Royals vs Guardians: How a Pedigreed Pastime Became a Global Power Struggle The phrase “Royals vs Guardians” sounds like the elevator pitch for a Netflix fantasy series—complete with brooding heirs, moody castles, and a CGI dragon voiced by a disgraced Oscar winner. In reality, the drama is unfolding on baseball diamonds from Kansas City to…
Set for Life Results: A Global Lottery of Hope and Despair in Six Numbers By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Des Moines and Dar es Salaam Every Friday night, a modest surge of electricity ripples across GMT+0 through GMT+12 as Australia’s Set for Life draws its six polite little digits. The numbers themselves—2, 11, 19, 27,…
Casablanca—where the air smells of Atlantic salt, diesel exhaust, and the faint but unmistakable perfume of geopolitical compromise. From the rooftop of the downtown Hyatt, you can watch the sun set behind a skyline that looks like Dubai’s younger, thriftier cousin—half-finished glass towers next to tile-roofed medinas, all of it ring-fenced by cranes that never…
Renée Zellweger and the Collapsible World Order By our correspondent drinking coffee in three time zones at once In the grand geopolitical casino, you wouldn’t normally bet on a Texan who once pretended to be British for two whole films. Yet Renée Zellweger—yes, the woman who made millions by squeezing into impossibly large knickers and…
Sweden: A Nation So Pleasant It Hurts By Dave’s Locker International Desk (and a lukewarm cup of overpriced filter coffee) STOCKHOLM—Somewhere between the 14th-century cobblestones and the 5G antenna disguised as a birch tree, Sweden has managed to become a geopolitical Rorschach test for the rest of the planet. To American progressives, it’s a pastel-coloured…
The Eternal Derby of Inconvenience Guatemala vs Panama, or How to Misplace a Canal and Still Win the Century By the time you finish this paragraph, a container ship the length of lower Manhattan will have slipped through the Panama Canal, earning the Panamanian treasury roughly the GDP of a midsize Baltic nation. Meanwhile, 600…
Ann Ming: The Woman Who Turned a Mother’s Grief Into the World’s Slowest-Motion Revenge By the time Ann Ming finally watched her daughter’s killer convicted for a second time—14 years after he’d literally laughed at the verdict—the rest of the planet had already moved on to fresher horrors: two Gulf wars, the birth of social…
Joanna Lumley: The Accidental Diplomat Who Weaponised Charm Against the World Order By Our Correspondent in a Hotel Bar Where the Ice Has Already Melted PARIS—Across the river from Notre-Dame, a gaggle of European finance ministers once waited half an hour to take a selfie with a woman who once played a drunken heiress on…
Weatherford-on-the-Med, Tuesday, 3:47 a.m.—Somewhere between a NATO summit in Vilnius and the latest BRICS currency pow-wow in Johannesburg, a far more seismic tremor is rattling the tectonic plates of soft-power diplomacy: the rumor, denied, confirmed, denied again, and finally upgraded to “pretty much certain” that Tyrone Dobbs is packing his spanners and quitting Coronation Street….
William Shatner, the 93-year-old Canadian export who once sold discount airline tickets on late-night television, has now transcended Earthly kitsch to become the first nonagenarian space tourist. While the world’s attention remains glued to whatever fresh geopolitical dumpster fire is trending, Shatner’s 2021 sub-orbital hop aboard Jeff Bezos’s phallic hobby rocket quietly achieved something diplomats,…
Bermuda: The Atlantic’s Hand-Painted Mirage of Money, Moss, and Mild Existential Panic By Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between the jet-stream and the 401(k) statements of hedge-fund divorcees floats Bermuda, a 21-square-mile pastel hallucination that insists—politely, in a crisp accent—on being taken seriously. To global capital, it’s a PO Box with a navy blazer; to…
Switzerland vs Slovenia: A Tale of Two Alp-Mates and the Quiet Collapse of European Exceptionalism By Dave’s Locker International Desk ZURICH—On paper, the match-up is almost charmingly lopsided: Switzerland, the planet’s discreet banker, pitted against Slovenia, a country whose greatest export is probably “postcard envy.” Yet this week’s Alpine face-off—part Euro qualifier, part existential audit—has…
