State of Play: The Great Global Game Where Everyone’s Losing but Pretending to Win By the time you read this, the scoreboard has already changed—but don’t worry, the scorekeepers never agreed on the rules anyway. From Washington to Wuhan, Davos to Dakar, the phrase “state of play” has metastasized from sports cliché to geopolitical diagnosis,…
Bournemouth Echo: The Local Paper That Went Global Without Leaving Dorset By Correspondent-at-Large, Dave’s Locker In the grand, gaudy circus of world news, the Bournemouth Echo sits somewhere between the bearded lady and the fire-eater: provincial, slightly singed, yet weirdly compelling to anyone who’s ever watched humanity attempt to juggle flaming torches while riding a…
**Bangkok’s Eternal Return: Why Thailand Keeps Seducing the World (and Then Sending It Home in a Tuk-Tuk of Regret)** By the time your flight descends through the petrochemical haze above Suvarnabhumi, you’ve already joined a centuries-old parade of outsiders who arrived certain they could bend the Kingdom to their will. The Portuguese came with cannon,…
Jim Carrey: A One-Man Sanctions Package on Hollywood and the Planet By the time you read this, somewhere between Mumbai and Montevideo somebody is still quoting “Alrighty then!” as if it were a UN resolution. That’s the geopolitical reach of James Eugene Carrey, the rubber-faced Canadian export whose greatest trick was convincing the world that…
**Rapture Ready: The Global Implications of Apocalypse Tourism** *From Jerusalem to Jakarta, the curious phenomenon of rapture-ready Christians is reshaping geopolitics, economics, and the occasional real estate transaction.* While most of humanity stumbles through Tuesday afternoon blissfully unaware of their impending doom, a peculiar subset of Christians worldwide have their bags packed for a rather…
Robert De Niro, International Man of (Mild) Mystery By Our Correspondent in an Airport Lounge Where the Wi-Fi Charges by the Minute There is a peculiar kind of diplomatic immunity that celebrities acquire once their faces have been projected onto every screen from Lagos to Lagos—yes, both the Nigerian and Portuguese ones. Robert De Niro…
The phrase “golden knights” once conjured images of armored crusaders galloping toward Jerusalem, pockets heavy with Byzantine coins they definitely intended to give back. Today the same words are brandished by everyone from a U.S. Army parachute team (who spell it “Golden Knights” and land in stadiums rather than on peasants) to gleaming cryptocurrency funds,…
Jeopardy Today: A Planet-Wide Pop Quiz Nobody Studied For By our jaded foreign correspondent, still jet-lagged since 2016 GENEVA—Somewhere between the coffee that tastes like burnt passport stamps and the 3 a.m. cable news ticker, it dawns on me: the entire world has become one never-ending Daily Double. Only the stakes are actual nukes, supply…
**Anthony Volpe: The Shortstop Who Proves America Still Exports Dreams Instead of Democracy** *From our international desk, where we watch American exceptionalism strike out in real time* The global village received another shipment of American mythology this week, packaged in pinstripes and delivered via a 22-year-old from Manhattan who apparently decided that $3.7 million wasn’t…
Somewhere between the fluorescent glow of a Long Island Walgreens and the flickering LED of a Tokyo gaming café, the name “Matt Cardona” still surfaces—an improbable passport stamp on the battered itinerary of global pop culture. To the uninitiated, he’s merely a professional wrestler who once moonlighted as a zombie, a YouTuber who unboxed action…
The Highway of Broken Dreams: León to Mazatlán and the Global Art of Moving On by Diego Serrano, Senior Correspondent for Things That Look Like Progress™ Somewhere between León’s industrial smog and Mazatlán’s Instagram-ready sunsets, a four-lane slab of asphalt has become the newest Rorschach test for the 21st-century psyche. Locals call it the Autopista…
**The Ballad of Puebla-Pachuca: When Mexican Football Mirrors Our Global Existential Crisis** In the grand theater of human folly, where nations rise and fall like tide-tossed sandcastles, there exists a peculiar spectacle that somehow captures our collective predicament with startling accuracy: a Liga MX match between Puebla and Pachuca. Yes, dear reader, while the world’s…
