Ohio State Football Schedule, or How the Midwest Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Empire By “Diplomatic” Correspondent, somewhere between Berlin and a layover in Detroit Columbus, Ohio—population 906,000, time zone UTC-5, export commodities: soybeans, insurance salesmen, and unfiltered dread. Every autumn the city’s pulse syncs to a drumline that can be heard, if…
Jack Grealish, the £100 million hair-band, has spent the season oscillating between the Manchester City bench and the global meme economy like a geopolitical ping-pong ball. In any other era, a footballer known primarily for his calves and calamity would be a parochial curiosity. But ours is the age when a misplaced shinpad in the…
TalkSport: The Empire’s Last Radio Outpost Now Broadcasts the Global Desperation Derby By Dave’s Locker’s chief correspondent, still wearing yesterday’s cynicism and a suspiciously stained press badge. From a windowless studio somewhere between a Pret and a Ladbrokes in London’s docklands, TalkSport continues to pump football opinions into the ionosphere with the same imperial confidence…
The 6’8″ Revelation: How a French Teenager’s Serve Became a Geopolitical Weapon By the time Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard had finished pummelling the Adelaide International’s speed gun at 243 km/h last January, three distinct constituencies were already recalibrating their spreadsheets. Tennis Australia’s marketing department began quietly deleting old promos of “friendly” Nick Kyrgios; the International Tennis…
Noah Centineo and the Soft-Power Romance Industrial Complex A field report from the Department of Global Heartthrobs and Geopolitical Fluff PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine and the 13th arrondissement’s last surviving DVD store, a gaggle of Korean exchange students is reenacting that locker-kiss scene from “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.” Their TikTok hashtag (#CentineoInSeoul)…
Mikel Arteta, the accidental geopolitician, is currently conducting a real-time experiment in soft power from a bench in North London. While the rest of us doom-scroll through tariff wars, coups, and that inexplicable new TikTok dance, Arteta has quietly turned Arsenal Football Club into a multilateral alliance that would make the UN Security Council blush…
Sam Heughan: Scotland’s Accidental Soft-Power Kilt Missile and the World’s Thirst for Tartan-Wrapped Reassurance By Our Man in the Highlands, Nursing a Hangover and a Passport Full of Airport Stamps There are moments when the global order feels like a Jenga tower assembled by drunk toddlers: one wobble in Washington, one sneeze in Beijing, and…
Brie Larson and the Peculiar Global Sport of Watching Actors Become Ideological Footballs By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere over the Pacific It began, as most twenty-first-century international incidents do, with a tweet. Brie Larson—Oscar-winner, Marvel franchise linchpin, part-time YouTube vlogger—once suggested that film criticism could stand a wider range of voices. Within…
The planet keeps smouldering—literally in some latitudes—but 1.2 billion eyeballs still found time last week to watch 22 women in mint-green and navy-blue polyester chase a red leather sphere across a rectangle in Mumbai. Australia Women vs India Women—sounds almost quaint, like an academic debate on colonial legacies, except the only thesis being defended was…
Jayden Federline: The Unlikely Geopolitical Barometer of Our Distracted Age By Dave’s Locker International Desk In the grand, slightly mildewed theatre of global affairs—where currencies convulse, glaciers defect southward, and diplomats pretend to read the footnotes—there now appears, stage left, a seventeen-year-old guitarist named Jayden Federline. He is the second son of Britney Spears and…
iOS 26: A Global Soft-Power Coup in 6.1 Inches By Dave’s Locker’s Bureau of Late-Stage Capitalism Correspondence GENEVA — While the United Nations was busy drafting yet another sternly-worded letter about somewhere being on fire, Apple quietly dropped iOS 26 last week, instantly redrawing the planet’s cultural map faster than you can say “non-binding resolution.”…
The Ballad of Mac DeMarco, or How One Slack Canadian Became the Soundtrack to a Planet’s Collective Quarter-Life Crisis PARIS—On a recent Tuesday night, the line for DeMarco’s free pop-up gig outside Shakespeare and Company bookstore snaked past the Seine, where earnest Americans in thrifted Carhartt compared visa nightmares with French philosophy majors clutching dog-eared…
