Black Rabbit, Jason Bateman, and the Worldwide Art of Selling Nothing Very Loudly By Diego M. Salgado, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker Somewhere between the Kremlin’s latest cryptic press release and TikTok’s newest dance craze performed on a melting glacier, Netflix dropped the trailer for “Black Rabbit.” The limited series stars Jason Bateman as a middle-aged…
DAVID LETTERMAN: AMERICA’S LATE-NIGHT EXPORT THAT TAUGHT THE WORLD HOW TO YAWN IN SARCASM By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Pacific The first time a bar in Reykjavík stayed open past 2 a.m. to simulcast “Late Night,” the locals thought Letterman’s gap-toothed grin was a US dental-insurance commercial. By the second…
Steven Merryday and the Planet-Sized Implications of One Stubborn Judge in Tampa By Our Man in the Departures Lounge, Nursing a Flat White and Existential Dread TAMPA, FLORIDA—From the air-conditioned gloom of a courthouse that smells faintly of toner and ambition, Senior U.S. District Judge Steven Douglas Merryday has, once again, reminded the world that…
From the Baltic to the Bolshoi, the planet’s favorite geopolitical boogeyman is enjoying what might charitably be called a vintage year. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin—ex-KGB judoka, bare-chested horse-whisperer, and the only man who can annex a peninsula before breakfast and still insist he’s just tidying up the yard—continues to set the tempo for our weary waltz…
Oxford Still Beats Cambridge, Earth Still Orbits Sun: 2025 Global Rankings Confirm British Universities Are Expensive, Excellent, and Slightly Alarmed by L. V. Merriweather, International Affairs Correspondent LONDON—The annual scholastic beauty pageant known as the QS World University Rankings sashayed down the runway this week, and British institutions once again collected tiaras like a kleptocratic…
ODEON: How a Greek Word for Singing Became the World’s Loudest Love Letter to Escapism By the time you finish this sentence, roughly 3,200 people in 31 countries will have swiped their credit cards at an Odeon-branded box office to watch something explode in Dolby Atmos. From Oslo to Mumbai, the name—“singing place,” courtesy of…
Abidjan, Thursday night, 23:47 local. I’m sipping a €12 mojito on the rooftop of the Radisson Blu, watching container ships queue like disciplined ants outside the new Port of Abidjan extension. Somewhere below, the lights of Treichville flicker just enough to remind the rest of the planet that Ivory Coast still exists between soccer transfers…
Agnes Gund, the 85-year-old Manhattan dowager who looks like she just stepped out of a Wharton novel and into a money-laundering thriller, has decided that the best way to punish the world’s autocrats is to hit them where it hurts: their taste in art. Last week, she sold a single Roy Lichtenstein—one measly cartoon explosion…
Alfa Romeo: Italy’s Beautiful, Broke, and Emotionally Unavailable Sports-Sedan of International Relations By Our Correspondent, still recovering from a Milanese espresso-induced arrhythmia MILAN—In the marble-lobbied heart of Alfa Romeo’s headquarters, you can almost hear the ghosts of fascist-era racing drivers arguing with present-day accountants about depreciation schedules. That, dear reader, is the Alfa Romeo condition:…
Estonia: The Tiny Nation Teaching the World How to Be Modern While Everyone Else Argues on Twitter By Our Correspondent, currently hiding from the EU’s cookie-consent pop-ups in Tallinn Tallinn, ESTONIA—On any given morning, while the rest of the planet is still rebooting its smartphone after the latest “critical” security update, this Baltic speck of…
Jayne Kennedy: How One American Gladiator Became a Global Rorschach Test in High Heels PARIS—If you mention Jayne Kennedy in a smoky bar on the Rue Oberkampf, the locals will assume you’re talking about the latest crypto-scandal or perhaps a new strain of Bordeaux. Tell them she was the first Black woman to anchor network…
The Global Pension Time Bomb: How Governments Are Playing Musical Chairs With Your Retirement By the time you finish reading this sentence, approximately 47 people worldwide will have turned 65. By the time you reach the end of this paragraph, that number will have surpassed the population of Iceland. The global silver tsunami isn’t coming—it’s…
