England vs South Africa: Two Former Empires Attempt Sport While the Planet Burns By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Indian Ocean LONDON—If you squint through the smog and the smugness, Tuesday’s Oval showdown between England and South Africa looks like a simple cricket match. Two teams, 22 millionaires in whites, a…
The NFL’s Global Roadshow: How One League Exports Helmeted Capitalism to a Bewildered Planet By Dave’s Locker International Desk Every September, while most of the world is busy arguing about energy prices, coups, or the correct pronunciation of “GIF,” roughly 120 million humans from Minsk to Manila suddenly acquire opinions on third-string cornerbacks. The culprit:…
Dublin to Dubai, Vegas to Vladivostok: Conor McGregor and the Global Theater of One-Liners and Lawsuits By Diego “The Diplomat” Salgado, for Dave’s Locker When Conor McGregor first laced up gloves in a threadbare Crumlin gym, the planet was busy worrying about Greek debt, Beyoncé’s surprise album, and whether the Large Hadron Collider would accidentally…
Phillies Score: A Humble Tally That Could Tilt the Planet From a rooftop bar in Istanbul—where the Bosphorus glitters like a bribed official and the muezzin competes with Euro-trash pop—tonight’s Phillies score scrolls across the ticker: Philadelphia 7, Opponent 3. The barflies, mostly German tech consultants who think RBI is a new cryptocurrency, raise their…
The Curious Case of Paul Doyle: A Parable for Our Interconnected Age By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent Dateline: Somewhere between Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and a half-functional Zoom call Paul Doyle, if the name rings any bells at all, is the mild-mannered Irish civil servant who accidentally set off a trans-continental domino cascade last Tuesday. One…
Mamdani: A Name That Travels—Sometimes with a Passport, Sometimes Without By Our Man in Every Terminal Lounge If you say “Mamdani” in a faculty club in New York, you’ll summon a polite nod to Mahmood Mamdani, the Ugandan polymath whose books on colonial ghosts and post-colonial hangover are heavier than the guilt in an IMF…
Crawford vs Canelo: When Two Hemispheres Collide in a Glorified Parking-Lot Behind a Casino in Vegas Dave’s Locker Global Dispatch, 9 May 2024 The boxing world has finally found a way to make the war in Gaza, the collapse of the Yen, and the slow-motion implosion of the Arctic ice shelf feel like quaint side-notes:…
The Roman Empire had bread, circuses, and the occasional crucifixion; the modern United States has 17 weeks of NFL football, $18 nacho helmets, and the moral certainty that anyone who kneels during the anthem must hate freedom. From the outside looking in—say, from a rain-soaked Glasgow pub or a Seoul subway car packed with K-League…
Victoria Station: The World’s Most Overqualified Waiting Room By Our London Correspondent, nursing a tepid flat white and existential dread London, UK – Somewhere beneath the ornamental pigeons and the low, grey sky that passes for weather here, Victoria Station yawns open like a bored Leviathan. Every minute, 2,000 fresh pilgrims—armed with wheelie bags, misplaced…
Achieve: A Global Tour of the Impossible Dream, Now 30 % Off By Our Correspondent, Somewhere between Terminal 3 and Existential Dread “Achieve,” the travel brochure promises, is a quaint village reachable by anyone with grit, Wi-Fi, and a premium LinkedIn subscription. In reality it’s more of a floating island—today moored off the coast of…
GLOBAL FENDER-BENDERS & THE MERCENARIES WHO LOVE THEM A dispatch on car-crash lawyers from our correspondent who once watched a Lagos traffic jam swallow an ambulance whole Lagos, 8:03 a.m. The danfo minibus kisses the rear bumper of a freshly-imported Tesla—an unholy union of 1990s carburetor and 2020s firmware. Within seconds, two men in fluorescent…
Brewery Lane, Newtownards: A Tiny Street with a Hangover the Size of the World Dave’s Locker, International Desk – Somewhere between the sixth pint of Guinness and the seventh lecture on supply-chain resilience, it struck me that Brewery Lane in Newtownards, County Down, is less a street than a geopolitical metaphor in brick form. The…
