide her into any geopolitical socket—cyber-intrusion in Bucharest, ransomware in Rio, or a coup-curious colonel in Conakry—and somehow the lights…
The planet’s most reliable diplomatic channel these days isn’t Geneva, Vienna, or even that soulless Marriott in Riyadh with the 24-hour hummus bar. It’s a paddock in Kentucky where a 1,200-pound quadruped with the IQ of a damp sponge is currently deciding whether to sign a free-trade agreement by trotting clockwise or counterclockwise. Welcome to…
Guyana, the pint-sized South American republic wedged between Venezuela and Suriname, has spent most of its 57 independent years as the answer to a trivia question nobody asked. Lately, however, the world’s energy giants have started treating it like the last unopened bottle at closing time. ExxonMobil, Chevron, and a chorus of smaller desperados have…
Cushendall, County Antrim—population 1,280, sheep 3,421, Wi-Fi signal occasionally audible—has just been named Northern Ireland’s newest “Eco-Destination of the Year,” a title greeted locally with the same enthusiasm reserved for a second-place raffle ticket. Yet this windswept hook of basalt and drizzle, huddled between the Antrim Glens and the North Channel’s grey indifference, has quietly…
Barkov: the name now ricochets around chat rooms, boardrooms, and dimly lit war rooms from Helsinki to Ho Chi Minh City with the same urgency once reserved for terms like “sub-prime” or “Brexit.” At first glance it sounds like a mid-tier vodka brand or a minor character in a Dostoevsky subplot, but Barkov—part meme, part…
Capgemini: The Quiet Colossus Outsourcing the Apocalypse—One Spreadsheet at a Time PARIS—While the rest of us were doom-scrolling through 2023’s greatest hits—wildfires, coups, AI-generated pop songs—Capgemini celebrated its 56th birthday by quietly adding another 30,000 humans to its payroll. That’s roughly the population of Liechtenstein, give or take a tax haven. Not bad for a…
The Ballad of Justin Rose, or How a Very Polite Englishman Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Weather Vane By Our Man in the Fairway, Still Nursing a Hangover from Geneva In the grand casino where nations hedge their soft-power bets—Olympic villages, World Cup stadiums, the occasional F1 paddock—golf was long dismissed as the pastel-colored safe space…
The Swedish Meteor That Missed Every Radar Screen By our correspondent in the bunker beneath Geneva’s Palais des Nations GENEVA—In a week when the planet busied itself with the usual carousel of missile tests, crypto collapses, and whichever royal duchess is currently suing a tabloid, a 24-year-old from Esbjerg (yes, that’s in Denmark, but try…
Alabama vs Georgia: When a College Football Grudge Becomes a Proxy War for the Planet’s Nervous Breakdown Dave’s Locker | International Desk ATLANTA—While the rest of the world spent New Year’s Eve stockpiling rapid tests, fireworks, or sheer existential dread, the American Deep South was busy rehearsing its own ritualized apocalypse: Alabama versus Georgia, college…
PARIS—If you drew a straight line from the Kremlin war room to the Hollywood Hills, you’d find Perrie Edwards somewhere on the flight path, sipping an oat-milk latte and accidentally destabilising the algorithmic order of the known world. The former Little Mix soprano—now solo artist, fashion house muse, and walking soft-power missile—has become a case…
