Patrick McEnroe and the Quiet Apocalypse of American Soft Power By Diego Serrano, Global Desk PARIS — Somewhere between the disappearance of the last American tennis prodigy and the rise of pickleball as geopolitical metaphor, Patrick McEnroe has become the most useful diplomat Washington never appointed. To the casual observer he is merely the younger,…
Mets vs Reds: A Global Tragedy in Nine Innings By Paolo “Pallino” Rossi, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Singapore bureau, 04:17 a.m. local time The first pitch in Cincinnati is scheduled for 7:10 p.m. ET, which is convenient for Manhattan traders still digesting lunch and mercifully late for Jakarta office drones already asleep. One ballgame, two…
NFL Football Tonight: The American Gladiator Show That Pays for Half the World’s Cable Bill By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk While the rest of the planet is busy arguing about tariffs, TikTok bans, and whether the North Atlantic is still a thing, tonight’s NFL game (Cowboys-Eagles, 8:15 p.m. ET for those keeping score in Zulu…
Toronto, the city that can’t decide whether it’s New York with healthcare or Cleveland with delusions, has become the world’s polite laboratory for the question: “What happens when global capital, global talent, and global anxiety all collide in a place where the sidewalks apologize for your own bad mood?” From an international vantage point—say, a…
In the pantheon of world capitals, Wellington is the one that keeps its head down, politely coughs into its sleeve, and still manages to be the only place on the planet where a mid-grade earthquake counts as Tuesday’s coffee break. From Reykjavík to Riyadh, the city’s name evokes two immediate images: a boot-shaped harbour that…
Liz Hurley at 59: How One British Actress Became the Planet’s Last Remaining Geopolitical Constant By the time the International Monetary Fund finished recalculating Argentina’s debt for the ninth time this decade, Liz Hurley had already posted another bikini selfie from an undisclosed Caribbean tax haven. While COP28 delegates argued over which hemisphere should foot…
The World According to Alcaraz: How One 20-Year-Old from El Palmar Turns Global Panic into Forehand Therapy Dave’s Locker | International Desk | 14 June 2024 It is a truth universally acknowledged that whenever the planet feels as though it’s sliding down a compost heap of wars, inflation, and algorithmically generated pop stars, humanity demands…
John Bishop: A Name So Ordinary It Might Just Save the World By Our World-Weary Correspondent, Somewhere Between Duty-Free and Despair There are, according to the latest census of human paranoia, approximately 43,000 John Bishops alive at this moment. If you stacked them all horizontally they would reach from Liverpool to Lisbon—assuming none of them…
Siniakova: The Czech Who Became a Global Rorschach Test By an increasingly weary correspondent who once believed sport was just sport PRAGUE—When Katerina Siniakova hoisted yet another trophy over her head last month, the global reaction split neatly into three camps: the flag-waving Czechs who treat every serve as a referendum on national pride, the…
Bethenny Frankel and the Geopolitics of a Skinny-Girl Empire By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk PARIS—Somewhere between the Seine’s gently bobbing wine barges and the neon glare of a nearby McDonald’s, a French sommelier is quietly weeping into his gamay. The cause? A former Real Housewife of New York has managed to export “low-calorie margarita in…
As the sun rose over five continents this morning, so did a familiar, slightly guilty thrill: Rockstar has finally deigned to show us Grand Theft Auto VI—or, as foreign-exchange desks immediately rebranded it, “the single most reliable dollar-drain since Taylor Swift’s travel itinerary.” From Lagos broadband cafés to Seoul’s PC-bangs, from São Paulo’s favela LAN…
Issa Rae and the Global Business of Being Seen Dave’s Locker – International Desk Somewhere between the 405 and the A1, Issa Rae stopped being merely “that awkward Black girl from YouTube” and became a stealth export product—part cultural soft power, part quarterly-earnings call. The rest of the planet, always hungry for American dysfunction packaged…
