Cameron Young: When a Quiet Golf Prodigy Becomes the World’s Latest Metaphor for Everything By the time Cameron Young’s tee shot at the 151st Open Championship settled 370 yards down the fairway—roughly the distance between London and Brussels on an emotional map—the planet had already begun its usual act of projection. A 26-year-old from Scarborough,…
Ben Griffin and the Global Ripple of One Man’s Quiet Rebellion By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Geneva and Despair The name “Ben Griffin” does not, at first blush, ring many international bells. It lacks the Hollywood sheen of a Zelensky or the market-moving swagger of a Musk. Yet in the smoky backrooms of security conferences…
West Bromwich Albion versus Leicester City sounds, at first blush, like a provincial scuffle over who forgot the teabags in the Midlands staff kitchen. Yet in the grand planetary theatre—where Wall Street interns refresh score-apps between margin calls and a Singaporean banker can ruin his sleep schedule for 90 minutes of men hoofing leather—this timeline…
Barkov: the name now ricochets around chat rooms, boardrooms, and dimly lit war rooms from Helsinki to Ho Chi Minh City with the same urgency once reserved for terms like “sub-prime” or “Brexit.” At first glance it sounds like a mid-tier vodka brand or a minor character in a Dostoevsky subplot, but Barkov—part meme, part…
Just Picture It: A Planet-Wide Thought Experiment in the Age of Collapse By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker Foreign Bureau GENEVA—Close your eyes for a moment—unless you’re reading this while driving a Tesla on autopilot on the outskirts of Shenzhen, in which case, please keep them open. Now, just picture it: every human being alive simultaneously trying…
By the time you finish this sentence, the word “aberg” will have been Googled in 37 languages, meme-ified on six continents, and politely ignored by the three governments that actually know what it means. Welcome to the latest linguistic contagion to slip past customs without declaring anything more dangerous than curiosity. Aberg began life as…
Michael Jordan Doesn’t Do Borders, but Borders Do Him Bylines from Belgrade to Beijing still tremble when the man’s silhouette appears on a screen—like a Rorschach test for late-stage capitalism. Thirty-plus years after he first levitated from the free-throw line, His Airness remains the planet’s most efficiently exported American: more durable than democracy, lighter to…
The Kai Trump Phenomenon: How a 17-Year-Old Golfer Became a Geopolitical Rorschach Test By the time the sun rose over Dubai’s Emirates Golf Club last month, the leaderboard had already become a proxy war. At the top, in neat block letters, stood KAI TRUMP—an American teenager whose surname is less a name than an international…
When historians of late-capitalist decadence need a single face to explain how a Manchester United right-midfielder metastasized into a planetary lifestyle brand, they’ll probably pick David Beckham: the haircut that launched a thousand visa stamps. From a cramped East London terrace to the gilded benches of Qatar’s World Cup, Beckham has become the first footballer…
Rachel Scott: How One American Teenager’s Murder Became a Global Parable About Bullets, Brands, and Badly-Behaved Nations By Our Correspondent in the Cheap Seats, Somewhere Between the Hague and a Shopping Mall Let us begin, as the world now insists all stories must, with the disclaimer: Rachel Joy Scott was not a geopolitical strategist, a…
Russ Holliday: The Man Who Outsourced the Apocalypse and Still Missed the Deadline By Our Bureau Chief, Somewhere Between the 38th Parallel and a WeWork in Warsaw PARIS—While most of us were busy doom-scrolling through another Tuesday, a 47-year-old supply-chain savant named Russ Holliday quietly rerouted the planet’s remaining good intentions through a server farm…
Rhode Island: The Smallest State With the Biggest Identity Crisis By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, somewhere between Schiphol and a delayed T.F. Green layover Somewhere on the tectonic shuffleboard between Boston’s self-importance and New York’s delusions of centrality lies Rhode Island, a geographical typo that insists on being treated like a sovereign nation….
