A Parisian café, late evening: two diplomats from rival continents trade theories about whether the most seismic Anglo-American export since the Beatles is, in fact, a septuagenarian advice columnist from Indiana. “Carroll?” the French attaché shrugs, swirling Bordeaux. “She’s the reason my president now cites U.S. defamation law in campaign rallies. Mon Dieu, the reach…
Indianapolis: A Flat, Friendly Fiefdom Where the World Quietly Reboots By our man in the corn belt, still wondering why every flight here lands next to a steakhouse Most foreigners can’t find Indianapolis on a map that already has a red “You-Are-Here” arrow pointing at it. That’s a pity, because the city is a low-stakes…
The continent that once carved the planet into colonies with the enthusiasm of a chef slicing truffles now finds itself an elegant, slightly anxious dinner guest at the global feast it once catered. Europe, that antique mosaic of kingdoms, republics, and tax shelters, is busy rehearsing humility while the rest of the world scrolls past…
**The World’s Most Dangerous Reality Show: Ukraine’s Geopolitical Theater** Two years into Europe’s most unnecessary war since someone decided the Habsburgs needed a slight nudge in 1914, Ukraine has become the planet’s most depressing reality television series—except the contestants can’t vote themselves off the island, and the producers are nuclear powers with questionable impulse control….
Rainn Wilson: How a Paper-Selling Schrute Became the Planet’s Unlikely Moral Compass By Our Man in Copenhagen, Still Wondering When Satire Died If you had told a roomful of mid-2000s cubicle drones that the beet-farming, Battlestar-loving oddity on their screens would one day be schooling the United Nations on climate grief, they’d have assumed you’d…
Only Murders in the Building: How Three Lonely New Yorkers Became the World’s Most Relatable Diplomats By Our Bureau Chief, Still Recovering from a Long Layover in Newark It began, as most modern catastrophes do, with a podcast. Somewhere between the collapse of global supply chains and the rise of artisanal oxygen bars, three residents…
The United States, that vast laboratory of late-stage capitalism and earnest flag-waving, has always insisted on packaging itself in neat little bundles. Fifty of them, to be precise—states, commonwealths, and one District that pays taxes without representation, a civic arrangement that would make any European monarch blush. To the rest of the planet, this tidy…
Premier League Hall of Fame: A Velvet-Rope Mausoleum for the Planet’s Most Lucrative Circus By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere over the Atlantic Let’s get one thing straight before the brass band starts: the Premier League is not a football competition, it’s a planetary mood-stabiliser. Every weekend from Lagos to Lapland, 3.2 billion…
LUSAKA—Somewhere between the copper mines that still glint like the dreams of a 1970s commodities trader and the Casablanca skyline that Instagram insists is “just like Spain, but cheaper,” Zambia and Morocco have wandered into the same geopolitical boxing ring. Their fight card isn’t a World Cup qualifier—though God knows both nations could use the…
If you happen to be sipping an overpriced flat white in Melbourne, queueing for a soggy crêpe in Paris, or silently judging the karaoke choices in a Seoul basement bar, chances are the name “Ben Shapiro” has ricocheted through your phone speaker at least once. The 5-foot-9 human reductio-ad-absurdum machine has become a rare American…
**The Accidental Tourist: Paul Nowak and the Global Search for Meaning in a Meaningless World** In the grand theater of international affairs, where nuclear powers play chicken over shipping lanes and billionaires rocket themselves into space for sport, the curious case of Paul Nowak emerges as a peculiar footnote to our collective existential crisis. While…
KATHMANDU—While the rest of the planet obsesses over which billionaire will colonize Mars first, a modest Himalayan republic the size of Arkansas keeps quietly demonstrating how to survive the twenty-first century without losing its soul—or its sense of irony. Nepal, population 30 million and falling off the map every time Google’s servers hiccup, has become…
