The NFL Lands Abroad: How a Private American Gladiator League Conquered the World’s Living Rooms by Matteo “Flat-Foot” Ricci, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker PARIS—Every November, the City of Light dims its monuments so that three hours of prime-time electricity can be funneled into a pop-up stadium three metro stops from the Louvre. There, beneath the…
**The Global Hunger Games: How Your Toaster Became a Geopolitical Weapon** While you’re cursing your $200 electric bill, somewhere in Brussels a bureaucrat is quietly calculating whether European democracy can survive another winter without Russian gas. Welcome to the wonderful world of consumers energy—the only marketplace where grandmothers freezing in their apartments directly influence NATO…
Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses: The World’s Newest Panopticon, Now in Tortoiseshell by “Marina Vex,” roaming correspondent for Dave’s Locker PARIS—Standing on the Pont Neuf at dusk, I watched a German tourist livestream his own mugging. The assailants, two agile teenagers from the banlieue, performed their routine with balletic precision while the victim’s new Meta Ray-Bans…
Chequers Prime Minister: A Weekend in the English Countryside That Shook the World By Dave’s International Affairs Desk If you ever wondered where the fate of 67 million Britons—and, by extension, the global financial system—gets decided on a rainy Friday afternoon, the answer is a 16th-century manor house whose greatest architectural triumph is its ability…
The Ballad of Slaven Bilić: A Balkan Bard in a World That Stopped Listening to Rock ’n’ Roll By the time Slaven Bilić reached Beijing in 2023—fresh off a red-eye that smelled equally of instant noodles and Chinese state-media cologne—he carried the same leather jacket he’d worn while head-banging at AC/DC concerts in Zagreb circa…
Daria Kasatkina is not the tennis story most broadcasters lead with. She doesn’t smash rackets, date pop stars, or hire an entourage the size of a NATO battalion. Instead, the 26-year-old Russian has spent the last year turning press conferences into miniature Nuremberg trials—minus the dramatic lighting—while still finding time to dispatch top-ten opponents with…
**The Accidental Oracle: How James Buckley Became the Internet’s Reluctant Prophet of Doom** In an age where viral fame typically requires either exceptional talent or spectacular failure, James Buckley has achieved the rare feat of embodying both simultaneously. The British actor—best known for playing Jay Cartwright in *The Inbetweeners*—has inadvertently become a global symbol of…
**The Global Obsession with Five Letters: How Today’s Wordle Hint Became a UN Security Council Issue** While nuclear powers exchange sternly-worded diplomatic notes and the Arctic melts faster than a popsicle in Dubai, humanity has found its true common ground: desperately trying to guess a five-letter word before breakfast. Today’s Wordle hint—something about a “medieval…
Basement Flooding: The World’s Wettest Underground Revolution By Our Correspondent, still drying his socks in five languages GENEVA—While diplomats upstairs argue over carbon credits and whose submarine is parked in whose harbor, the planet’s true diplomatic channel is busy negotiating with gravity and faulty sump pumps. From Brooklyn to Bangladesh, the basement is flooding, and…
Basement Submarines and the End of the World A Dispatch from the Planet’s Lower-Middle Floors By the time you read this, someone in Jakarta, Jakarta-on-the-Rhine (Cologne), or a newly soggy suburb of Detroit is probably up to their ankles in what used to be a wine cellar. The flooded basement—once the punch line of American…
Darwin Núñez and the Beautiful, Horrible Global Hype Machine By Santiago “The Jaundiced Eye” Morales, International Desk Montevideo, Liverpool, Baku—pick a dot on the map and someone is currently screaming either “¡Golazo!” or “£85 million down the drain!” at a screen featuring Darwin Núñez. The 24-year-old Uruguayan striker has become a sort of planetary Rorschach…
The Ticket That Launched a Thousand Scams An International Field Guide to the Most Over-Printed Scrap of Paper Since Monopoly Money PARIS—On any given morning, the line outside the Louvre snakes like a colonoscopy camera, and every pilgrim clutches the same talisman: a crumpled ticket. The same ritual repeats in Lima, Lagos, and Lahore. From…
