The Champions League standings have always been a kind of global stock exchange for hope—except the market never closes, the brokers are all teenagers in club-branded pajamas, and the dividends are measured in memes rather than money. Still, every autumn the same ritual unfolds: continents rearrange their body clocks to watch 32 clubs from 16…
Madrid, Spain—In the grand casino of global sport, Real Madrid is the house that never loses. While governments teeter, currencies wobble, and the planet itself runs a low-grade fever, the white-shirted mercenaries of the Bernabéu continue to collect pot after pot with the indifferent efficiency of a croupier who knows the wheel is rigged. Last…
Lisbon’s Estádio da Luz—aptly named the “Stadium of Light” when floodlights are the only reliable illumination left in Europe—will host the latest episode of geopolitical shadow-boxing masquerading as a football match. Benfica versus Qarabağ FK is, on paper, a routine Europa League quarter-final. In practice, it is a miniature Cold War on grass, complete with…
Riyadh’s Tuesday evening air carried the usual cocktail of sand, ambition, and mild existential dread—perfect weather, then, for Al-Hilal vs Al-Duhail, the Champions League quarter-final second leg that doubled as a geopolitical micro-drama for anyone still pretending football is “just a game.” The 2-0 score line that sent the Saudi side through may read like…
PARIS—While diplomats at UNESCO argue over whose cultural heritage gets the next plaque, a 22-year-old from Hopkins, Minnesota, has quietly become the most effective American export since the iPhone. Paige Bueckers—yes, the name that sounds like a Bavarian pastry—just led UConn to another NCAA title, and the planet took notice in that peculiar 21st-century way:…
Robin Wright, the accidental oracle of American decline, landed in London last week to promote her latest film and promptly offered the British press a masterclass in how to sound cosmopolitan while selling them their own post-Brexit melancholy back to them. The woman who once embodied the icy perfection of a Beltway power-wife now drifts…
WINDSOR CASTLE, England – On a rain-lashed afternoon that could have been sponsored by the British Tourist Board’s Department of Existential Dread, the planet’s most expensive pensioners’ residence loomed over the Thames like a granite middle finger to the concept of modesty. Windsor Castle—part fortress, part family crypt, part gift shop—has survived plague, revolution, civil…
Hamish Kerr: The Pole-Vaulting Diplomat Who Accidentally Unites a Fractured Planet By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent, filing from the thinning ozone layer above Auckland If you’ve never heard of Hamish Kerr, congratulations—you’ve been living under a rock that, frankly, has better Wi-Fi than most of the global south. For the uninitiated, Kerr is the 26-year-old…
In the grand theatre of geopolitics, nothing screams “late-stage empire” quite like two nations—each with a per-capita GDP smaller than the average Silicon Valley intern’s coffee allowance—being pitted against one another on the world’s most conspicuous stage. Bangladesh versus Afghanistan is not merely a fixture on the cricket calendar; it is the latest episode in…
Riley Green’s Tour: How a Red-Dirt Bard from Alabama Accidentally Became a Global Soft-Power Asset By Dave’s Locker, Foreign Bureau There are moments—rare, fleeting, and usually soundtracked by steel guitar—when the American South leaks into the wider world, and the wider world, baffled, decides it likes the taste. Enter Riley Green, the former University of…
Neighbours, Nukes, and the Neoliberal Nostalgia of Stefan Dennis By Our Foreign Desk, somewhere over the Pacific Sometime around 1985, while Reagan and Gorbachev were trading pleasantries about mutually assured destruction, an Australian soap opera quietly exported suburban melodrama to 60-odd countries and accidentally turned a Melbourne cul-de-sac into a soft-power superweapon. At the centre…
Valley Forge Military Academy: Where the World Sends Its Sons to Learn the Ancient Art of Marching in Circles By Dave’s Foreign Desk, still jet-lagged from a diplomatic reception in Ulaanbaatar that featured fermented yak milk and PowerPoint slides on “synergistic deterrence.” Wayne, Pennsylvania – On a crisp morning that smells faintly of wet wool…
