Toluca vs Puebla: When Two Mexican Towns Turn a Soccer Rivalry into a Global Parable of Inflation, Emigration, and Existential Despair By the time the whistle blew last Saturday night, Estadio Nemesio Diez looked less like a football ground and more like a Hieronymus Bosch painting sponsored by Coca-Cola. Smoke from illicit flares mingled with…
Somewhere between the soy latte belt and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, two MLS franchises will meet on Saturday night in what the marketing department politely calls “a Western Conference showdown.” The rest of the planet, busy watching oil prices, missile parades, and the slow-motion implosion of several democracies, will glance over just long enough to…
The Global Gospel According to Six Little Numbers By “Lucky” Matteo Volkov, roaming correspondent and reluctant statistician Somewhere between the duty-free cigarette counter and the overpriced espresso machine at Istanbul’s new mega-airport, I watched a Kazakh oil engineer, a Filipino nurse, and a German backpacker queue for the same thing: a slip of thermal paper…
Fábio Carvalho: The €7 Million Footballer Who Reminds Us the World Is Still For Sale, Just at a Discount If you squint hard enough at Fábio Carvalho’s career trajectory, you can see the entire global economy refracted in miniature: a Portuguese kid born in Torres Vedras, polished in England, loan-dumped in Germany, and now hawked…
Tyler Smith, a 29-year-old supply-chain analyst from Des Moines, woke up last Tuesday convinced he was, in fact, the epicenter of the global economy. The rest of the planet, still rubbing sleep from its eyes, did not immediately concur. Yet within 48 hours Tyler’s spreadsheet—an unassuming .xlsx file titled “FinalFinal_V6(Really).xlsx”—had ricocheted from a Midwestern laptop…
The Global Bazaar of Bang, or How to Arm Your Neighbor in Five Easy Steps By Our Man Somewhere Between the Hague and a Hardened Bunker Geneva—Here, in the city that gave the world both the Red Cross and a 1.50-franc espresso, diplomats still pretend that weapons are merely “controlled commodities.” One floor above the…
North Dakota vs. Montana: A Prairie Cold War the World Pretends Not to Notice By “Marcel Dufresne,” Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker PARIS—While the rest of the planet obsesses over which septuagenarian will control the nuclear football, a quieter, far more existential struggle has broken out on the high plains of the United States: North Dakota…
PARIS—At 09:00 CET, while the European Central Bank was busy explaining why inflation is “transitory” for the fourteenth consecutive month, a parallel monetary drama was unfolding in front of the Opéra Garnier. Two hundred people—Tokyo scalpers, Detroit teens on spring break, and a surprisingly well-informed delegation from Lagos—stood in a queue that smelled faintly of…
Gyokeres: When a Swedish Striker Becomes the World’s Favorite Economic Indicator By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk The name “Gyokeres” has lately been muttered in places where football boots fear to tread: hedge-fund break rooms in Mayfair, Bundesbank briefing folders, even the dimly lit karaoke bars of Singapore where traders unwind by belting ABBA’s back catalogue…
The Derek Carr Paradox: How One Quarterback’s Trade Request Quietly Terrified the Global Order By Santiago “Santi” Vargas, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker GENEVA—While the Swiss were busy polishing the Large Hadron Collider and pretending their mountains aren’t full of Nazi gold, Derek Carr—yes, that Derek Carr—ignited a chain reaction more unpredictable than any particle physicist…
Milwaukee, Wisconsin—population 577,000, beer-per-capita champion of the Midwest, and, this week, the unlikely geopolitical barometer for the rest of the planet. While CNN loops footage of glaciers doing their best Titanic impression and the EU debates whether to classify “pleasant spring day” as a protected heritage item, Milwaukee has opted for a more avant-garde climate…
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…
