Indiana State Football, or How a 2-9 Season Quietly Explains the Collapse of Western Civilization By “Roving” Roisin MacAllister, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Global Desk PARIS—On a drizzly November afternoon along the Seine, the bistros are abuzz with talk of pension strikes, Ukrainian grain corridors, and whether the Sycamores can finally break their 39-game road…
King Princess and the Royal Mess: How a 26-Year-Old Pop Sovereign Became a Global Thermometer Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of TikTok, the planet decided it craved a monarch who could sing about heartbreak while dressed like a thrift-store Habsburg. Enter King Princess—born Mikaela Straus, heir to the multi-generational…
Championship, noun: the glorious moment when one sweaty tribe convinces the rest of the planet that their arbitrary ritual victory is, in fact, the hinge upon which civilization quietly swings. From the flood-lit cathedrals of Qatar to the jerry-rigged favela courts of Rio, humanity’s appetite for crowning a “best” is the one export that never…
Facebook’s $725 Million Privacy Settlement: A Global Receipt for Twenty Years of Oversharing By Our Correspondent, Somewhere with Better Wi-Fi Than You Mark Zuckerberg’s legal team finally found the “download receipt” button—except instead of a PDF, it’s a $725 million class-action settlement, and instead of a printer, it’s wired directly to the 250 million Americans…
WrestleMania 42: The World’s Most Expensive Therapy Session Rolls into São Paulo By A. D. “Dante” Marlowe, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker SÃO PAULO—In a city where rush-hour traffic already resembles a steel-cage match, the planet’s premier spandex opera has pitched its tent. WrestleMania 42—billed as “The Showcase of the Immortals, now with 40 % more…
Donald Trump Jr: The World’s Problem Child in a Suit By Dave’s Locker International Desk From the snow-scoured boulevards of Reykjavík to the humid rooftop bars of Ho Chi Minh City, one can still hear the same exasperated sigh: “Wait, the eldest Trump son is trending again?” Like a geopolitical Whac-A-Mole, Donald John Trump Jr….
Curiosity and the Global Vanity Project By Our Man in the Void, Geneva Bureau If you stand on the roof of the Palais des Nations at 3 a.m.—a vantage point once reserved for spies and nicotine-addicted translators—you can almost imagine the Martian wind that has been buffeting NASA’s Curiosity rover for the past decade. Almost,…
Victoria Beckham: Globalization’s Loudest Whisper in a Pair of £900 Flats By Our Correspondent in Exile, Somewhere Over the Duty-Free Abyss It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a Spice-Girl past and a footballer husband must be in want of a fashion empire. Enter Victoria Beckham, the woman who…
Ipswich Score: How a Second-Tier English Result Quietly Terrifies the Entire Global Order By the time the final whistle blew at Portman Road last night, most of the planet was busy doom-scrolling about the next war, the next recession, or the next celebrity divorce. Yet in a modest Suffolk town—best known internationally for a serial…
Dewald Brevis: The 21-Year-Old Human Highlight Reel Who Makes Cricket’s Old Guard Wonder Why They Bothered Showing Up By the time most people turn twenty-one, their greatest accomplishment is successfully assembling IKEA furniture without a leftover screw. Dewald Brevis, meanwhile, has already turned international bowlers into anxious spreadsheets and forced broadcasters to pre-book superlatives like…
The Geopolitics of a Googly: How Adil Rashid’s Wrist Flick Echoes from Birmingham to Beijing by Our Man in the Press Box, nursing a lukewarm Nescafé and existential dread In a world where trade wars are announced via tweet and summits collapse over dessert choices, it is oddly comforting that a 35-year-old leg-spinner from Bradford…
PARIS — The name Ercan Osmani has started popping up on encrypted Telegram channels, in the margins of EU parliament briefings, and, most improbably, on the laminated “Person of Interest” cards carried by bored bodyguards at Davos. Who, you ask, is this man now orbiting the same stratosphere as sanctioned oligarchs and TikTok prophets? Allow…
