Real Madrid vs Espanyol: A Timeline of Empire, Hubris, and the Quiet Misery of the Underdog Madrid, 28 April 2024 – Somewhere between the 13th-century reconquista and the 21st-century Champions League anthem, Real Madrid decided that losing was a moral failing best left to the peasants. Espanyol, meanwhile, has spent 120 years perfecting the art…
Sometime around 2 a.m. in Auckland, while most of the planet was doom-scrolling economic forecasts and wondering which hemisphere would catch fire next, the Women’s Rugby World Cup final kicked off like a polite riot in Eden Park. England versus New Zealand—two nations that once colonised each other’s accents—settled the matter with 80 minutes of…
If you’re looking for the 21st-century Silk Road, forget dusty caravans and Marco Polo cosplayers: follow the private-jet vapor trails to New Zealand’s South Island, the Norwegian Arctic, or a Kansas missile silo recently converted into “premium doomsday condos.” There, behind blast doors thick enough to make a Cold War general blush, the planet’s most…
The Global Hunger Games of Higher Education: How Rankings Turn Universities into Panic-Stricken Beauty Queens By Eduardo Valdez, Dave’s Locker Senior Correspondent (and occasional adjunct) Somewhere between the Suez Canal and a Zoom breakout room, the modern university lost its soul and found a spreadsheet. Each September, QS, THE, ARWU, and a small army of…
The Last Time Sir Bob Rattled the World’s Cage By Our Sardonically Seasoned Correspondent in Brussels (where the beer is strong and the guilt is stronger) It is 1984, Ethiopia is a synonym for famine, and somewhere between a synthesizer riff and a drum fill, Bob Geldof—an Irish rock singer whose biggest hit until then…
In Queens, New York, sits Benjamin N. Cardozo High School—a red-brick monument to the American conviction that meritocracy can be manufactured like plastic lawn flamingos. Named after the Supreme Court justice who once called law “a solemn farce,” the building now hosts a daily farce of its own: 3,800 teenagers trying to game the algorithm…
Storm in a Teacup, with Global Froth by Our Man in the Departure Lounge The British Isles are once again under official “don’t panic, but do panic” orders as the Met Office issues a fresh flurry of colour-coded weather warnings—amber for wind, yellow for rain, and, in a festive twist, a sort of mauve for…
Omaze: The Golden Ticket Factory Where Dreams Are Packaged in USD, EUR, and Existential Dread by our correspondent in the Duty-Free Lounge of Disillusionment Somewhere between the duty-free Bulgari store and Gate 42B at Heathrow, an email pings: “Win a Tuscan villa & a Lamborghini for £10.” The sender is Omaze, the Los Angeles-based sweepstake-cum-conscience…
The Jet-Set Hunger Games: When “Celebrity Race Across the World” Becomes a Passport to Our Collective Guilt By the time the private-jet fumes had dissipated somewhere over the Azores, the first Instagram post had already gone viral: a selfie of a British pop star pouting beside a broken-down tuk-tuk in rural Laos, captioned “Finding myself…
Stardust Racers: How Billionaires Turned the Cosmos Into Their Private Monaco Grand Prix By The Unimpressed Correspondent, filed from an undisclosed low-orbit bar The latest celestial spectacle isn’t a meteor shower or a comet with an unpronounceable name—it’s the Stardust Racers, a floating Formula One where the exhaust is literal plasma and the pit crews…
The planet’s fastest-growing welfare state doesn’t issue passports, levy taxes, or bother with elections. It’s called GoFundMe, a Silicon Valley startup that has quietly become the de-facto Ministry of Last Resort for the 21st-century human. From Manila to Manchester, when the chemotherapy invoice arrives, the volcano erupts, or the local warlord decides your village is…
GoFundMe, the Silicon Valley-born digital tin cup, has quietly become the world’s most efficient post-colonial tax collector—only instead of taking your money, it politely asks for it while telling the tragic backstory of your neighbor’s exploding pancreas. From Manila to Manchester, the platform now hosts roughly one campaign for every seven humans who’ve ever had…
