Blown Britannia: How a Small Island’s Breeze Becomes a Global Mood Ring By Our Man in the Jet Stream, filing from an airport lounge whose roof is currently somewhere over the North Sea LONDON—The United Kingdom has issued yet another “yellow warning” for strong winds, which is meteorologist-speak for “batten down the ornamental gnomes.” Gusts…
Ella Seidel, the Tennis Prodigy Who Makes Global Panic Look Like a Gentle Warm-Up By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—In the city that perfected existential dread in cafés and surrender in 1940, twenty-year-old German qualifier Ella Seidel spent last week politely reminding the planet that panic is best outsourced to the adults. First came world…
Chiba Lotte Marines: The Little Ballclub That Could—and Still Might Start a Trade War ZOZO Marine Stadium, Chiba—The sun is setting over Tokyo Bay and, like clockwork, the Chiba Lotte Marines are reminding the planet that baseball isn’t just America’s pastime; it’s Japan’s coping mechanism. While the Yankees hemorrhage cash on players who treat hamstrings…
Iva Jović, the 16-year-old tennis prodigy from Serbia, has been crowned the Orange Bowl champion, a title that once served as a crystal ball for future Grand Slam winners back when newspapers still mattered. While the planet teeters between climate catastrophe and TikTok diplomacy, the international press corps has dutifully pivoted from COP28 meltdowns to…
The FTSE 250: Britain’s Overlooked Middle Child in a World That Only Notices Extremes By Our Correspondent, presently somewhere between a Pret and a Costa in Zone 2 It is fashionable, these days, to obsess over absolutes: the trillion-dollar mega-caps that orbit like bloated moons above the global economy, or the penny-ante crypto tokens that…
Ocado’s Share Price: A Canary in the Global Panic Room International correspondents like to pretend their beat is the fate of nations. In truth, we spend most of our time watching spreadsheets dressed up as destiny. Take Ocado Group, the British online grocer turned warehouse-robot evangelist. Its share price has become less a financial metric…
PARIS—A decade ago the only people who knew their titer from their Tdap were gap-year backpackers and epidemiologists with a sense of adventure. Today, the travel vaccine has become the hottest accessory since noise-canceling headphones and diplomatic immunity. From the marble corridors of the WHO in Geneva to the pop-up clinics wedged between duty-free liquor…
The FTSE 100: London’s Glittering Lie in an Age of Global Delusion London – Somewhere between the third flat white and the sixth Zoom call, the FTSE 100 ticked up another 14 points this morning, prompting the usual carnival of breathless headlines. “Markets surge on optimism,” they crowed, as if the index were a barometer…
Office 365: The World’s Most Ambitious Digital Colony By our roving correspondent in a Wi-Fi cave somewhere between GMT+8 and existential despair When Microsoft announced that Office 365 would henceforth be “Microsoft 365,” the planet reacted with the same collective shrug it reserves for new UN resolutions and gluten-free airline meals. Yet beneath the rebranding…
When the Lions Meet the Leopards: A Dispatch from the Tropic of Irony By Dave’s Locker International Desk Harare to Windhoek is only a two-hour hop on Air Zimbabwe—assuming the airline has remembered to fuel the plane that morning—yet the distance between the two countries keeps widening like a bad marriage. Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket…
Maxine Peake and the Globalist Hamlet: How a Lancashire Actress Became a One-Woman IMF of Ideas By The World-Weary Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Atlantic There are two kinds of fame in 2024: the kind that ends up on a commemorative plate in an Istanbul bazaar and the kind that leaks into UN side-events on cultural…
Ella Toone and the Geopolitics of a Top-Bin Finish Dave’s Locker, global bureau of mildly disillusioned correspondents Manchester, England – The planet has spent the last decade arguing about tariffs, troll farms, and whether democracy was just a limited-run series, yet this week it briefly pivoted to a small patch of grass where a 24-year-old…
