Gyokeres: When a Swedish Striker Becomes the World’s Favorite Economic Indicator By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk The name “Gyokeres” has lately been muttered in places where football boots fear to tread: hedge-fund break rooms in Mayfair, Bundesbank briefing folders, even the dimly lit karaoke bars of Singapore where traders unwind by belting ABBA’s back catalogue…
Bananas in the Anthropocene: A Fruit That Thinks It’s a Baseball Team For a planet currently busy stockpiling canned beans and iodine tablets, it is oddly reassuring to watch 7,000 Georgians—actual Georgians, not the Eurasian variety—lose their collective minds over a yellow-clad circus that calls itself the Savannah Bananas. From the outside, the spectacle resembles…
Edu Gaspar: The Diplomat in Cleats Quietly Reordering Global Football’s Furniture By “Dave’s Locker” International Correspondent Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Geneva—pick your clichéd dateline—doesn’t matter. Wherever you stand, Edu Gaspar is already there, smiling politely while shifting the tectonic plates under world football like a maître d’ who’s just noticed the VIP table needs…
Telemundo News: The Telenovela-Flavored Mirror Latin America Holds Up to the World By an Over-Caffeinated Correspondent Who’s Lost the Remote You don’t need to speak Spanish fluently to grasp the plot twist: while the English-speaking world binge-scrolls TikToks of cats lip-syncing NATO communiqués, roughly 40 million prime-time viewers from Tierra del Fuego to the Bronx…
**SmackDown Diplomacy: How WWE’s Traveling Circus Became the Last Universal Language** GENEVA—While the UN Security Council spent Friday night bickering over whose turn it is to veto humanitarian aid, 1.3 million people from Lagos to Lahore tuned into WWE SmackDown to watch a man in neon spandex pretend-break another man’s spine over a folding chair….
Ore Oduba: How A British TV Host Became The Canary In Our Global Celebrity Coal Mine By Our Man in a Mid-Cost Airline Lounge, Somewhere Over the Persian Gulf There are, by last IMF count, roughly 7.9 billion humans currently failing to save for retirement. Of these, only one is named Ore Oduba—an accident of…
Clare Balding and the Global Circus: How One British Broadcaster Accidentally Became a Barometer for the End of Empires By the time Clare Balding read the weather report for the King’s coronation in seven languages—five of which she does not speak—viewers from Lagos to Lima realised something profound had shifted. The BBC had, without meaning…
Jade Little Mix: How a Brit-Pop Side Hustle Became the World’s Favorite Glitter-Splattered Diplomatic Crisis By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Duty-Free and Disillusionment In the grand tradition of exporting manufactured rebellion, Britain has once again gifted the planet a cultural hand-grenade—this time wrapped in sequins, marinated in Auto-Tune, and labeled Jade Little Mix. What began…
Thunderbirds, or as most of the planet now calls them, “the flying ambulance that lands on your Instagram feed,” have become the rare military export that nobody minds receiving. Picture a scarlet jet screaming over a refugee camp in Jordan, dropping nothing more lethal than colored smoke and a promise that someone, somewhere, still has…
The 2025 series of *Strictly Come Dancing* premiered last Saturday, and the planet—still busy juggling wars, elections, and the slow-motion car crash formerly known as “the climate”—paused for two hours to watch celebrities in diamanté try not to fall over. From Kyiv to Caracas, viewers tuned in to see whether a former oligarch’s niece could…
Patrick Kielty: The Accidental Diplomat Who Proves the World Runs on Banter By Our Man in the Green Room When historians eventually write the obituary for the late, unlamented “Global Age of Earnestness,” they will almost certainly footnote Patrick Kielty—Northern Irish stand-up turned BBC chat-show sphinx—as the man who demonstrated that international soft power can…
Global Dispatch: The Curious Soft-Power of Ant Middleton – or How One Bearded Brit Became the World’s Favourite Recruiting Poster for Masochism By the time the sun rose over the South China Sea last Tuesday, an ex-Royal Marine with the improbable surname “Middleton” was already screaming at a tear-streaked Singaporean banker through a mouthful of…
