Laura Ingraham: America’s Favorite Export of Manufactured Outrage Hits the Global Market By a Correspondent Who Has Seen Angrier Sunrises in Cheaper Countries Somewhere between the koi ponds of Davos and the karaoke bars of Seoul, an odd export from the United States has quietly gone viral: Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host whose nightly…
**The Bishop Who Streams Salvation: Robert Barron’s Digital Empire and the Vatican’s Netflix Strategy** ROME—While Silicon Valley titans race to colonize Mars and Wall Street wizards invent new ways to lose other people’s money, Bishop Robert Barron has quietly built something far more ambitious: a global Catholic media empire that makes Netflix’s content library look…
Chief Justice John Roberts is a man who, for reasons best known to himself, decided to spend his twilight years refereeing a constitutional demolition derby in which every contestant is driving a monster truck labeled “Originalism,” “Stare Decisis,” or “Whatever Gets Me on the 6 o’clock News.” From Lagos to Lisbon, bureaucrats, barristers, and bored…
From the banks of the Danube to the neon canyons of Tokyo, the name Alex Jones now elicits the same weary smirk once reserved for flat-earthers and people who believe the moon landing was staged on a Kubrick set. Yet the American carnival barker in a tactical vest has become, improbably, a global export—proof that…
Stockton University: A Quaint American Campus Where the World’s Problems Go for a Gap Year By Our Correspondent Who Still Owes the Bursar GALLOWAY, New Jersey—Somewhere between the Pine Barrens and the existential dread of late-stage capitalism sits Stockton University, a 2,000-acre arboretum of contradictions. To the average European it looks like a polite Scandinavian…
Bethune-Cookman: A Tiny Florida Campus that Explains Why the Planet is Still on Fire Dateline – Daytona Beach, Florida – or, as it is known in the darker corners of Davos, “Exhibit A in the Tragedy of the Commons.” From a satellite’s bored eye, Bethune-Cookman University looks like a modest cluster of red-brick optimism wedged…
Baton Rouge, Louisiana – It is a safe bet that most people on the planet have never Googled “Southern University,” yet the phrase still manages to radiate a gravitational pull for anyone wondering how a former slave colony quietly reinvented itself as an exporter of culture, football trauma, and contradictory optimism. From Lagos to Lahore,…
Wye Valley: The Last Scenic Cul-de-Sac Before the World Ends There is a quiet, green scar running between England and Wales where the River Wye performs its slow-motion escape from the 21st century. On a good day the place looks like a Tolkien screensaver—hills tossed like crumpled bed linen, sheep posing as unpaid extras, and…
Alabama State University: A Small Campus in the American South That Still Manages to Matter to the Rest of the Planet By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk Montgomery, Alabama – While the rest of the world obsesses over which septuagenarian will next get the nuclear codes, a modest cluster of red-brick buildings on the banks of…
From the ashram to the algorithm: Jay Shetty’s planetary takeover By Our Correspondent, somewhere between Heathrow and existential despair If you’ve flown long-haul recently, you’ve probably seen Jay Shetty’s face staring at you from the seat-back screen like a benevolent flight attendant who’s swapped safety demos for Sanskrit aphorisms. The former Hindu monk turned “urban…
**The Little Historically Black University That Could (and Did) While the World Burned** In an era when American higher education has become a grotesque parody of itself—where universities resemble luxury resorts with football teams and student debt rivals the GDP of medium-sized nations—Hampton University stands as a peculiar anomaly. This 156-year-old institution in coastal Virginia…
Virginia State University, an HBCU founded in 1882 in Ettrick, sits roughly 6,700 miles from the nearest Russian artillery position in Donetsk, 4,300 miles from the nearest Chinese rare-earth mine in Inner Mongolia, and precisely one algorithmic click away from every bored teenager on the planet. Yet the institution’s latest convulsions—budget shortfalls, enrollment dips, and…
