**The Numbers That Launch a Thousand Visa Applications** The cricket score, that innocent-looking sequence of digits flashed across stadium screens from Mumbai to Manchester, has evolved into something far more consequential than a mere accounting of runs and wickets. In our gloriously interconnected world of 24-hour news cycles and instant gratification, these humble numbers now…
The Gregorian calendar, that cheerful fiction we all agreed to pretend is real, insists the Formula 1 circus is in town once again—this time in Jeddah, a city whose coastal corniche looks suspiciously like Monaco after a particularly aggressive sand-blasting. Somewhere between the call to prayer and the call to Netflix, millions of humans will…
Laura Kuenssberg: The BBC’s Political Gladiator in the Global Colosseum By Dave’s Locker International Desk To the uninitiated, Laura Kuenssberg is merely the BBC’s former political editor—now elevated to Sunday-morning inquisitor on *Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg*—a job title that sounds suspiciously like a hostage video. Yet beyond Britain’s damp little island, her significance has metastasized…
The Glorious Farce of “Um Football” – A Global Tour of Hesitation, Bureaucracy, and the Beautiful Game’s Beautiful Confusion By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you type “um football” into a search engine anywhere outside North America, you will receive 1) a polite correction to “football,” 2) a flurry of American university athletics pages, or…
BILLIE JEAN KING, OR HOW ONE WOMAN MADE THE WORLD PRETEND TO CARE ABOUT EQUAL PAY FOR AN AFTERNOON By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats PARIS—In the city that once guillotined its aristocrats for sport, a bronze statue of Billie Jean King now stands on the hallowed clay of Roland-Garros, racket frozen mid-backhand as…
Immigration Appeals Court: Where Hope Goes to Get a Number and Wait in Line Forever By the Global Affairs Correspondent who has watched passports change hands more often than a €500 note in a Bulgarian nightclub. Walk into any immigration appeals court on the planet and you’ll find the same décor: fluorescent lighting that flatters…
Natalie Portman: The Accidental Geopolitical Weapon By the time most passports have collected three sad visa stamps, Natalie Portman has already rewritten the foreign-policy syllabus. Born in Jerusalem, passport-stamped in Washington, educated at Harvard, Oscar-polished in Los Angeles, and now—because the world insists on tidy narratives—drafted into the culture wars of half a dozen capitals….
Sara Cox: How a Rugby Referee From Rochdale Accidentally Became a Global Allegory for Everything By Our Jaded Correspondent, currently self-medicating with airport whisky PARIS—The planet is on fire, supply chains are collapsing, and the Doomsday Clock has crept so close to midnight that the minute hand needs a restraining order. Yet in the midst…
Lucid: The Word the World Pretends to Understand While Hitting Snooze By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Jet Lag and Existential Dread Lucid, adj. — clear in expression or thought; rational; easily understood. A lovely, optimistic scrap of Latin that somehow survived the fall of Rome, two world wars, and an internet full of conspiracy theories…
Jennifer Garner and the Geopolitics of Nice: How America’s Sweetheart Became a Soft-Power WMD By our correspondent in the neutral wasteland between Hollywood and reality PARIS—While the Northern Hemisphere frets over ballistic missile tests and the Southern Hemisphere drowns in micro-plastics, the United States has quietly deployed its most destabilizing weapon yet: Jennifer Garner. Not…
Novak Djokovic: The Last Sovereign of a Crumbling Empire By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk There’s a small, rectangular kingdom that exists wherever a tennis court has white lines and a net. It has no parliament, no currency, and no immigration queue—only a scoreboard and the faint smell of overpriced sunscreen. For the better part of…
Alcaraz vs Djokovic: The Gladiator Match in Which the Colosseum Is Everywhere By Dave’s Locker Global Sports Bureau (with a flask in the press box) PARIS – On a late-spring afternoon when the Seine smelled only faintly of industrial despair and the Eiffel Tower’s lights blinked like a malfunctioning slot machine, two men in white…
