Old Empires, New Glitches An international dispatch on the latest episode of London City vs Manchester United, the soap opera that doubles as a football match. By the time the final whistle blew somewhere between Peckham and Piccadilly, diplomats in twenty-one time zones had already updated their risk assessments. In Singapore, a hedge-fund algorithm that…
World Championships 2025: The Planet’s Most Expensive Group Therapy Session By the time the opening cannon fired in Singapore’s newly reclaimed Marina East District this morning, the 2025 World Championships had already outspent three small island nations and generated enough carbon to make a coal lobbyist blush. Delegations from 193 countries—plus the ever-optimistic “Observer State…
**The Glorious Decline of Manchester United: A Global Tragedy in 4-4-2 Formation** From the bustling streets of Mumbai to the smoky cafés of Buenos Aires, from Lagos to Laos, the world watches with morbid fascination as one of football’s crown jewels transforms into an exquisite corpse. Manchester United—once the empire on which the football sun…
Burnley F.C. vs Liverpool F.C.: A Timeline for the End of Days Turin, Tuesday. While G-7 finance ministers argue over whose printer still has ink, the real summit of civilisation is quietly unfolding on a rectangle of grass in Lancashire. The Burnley–Liverpool fixture may look provincial to anyone who thinks football is merely twenty-two millionaires…
**From Tuscaloosa to Tbilisi: How American College Football Scores Explain Everything Wrong with Global Priorities** While the world’s oceans acidify and glaciers perform their spectacular disappearing act, a curious ritual unfolds across American television screens every autumn Saturday. Millions of otherwise functional adults transform into crimson-faced zealots, clutching beers and smartphones, screaming at 19-year-olds in…
Roma vs Torino: A Serie A Sideshow in the Grand Theater of Geopolitical Chaos By Dave’s Locker International Correspondent Somewhere between the Tiber and the Po, two football clubs will kick a ball tonight while the rest of the planet rehearses its usual slow-motion apocalypse. Roma—capital club, eternal city, home to popes, emperors, and the…
From the Highveld to the High Seas: Teddy Bridgewater’s Quiet Rebellion Against the NFL’s Global Circus By Our Man in the Departures Lounge MIAMI—Somewhere between a half-eaten Cuban sandwich and the faint smell of jet fuel, Teddy Bridgewater stands on the tarmac like a man who has read the fine print on the back of…
OSMOND IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA (AND TIKTOK) From the Diplomatic Lounge of Dave’s Locker, somewhere above the 38th parallel The name Donny Osmond still triggers Pavlovian flashbacks in three distinct planetary zones. In Manila karaoke bars, “Puppy Love” is the go-to apology ballad for husbands who forgot their anniversaries—nothing says contrition like a falsetto…
From the red-tiled roofs of Epstein’s Caribbean fantasy-island to the fluorescent chill of a Brooklyn federal courtroom, Ghislaine Maxwell’s résumé has taken a decidedly unglamorous turn. Once the cosmopolitan “fixer” who could get you an introduction to a prince, a president, or a particle-physicist-cum-pedophile, she now occupies a 10-by-12 cell in Tallahassee’s low-security satellite camp—an…
Marvel’s First Family Finally Gets the Couch Tour: “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” Lands on Streaming, World Shrugs and Presses Play By C. Malone, roving correspondent with a permanent jet-lag headache and a suspiciously empty expense account PARIS—Somewhere between a croissant that cost six euros and the realization that the city’s entire Métro system now…
London’s Canary Wharf towers glint with the same smugness they had in 2008, but fifteen years later the man most Britons turn to for financial absolution is not a pin-stripe banker—it’s Martin Lewis, a balding Welshman whose greatest talent is translating compound interest into swear-free soundbites. From Lagos to Lima, the world watches the UK’s…
Lara Lewington: The Micro-Celebrity Diplomat We Never Asked For (But Got Anyway) In the grand, grimy opera of global media, most of us are but unpaid extras wheezing in the wings. Then there’s Lara Lewington—BBC Click’s resident tech whisperer, Sky News’ occasional “explain-AI-to-the-boomers” guest, and, if you squint, a one-woman soft-power envoy for Britain’s post-Brexit…
