A Ballad for the End Times: Calum Scott’s Global Sob-Fest and Why We’re All Still Crying in Economy By Dave’s International Bureau of Melodrama & Collateral Damage Somewhere over the Sea of Japan, a salaryman on his third highball queues up “Dancing On My Own” for the fourth straight flight. Half a world away, a…
Bibury, Gloucestershire – population 627, average blood pressure 180/110 once the tour buses arrive – has become the unlikely barometer for a planet that can’t decide whether it wants to be Instagrammed or left the hell alone. On paper it’s merely a Cotswold hamlet: honey-coloured stone, trout stream, a row of 14th-century weavers’ cottages so…
London, the city that once ruled a quarter of the planet and now can’t rule its own plumbing, stands as the world’s most charming contradiction. While other former imperial capitals have gracefully retired into museum pieces—Vienna sipping coffee, Istanbul smoking hookah—London insists on remaining relevant through sheer bloody-mindedness and an economy based entirely on Russian…
SEPTEMBER 11TH, GLOBALIZED: How One Tuesday Morning Became the Entire Planet’s Permanent Bad Hair Day By the time the second plane hit, the world’s coffee had already gone cold. In Lagos, a stockbroker paused mid-sip, watching the tiny television bolted to the currency-exchange kiosk; in São Paulo, a late-night talk-show host shrugged offstage, instinctively switching…
The Day the Sky Fell: How September 11 Gifted the World a New Brand of Chaos By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Over the Atlantic Everyone remembers where they were, or so the cliché insists. I was in a Nairobi newsroom watching a fuzzy CRT feed as the second plane performed its murderous…
The Day the World Got a Passport Stamp It Never Asked For Twenty-three years on, and September 11th has become something of a grim annual festival—like Christmas, but with more crying and fewer presents. The planet’s collective trauma has matured into a fine vintage of paranoia, served chilled at every international airport security checkpoint from…
Ghost of Yotei: The Specter Haunting Every Boardroom from Tokyo to Timbuktu By Our Far-Too-Frequent-Flyer Correspondent Tokyo—In the smoky backroom of a Shibuya izakaya last Friday, three salarymen toasted the quietest apocalypse in modern finance. Their clink of lowball glasses barely rose above the J-Pop B-side warbling from a 1990s-era karaoke machine, yet the gesture…
Car Injury Attorneys: The Globe’s New Ambassadors of Ambulance-Chasing Diplomacy By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between a Traffic Circle in Paris and the World’s Longest Tailback Outside Lagos It begins, as most modern tragedies do, with a notification. Somewhere between the squeal of rubber and the ping of an airbag sensor, a fender-bender in São Paulo…
Kurt Russell: The Last American Action Hero the World Actually Tolerates While the planet burns through its third year of geopolitical dumpster fires and economic whack-a-mole, one man has somehow maintained his status as Hollywood’s most exportable tough guy without starting a single international incident. Kurt Russell—actor, former child star, and apparently the only American…
Billy Crudup: The Accidental Global Everyman Somewhere between a Netflix menu and an airport paperback, Billy Crudup keeps turning up like a polite but slightly unnerving houseguest. The American actor—who, for the uninitiated, looks exactly like the man your ex-wife swore was “just a coworker”—has become the quiet export the world didn’t order but now…
The Earth Moves—And So Does the Money A sardonic postcard from the shifting crust By the time you finish this sentence, the planet will have executed roughly 50 imperceptible tremors, one M3+ wobble worthy of a California coffee spill, and—if it’s Monday—an M7+ catastrophe somewhere along the Ring of Fire, that 40,000-kilometer geological necklace we…
The Meth, the Myth, the Mandarin Collar: Bryan Cranston’s Accidental Diplomacy Heisenberg may have started as a high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, but somewhere along the way he became a UNESCO-certified export product—served neat, with a dash of existential dread, in 190 countries and counting. Bryan Cranston, the 67-year-old actor who once wore tighty-whities for…
