The Eurostar, that sleek steel eel that slithers beneath the English Channel, is often praised as a triumph of European cooperation. In reality, it’s a 400-metre-long metaphor for the continent’s ability to charge premium prices for the privilege of queuing together. Board in London, debark in Paris, Brussels or Amsterdam—three capitals that have perfected the…
Down Under and Further Down: How Australia vs New Zealand Became the World’s Nicest Blood Feud By Our Correspondent, filing from a press lounge that still smells faintly of burned flat white SYDNEY—Somewhere between the 1,400-kilometre stretch of the Tasman Sea, two of Earth’s most agreeable nations have spent the past century locked in a…
Supreme Court, Supreme Leader, Supreme Pizza—somewhere in the bureaucratic ether the word “supreme” has been upgraded from adjective to sovereign noun, and the planet is dutifully genuflecting. From the marble colonnades of Washington to the neon alleyways of Tokyo, “supreme” has become the ultimate linguistic passport: it opens doors, empties wallets, and occasionally topples governments….
Honda Prelude: A Two-Door Coupé That Outlived the Cold War, the Internet, and Your Last Relationship By the time the final Prelude rolled off the Suzuka line in 2001, it had already become something no marketing department could script: a rolling fossil of the late-20th-century promise that technology might actually save us. While the planet…
Martha Plimpton: The Accidental Global Cassandra If you mention Martha Plimpton at a dinner party in Lagos, Berlin, or Buenos Aires, you are statistically more likely to be met with polite confusion than if you mention “climate change” or “crypto bankruptcy.” Yet the actress-activist—once the snarling teen outlaw of 1980s suburban cinema—has quietly become a…
San Salvador, El Salvador – If you squint past the heat haze, the place looks almost hopeful. Glass towers glint where bullet casings once did, Bitcoin ATMs wink like slot machines, and the president’s Twitter feed is a 24/7 motivational poster with the occasional AK-47 cameo. From Berlin boardrooms to Beijing Belt-and-Road spreadsheets, the world…
DAVID HOPKINSON: THE MAN WHO ACCIDENTALLY BECAME A GLOBAL POLICY WEATHER VANE By Our Correspondent Somewhere over the Mid-Atlantic If you’ve never heard of David Hopkinson, congratulations—you’ve been spared the vertigo of watching a mid-level British civil servant mutate, overnight, into the planet’s favourite geopolitical Rorschach test. In March, Hopkinson—until recently a modest director at…
Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, Is the Last Global Fairy Tale Standing—And That Should Terrify Us All By Our Correspondent in Self-Imposed Exile from Several Commonwealth Realms Somewhere between the collapse of the British pound and the collapse of British politics lies Catherine, Princess of Wales—still smiling that serene, orthodontically perfect smile while the rest…
Melania Trump: The World’s Most Expensive Sphinx Finally Speaks—Sort Of By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently self-medicating with Slovenian wine in an undisclosed Balkan café The global press corps collectively dropped its lukewarm espresso this week when Melania Trump—international woman of mystery, former catalogue sphinx, and current resident of a gilded Florida mausoleum—stepped back into the…
Lucy Lawless and the Fine Art of Global Iconoclasm by “Roving” Rodrigo Valdez, filed from the last decent bar in Auckland that still serves journalists on expense accounts Auckland—Somewhere between the 1998 Asian financial crisis and the 2023 global polycrisis, the planet decided it needed a six-foot Kiwi warrior princess to explain the concept of…
The Mountain State’s Weekly Mirage: How West Virginia’s Lottery Became a Global Parable of Hope and Desperation By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you squint hard enough from the right altitude, the West Virginia Lottery looks like a modest civic ritual: $1 tickets, pastel scratch-offs, and the nightly televised drum-roll that temporarily distracts 1.8 million…
Generation Z: The Planet’s First Global Cohort Learns to Live on the Ashes of Optimism By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Jakarta and Johannesburg If you want to meet Generation Z in the wild, skip the TikTok montages and try the overnight bus from Nairobi to Kampala. You’ll find them trading memes about climate collapse in…
