Freetown, Sierra Leone – If the world were a dinner party, Sierra Leone would be the guest who arrives fashionably late, still wiping blood off its shoes, politely asks for water, and then gets handed the bill for everyone else’s cocktails. A nation that has endured coups, a diamond-fuelled civil war, Ebola, and mudslides the…
IND vs SL: A Scorecard for the Apocalypse Lite™ (Disclaimer: No actual locusts were harmed in the making of this fixture) Colombo, Tuesday – While half the planet argued about which billionaire should steer the asteroid-deflecting yacht, 22 men in dazzling whites reminded us that the end of the world will still be interrupted for…
The Empire Strikes Back—With Ball-by-Ball Commentary By the Bureau Chief for Existential Sportsball, somewhere over the Indian Ocean Somewhere between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of TikTok, a quiet data-colony called ESPNcricinfo slipped its leash and began running the cricket world by remote control. Once a modest scorecard service born in…
Sevilla—city of orange trees, flamenco, and the gentle whir of air-conditioning units trying to out-hum the existential dread of 2024—has lately become the world’s most improbable barometer. While diplomats in Brussels argue over comma placement and Silicon Valley titans promise to upload your soul to a spreadsheet, Sevilla is quietly demonstrating what happens when a…
South Alabama Football: When American Pageantry Meets the Global Panic Room By “Jet-Lagged” Javier, filing from somewhere between Doha Duty-Free and a Mobile, Alabama Waffle House The Jaguars of the University of South Alabama do not, at first glance, look like geopolitical actors. Their stadium seats barely 25,000—roughly the capacity of a mediocre European airport…
São Paulo, Brazil – Somewhere on the other side of the equator and most of the civilized world’s attention span, the letters “SE LA” and “LSU” are being hurled at one another like undercooked empanadas in a family WhatsApp group. To the uninitiated, it sounds like the latest cryptocurrency rug-pull. To the initiated—mostly residents of…
The Gates Scholarship: A Golden Ticket in a World Where Most Kids Still Can’t Afford the Chocolate Bar By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Let us begin with the obvious: if you’re reading this in a refugee tent outside Gaziantep, a tin-roof classroom in rural Uttar Pradesh, or a cyber-café in Lagos where the power cuts every…
Accra’s Kotoka International Airport has, of late, become the involuntary terminus for a very particular kind of frequent-flyer program: the modern deportation. While the arrivals board flashes the usual banalities—“Dubai, 14:30, On Time”—it neglects to list the bonus routes pioneered by Washington, London, Berlin, and even Stockholm: red-eye specials with no in-flight duty-free, plastic-cuffed passengers,…
Telemundo News: The Telenovela-Flavored Mirror Latin America Holds Up to the World By an Over-Caffeinated Correspondent Who’s Lost the Remote You don’t need to speak Spanish fluently to grasp the plot twist: while the English-speaking world binge-scrolls TikToks of cats lip-syncing NATO communiqués, roughly 40 million prime-time viewers from Tierra del Fuego to the Bronx…
Buffalo Won: The Day the Herd Turned the World Upside Down By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Geneva GENEVA—Somewhere between the yak caravans of Lhasa and the water-coolers of Davos, the phrase “Buffalo Won” started trending. It wasn’t the Super Bowl, the Indian Premier League, or even the Mongolian Naadam finals. It was, improbably,…
Bamako, the capital whose name sounds like a late-night jazz riff but whose mornings smell of diesel, dust, and unfiltered ambition, sits on the Niger River like a card player who’s already shown his hand too many times. In the global imagination, Mali is either a red blob on the Foreign Office map or the…
Bethune-Cookman: A Tiny Florida Campus that Explains Why the Planet is Still on Fire Dateline – Daytona Beach, Florida – or, as it is known in the darker corners of Davos, “Exhibit A in the Tragedy of the Commons.” From a satellite’s bored eye, Bethune-Cookman University looks like a modest cluster of red-brick optimism wedged…
