UK Football: The Empire Strikes Back—With VAR and Petrodollars By Our Man in the Global Sports Saloon Somewhere over the North Atlantic, a chartered Gulfstream carrying a Qatari banker, a Silicon Valley data guru, and three North London season-ticket holders collides with the jet stream of history. The topic in the cabin: whether Manchester City’s…
UFC 320: When the Octagon Becomes the World’s Most Honest Diplomatic Channel Dave’s Locker International Desk | São Paulo → Las Vegas → Riyadh By the time the blood had dried on the canvas at UFC 320, three continents had already filed diplomatic cables about the main event. Not because the Dagestani champion had delivered…
Match of the Day: A Global Spectacle, Sponsored by Existential Dread By Our Foreign Desk Correspondent, somewhere between the bar and the abyss LONDON—Somewhere in the bowels of Broadcasting House, the BBC’s flagship football digest rolls off the production line every Saturday night like a precision-guided missile aimed squarely at the nation’s collective sofa. But…
Tudum: The Global Echo Chamber We Never Asked For If you’ve ever wondered what the sound of late-stage capitalism clearing its throat would be, Netflix has helpfully provided the answer: “Tudum.” A two-syllable onomatopoeic belch that now doubles as a fan-festival, streaming strategy, and, increasingly, a soft-power flex. Last week the traveling circus—equal parts trade-show,…
The BBC schedule, that timid spreadsheet of imperial nostalgia, still beams out from London with the solemnity of a butler announcing dinner. Yet what looks like a quaint list of “Gardeners’ World” and “Antiques Roadshow” is, in truth, a soft-power stealth bomber making nightly landings in 180-odd territories. While Washington exports aircraft carriers and Beijing…
From the Souk to the Streaming Queue: Barbara Eden’s Accidental Diplomacy in a Post-Genie World By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats Somewhere between the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the latest TikTok cease-fire, a perky brunette in harem pants blinked into existence and never quite blinked out. Barbara Eden—actress, accidental soft-power envoy, and…
Palmeiras vs Internacional: A Rumble in Brazil That Might Just Decide the Fate of Civilization (Or at Least the Weekend Mood of 215 Million People) RIO DE JANEIRO—When Palmeiras and Internacional jog onto the pitch at Allianz Parque this Sunday, the rest of the planet will be dutifully worrying about inflation, wars, and whatever new…
The Drummer Who Outlasted Empires: Roger Taylor’s Quiet Reign Over a Planet in 4/4 Time By “International” Ed Malone, somewhere over the Atlantic, still waiting for the seat-belt sign to turn off Mention the name “Roger Taylor” in a bar in Buenos Aires and you’ll get a Queen medley hummed by a septuagenarian with a…
SMU vs Missouri State: How a College Football Exhibition Quietly Became a Geopolitical Weather Vane By: Our Man in the Upper Deck, Somewhere Over the Atlantic DALLAS—On a humid Saturday that felt engineered by a vindictive meteorologist, Southern Methodist University lined up against Missouri State in something the brochures optimistically labeled the “Arctic Wolf Cotton…
The Georgia Tech Score Heard ’Round the World By Our Correspondent Who Still Owes Student Loans in Three Currencies ATLANTA—Somewhere between the peach-scented humidity of Georgia and the algorithmic chill of a Bloomberg terminal, a number flickered across millions of screens this week: Georgia Tech 68, Opponent 65. On the surface it’s merely the final…
In the grand theater of global spectacle—where billionaires race to Mars and teenagers topple governments with a meme—there stands a bald Dutchman hurling tungsten missiles at a board the size of a dinner plate. Michael van Gerwen, three-time world champion and walking endorsement for prenatal caffeine abuse, has become the unlikely barometer for how the…
Tuskegee vs Jackson State: A Southern Football Grudge Match That Somehow Matters to the Planet By Hans-Joachim “H.J.” van der Waal, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker ATLANTA—In the same week that COP28 delegates in Dubai were counting carbon credits on gold-plated abacuses, two historically Black universities in the American Deep South scheduled a football game that…
