Squirrel Hill Fire: Pittsburgh’s Little Inferno as a Global Mood Ring By our jaded correspondent who keeps a passport in one pocket and a fire extinguisher in the other It takes a special kind of municipal embarrassment to make a neighborhood named after manic tree-rats combust on live television, yet here we are. In the…
**Shin Bet: The World’s Most Efficient Neighborhood Watch with a License to Kill** While the rest of us were busy arguing about privacy settings on social media, Israel’s Shin Bet has been quietly perfecting the art of knowing what you had for breakfast before you’ve finished digesting it. Welcome to the international gold standard of…
KABUL—So there I was, sipping tea that tasted faintly of diesel and regret, watching two very different flags flap in the same wind. On one side: Afghanistan, a geopolitical piñata that’s been whacked by every empire since Alexander the Great’s travel blog. On the other: Hong Kong, a neon-lit tax receipt with its own anthem…
DOHA—This week’s bombing outside the National Museum of Qatar felt almost quaint: only three dead, a tidy crater, and—because the explosion happened at 3 a.m.—no influencers live-streaming their own immolation for “content.” In any other decade, the detonation of a car bomb in the Gulf’s squeaky-clean showcase would have merited wall-to-wall coverage. Today it merely…
The Barclays Center, that rust-colored coliseum squatting at the crossroads of Flatbush and Atlantic, has never really been about basketball. From the moment its weathered-steel carapace rose above Brooklyn’s brownstone quilt, it was clear the structure had higher ambitions than merely housing a mediocre NBA franchise. Today, as ticket prices outpace inflation in most emerging-market…
**The Wagyu Whopper: How Burger King Turned Japan’s Sacred Cow into Global Fast Food Fodder** TOKYO—In the land where cattle once lived better than most humans, the news landed like a sake bomb in a hostess bar: Burger King Japan has unveiled the “Wagyu Whopper,” a ¥1,980 (US$13) slab of allegedly premium beef wedged between…
Nationwide, Everywhere, and Nowhere at All A dispatch from the front lines of the planet’s favorite marketing fiction The word “nationwide” used to sound muscular, like a drumroll before the cavalry. These days it arrives more like a polite cough from the back row of a theater that’s already on fire. From Tokyo to Timbuktu,…
**Skegness: How a British Seaside Town Became the World’s Cautionary Tale** The world has its share of glamorous destinations—Paris, Tokyo, the Maldives—and then there’s Skegness, Lincolnshire’s crown jewel of managed expectations. While international headlines obsess over Dubai’s latest artificial island or Singapore’s newest infinity pool, this modest North Sea outpost has quietly become something far…
The Paper Shield: How Constitutions Became the World’s Most Popular Fiction Genre By our correspondent in the departures lounge of a failing republic GENEVA—While you were binge-watching constitutional crises on mute in the airport bar, 195 countries were quietly updating their national origin stories. The product? A tidy 800-word PDF that promises to turn blood-soaked…
Canon C50: The Camera That Will Film the End of the World in 6K—And Make It Look Cinematic PARIS—Every few years Canon releases a new box of circuits and glass that promises to democratize cinema-grade image-making. The freshly minted EOS C50 is no exception, except now the democrats have drones, and the cinema is TikTok….
Martin Sheen: The Accidental Statesman Hollywood Never Ordered By Dave’s Locker International Bureau Picture the scene: a war-fatigued planet, circa 1982, tuning in to watch a fictional U.S. president fling his jacket over a chair and wonder aloud whether the Doomsday Clock came with a snooze button. The actor behind that Oval Office catharsis was,…
The Global Game of House: How a Medieval Pawnshop Became the World’s Most Beloved Shackle By the time you finish this sentence, another 47 human beings somewhere on the planet will have signed a mortgage—an elegant term that translates from Old French as “death pledge.” Linguists insist that etymology merely implies “until death,” but after…
