The strange afterlife of Mel Gibson has become a sort of planetary weather vane: wherever the wind blows hardest—populism, cancel culture, streaming wars, or the latest geopolitical flare-up—you’ll find the Australian-American actor-director hovering like a cigar-chomping ghost at the edge of the frame. From Cannes to Caracas, his name still triggers a Pavlovian response: half…
Michelle Beisner-Buck: The Sideline Reporter Who Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Barometer By the time most of the planet’s 195 nations had finished arguing about the shape of the COP28 negotiating table, Michelle Beisner-Buck was already on a tarmac in Qatar, squinting into a desert sunset and asking an NFL linebacker how he planned to “finish…
Ashton Kutcher: The Last American Export That Still Works by our correspondent in a café whose Wi-Fi password is literally “password123” PARIS—On the same day the French government announced yet another bailout for baguette artisans, Ashton Kutcher was in Davos explaining to a roomful of unelected technocrats how blockchain can stop child trafficking. Somewhere in…
The Washington Nationals and the Miami Marlins, two baseball franchises whose combined payrolls could bail out a modestly failing European bank, faced off last night in a contest that the global community greeted with the same polite indifference normally reserved for a UN subcommittee on agricultural tariffs. From the Maracanã to the Marina Bay Sands,…
Chang’an: The City That Invented Globalization, Then Got Rebranded By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk If you want to see the birthplace of twenty-first-century supply-chain anxiety, you need to look 1,400 years backward and 8,000 kilometers east of Davos. Welcome to Chang’an—modern-day Xi’an—where cosmopolitan merchants once haggled over bolts of silk and, presumably, complained that the…
Royals vs Guardians: How a Pedigreed Pastime Became a Global Power Struggle The phrase “Royals vs Guardians” sounds like the elevator pitch for a Netflix fantasy series—complete with brooding heirs, moody castles, and a CGI dragon voiced by a disgraced Oscar winner. In reality, the drama is unfolding on baseball diamonds from Kansas City to…
Set for Life Results: A Global Lottery of Hope and Despair in Six Numbers By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Des Moines and Dar es Salaam Every Friday night, a modest surge of electricity ripples across GMT+0 through GMT+12 as Australia’s Set for Life draws its six polite little digits. The numbers themselves—2, 11, 19, 27,…
Casablanca—where the air smells of Atlantic salt, diesel exhaust, and the faint but unmistakable perfume of geopolitical compromise. From the rooftop of the downtown Hyatt, you can watch the sun set behind a skyline that looks like Dubai’s younger, thriftier cousin—half-finished glass towers next to tile-roofed medinas, all of it ring-fenced by cranes that never…
Renée Zellweger and the Collapsible World Order By our correspondent drinking coffee in three time zones at once In the grand geopolitical casino, you wouldn’t normally bet on a Texan who once pretended to be British for two whole films. Yet Renée Zellweger—yes, the woman who made millions by squeezing into impossibly large knickers and…
Sweden: A Nation So Pleasant It Hurts By Dave’s Locker International Desk (and a lukewarm cup of overpriced filter coffee) STOCKHOLM—Somewhere between the 14th-century cobblestones and the 5G antenna disguised as a birch tree, Sweden has managed to become a geopolitical Rorschach test for the rest of the planet. To American progressives, it’s a pastel-coloured…
The Eternal Derby of Inconvenience Guatemala vs Panama, or How to Misplace a Canal and Still Win the Century By the time you finish this paragraph, a container ship the length of lower Manhattan will have slipped through the Panama Canal, earning the Panamanian treasury roughly the GDP of a midsize Baltic nation. Meanwhile, 600…
Ann Ming: The Woman Who Turned a Mother’s Grief Into the World’s Slowest-Motion Revenge By the time Ann Ming finally watched her daughter’s killer convicted for a second time—14 years after he’d literally laughed at the verdict—the rest of the planet had already moved on to fresher horrors: two Gulf wars, the birth of social…
