The Man Who Sold Britishness to the World and Still Feels a Bit Guilty About It Lord David Puttnam, the former film producer turned unelected conscience of the House of Lords, has spent the last four decades trying to convince the planet that culture is not a garnish on the platter of geopolitics but the…
Chance Perdomo’s Final Curtain Call: A Post-National Tragedy in the Age of Global Streaming By the time the news pinged from a fan-run Twitter account in Jakarta to my phone in an under-heated Lisbon café, Chance Perdomo had already been mourned in six languages, subtitled, clipped, and monetised. The 27-year-old British-American actor—best known for playing…
Calm prevailed in Mumbai’s Brabourne Stadium on Friday evening, the sort of hush normally reserved for tax audits or UN Security Council vetoes. India’s women had just beaten Australia’s women by five wickets, and the planet’s collective shrug was almost audible. Still, the scorecard—India 187/5 chasing Australia’s 183/8—managed to ripple outward across continents like a…
Cameron Norrie: The Quiet Englishman Quietly Redrawing the Global Map of Tennis Mediocrity By Dave’s International Desk of Slightly Bruised Hopes PARIS—In a world where geopolitics is mostly played by men who can’t find their own car keys, it’s refreshing—if mildly disorienting—to watch a soft-spoken left-hander from Johannesburg via Auckland via London via Texas calmly…
The Ice-Cream Empire That Melted Geopolitics: A Global Postcard from Ben & Jerry There are few things more reliably universal than the human desire for cold, sweet fat—second only, perhaps, to the human desire to argue about it. And so Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, two underachieving gym-class refugees from Merrick, Long Island, accidentally built…
The Man Who Taught Windows to Apologize: Satya Nadella’s Grand Tour of Global Contrition By Our Correspondent in a Café with Suspiciously Fast Wi-Fi When Satya Nadella slipped into the CEO seat at Microsoft in 2014, most of the planet assumed the corporation would keep lumbering along like a T-rex on lithium—impressive, but doomed to…
Aaron’s, the rent-to-own furniture empire that began in 1955 Georgia, now spans three continents and 1,300 stores. From the outside it looks like a cheerful beige box peddling sectional sofas to people whose credit scores have been mugged by life. Step inside, however, and you’re touring a museum of planetary precarity: beds still warm from…
Every so often the planet tilts on its axis, not from tectonic drift or cosmic collision, but because one human being named Jamal does something that makes the rest of us spill our coffee and stare at screens like they’ve just insulted our mothers. Who exactly is Jamal? Pick a continent, any continent, and you’ll…
The Global Arms Race for a Red Ticket By Our Man on the Kop, Calais Bureau Calais, France – Dawn at the Eurotunnel terminal smells of diesel, desperation, and duty-free gin. A lorry driver from Naples named Marco is showing me his phone: a queue position of 37,842 on Liverpool FC’s ticketing portal. Somewhere between…
Mourinho, the Last Roman Emperor of Football’s Collapsing Empire By our correspondent in international schadenfreude Rome, late spring. The Colosseum still stands, mostly because the EU won’t let Italy knock it down for a parking lot. Inside the nearby Stadio Olimpico, José Mourinho is busy auditioning for yet another sequel nobody asked for: “Gladiator III…
Joel Engardio Recall: How One San Francisco Supervisor’s Ouster Became a Global Popcorn Moment By the time the first signature hit the recall clipboard in March, CNN International was already running a chyron that read “Tech Bro Democracy—Live!” From Lagos to Lisbon, viewers watched San Franciscans argue, yet again, about whether a moderate Democrat who…
A Peninsula, a Ballpark, and the Slow-Motion Existential Crisis of the SSG Landers By Our Correspondent in the Departure Lounge, Incheon It is a truth universally acknowledged that when a global shipping titan decides baseball is the next great hedge against geopolitical whiplash, the world has officially run out of sane hobbies. Last year, SSG—a…
