The Patriots Schedule as Geopolitical Weather Vane A Dispatch from the Department of Overthinking Sports By the time the New England Patriots open their 2024 campaign against the Bengals in Cincinnati, no fewer than twelve sovereign governments will have changed, three currencies will have wobbled, and one rogue nation will have discovered that threatening nuclear…
Jane McDonald and the Curious Soft Power of a Cruise-Ship Chanteuse Dave’s Locker – International Desk, somewhere between the buffet and the lifeboats If you mention “Jane McDonald” in a Manchester pub, someone will involuntarily hum “Cruise,” raise an imaginary piña colada, and reminisce about 1998—the year Britain briefly convinced itself that nautical karaoke could…
Jennifer Lopez and the Global Mirage of Endless Reinvention By Our Correspondent, drinking airport coffee that tastes like geopolitics Somewhere over the Atlantic, the in-flight entertainment system lurches into life and there she is again: Jennifer Lopez, ageless and suspiciously pore-free, gyrating through a medley that has already been adopted as the unofficial soundtrack in…
**The Gentle Art of Global Domination: How Alan Titchmarsh Conquered the World One Petunia at a Time** While the planet burns and democracy crumbles like overbaked shortbread, there’s something almost subversive about a 74-year-old British gardener who has quietly become more influential than most world leaders. Alan Titchmarsh—yes, that affable chap with the perpetual tan…
The world’s collective attention span, already shorter than a TikTok reel, has latched onto Eilish McColgan with the same ferocity it reserves for missing submersibles and celebrity divorces. From a windswept track in Eugene, Oregon, to a floodlit stadium in Doha, the Scottish distance runner has become an unlikely geopolitical weather vane: whichever way she…
The planet tilts gently on its axis every autumn, but nowhere tips harder than the United States, where entire Sundays now disappear into the neon vortex known as NFL Sunday Ticket. From the rueful comfort of a Singapore hawker centre or a Lisbon tasca, one can watch American ex-pats—once worldly backpackers—suddenly transform into helmet-clutching oracles…
THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF HEARTBREAK, NOW WITH BETTER LABS Dispatch from the Bureau of Cosmic Irony, somewhere above the Atlantic If you’ve flown from Lagos to London lately, scrolled TikTok in São Paulo, or queued for ramen in Shibuya at 2 a.m., odds are the same ghostly falsetto floated through the earbuds of the stranger…
LeBron James, Hall of Famer: A Global Empire Built on Sneakers, Screaming Fans, and the Fragile Myth of Meritocracy By Dave’s Locker International Desk It happened, inevitably, like a tax deadline or a coup in a midsized republic: LeBron James was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. The ceremony took place in…
Ros Canter: How One Woman and One Horse Are Quietly Redrawing the Map of Global Sport By the time most of us had finished our second coffee and begun pretending to answer emails, Ros Canter was already airborne somewhere above the dew-soaked turf of the Pratoni del Vivaro. The 32-year-old from Lincolnshire—population roughly equivalent to…
The Bear Is Global Now: How Ayo Edebiri Became the Accidental Diplomat of Kitchen Rage By Dave’s International Correspondent, still picking confit out of his passport PARIS—In the grand tradition of soft-power exports, the United States has previously given the world jazz, jeans, and that nagging suspicion that democracy ships with optional upgrades. Now, courtesy…
PARIS—On a rain-slick afternoon outside the Olympia, the queue stretches from the brasserie awnings all the way to the Seine, as if the river itself decided to form an orderly line for once. Inside, a 51-year-old Mancunian in a khaki parka is sound-checking the same four chords the planet has been hearing since 1994, and…
Carol Kirkwood: The Weather Oracle the World Didn’t Know It Needed By Dave’s Locker International Desk In the grand, smoldering tapestry of 2024—where oceans boil, glaciers sulk, and half the planet votes for leaders who treat climatology as a punch line—there stands, improbably, Carol Kirkwood. To the untrained eye she is merely the BBC’s perennially…
