The Global Kindergarten: How the World Outsources Its Toddlers and Calls It Progress From Reykjavík to Rio, a silent consensus has formed: the most valuable mineral of the 21st century is not lithium but a qualified grown-up willing to watch someone else’s offspring for less than the price of a Manhattan martini. Welcome to the…
Domenico Tedesco and the Beautiful, Broken Game: A Dispatch from the Edge of Europa We meet Mr. Tedesco in the only place that still makes sense—mid-table, mid-crisis, mid-pandemic hangover—where the Belgian national team has just handed him the keys to what optimists call a “golden generation” and pessimists call “eleven millionaires in matching deodorant adverts.”…
Dow Jones: The World’s Most Expensive Mood Ring By Dave’s Locker’s Chief Correspondent, somewhere between an airport lounge and existential dread The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened Tuesday like a hung-over aristocrat—wobbly, entitled, but still convinced the planet should curtsy. Thirty-odd American companies, stitched together into a single numerical shrug, managed to send tremors from…
In the grand theater of international relations, where every handshake is a potential dagger and every pipeline a geopolitical jugular, the sudden romance between Azerbaijan and Ukraine is less a love story than a mutually beneficial hostage situation. One country sits atop enough oil to make a Saudi prince blush, while the other has become…
PARKER ROMO AND THE BORDERLESS FARCE OF MODERN STARDOM Dave’s Locker – International Affairs Desk DATELINE: Somewhere over the Atlantic, Wi-Fi sputtering like a Balkan taxi, 3 a.m. GMT There are, by conservative United Nations estimates, roughly eight billion people currently vying for oxygen on this planet. Roughly 7,999,999,993 of them have never heard of…
Thin Mints as Soft Power: How Girl Scout Cookies Conquered a Planet That Can’t Agree on Anything Else By [Name Withheld to Protect the Guilty], International Affairs Desk GENEVA—While the UN Security Council spends another evening locked in performative stalemate over whose war crimes are more “contextual,” a stealthier multilateral force has managed unanimous global…
**The Global Pursuit of “Pubs Near Me”: Humanity’s Noble Quest for Oblivion** In the grand tapestry of human civilization, few searches unite us quite like “pubs near me.” From the frostbitten streets of Reykjavik to the sweltering alleys of Bangkok, this digital cry for help transcends language barriers, economic systems, and the increasingly thin veneer…
Connelly Early, for the handful of readers who haven’t already doom-scrolled past his name, is the sort of mid-tier American bureaucrat whose sudden elevation to global talking-point tells you everything about how thin the membrane between order and chaos has become. Until last Thursday he was an assistant under-secretary for something so forgettably titled that…
Cape Verde vs. Cameroon: A Tiny Archipelago Punches Up, a Continental Heavyweight Stumbles, and the World Watches with Popcorn By the time the final whistle blew in Yaoundé, the scoreboard said 1-1, but the ledger of global meaning told a more entertaining story: David had just bloodied Goliath’s nose with a borrowed sling, and Goliath—never…
Burger King Japan’s announcement that it will serve a ¥2,000 (US $15) “Wagyu King” burger landed in my inbox while I was watching grainy footage of Sudanese refugees queueing for sorghum. The juxtaposition was almost too perfect: one civilization reduced to boiled grain, another racing to stuff the planet’s most pampered cow between two sesame-seed…
Estonia vs Andorra: Two Tiny Nations, One Giant Mirror to the World’s Midlife Crisis Tallinn and Andorra la Vella sit 2,600 kilometers apart, but in the grand geopolitical waiting room they might as well be sharing the same cracked vinyl couch. One is a post-Soviet start-up that discovered capitalism the way a teenager discovers espresso—wide-eyed,…
Baku to Kyiv: Two Wars, One Playbook, Zero Refunds By Our Man Who’s Stopped Expecting Miracles If the planet were a casino, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe would be those smoky back tables where the house always wins and the players keep doubling down on losing hands. This week, while the world’s attention swung like…
