Sky News: A Small Island’s Loud Megaphone That the World Can’t Mute By Dave’s Locker International Desk LONDON—In the great bazaar of global news, Sky News is that stall run by the bloke who insists his artisanal hogwash is ethically sourced while simultaneously flogging you a half-price knock-off Rolex. Born in 1989 as Rupert Murdoch’s…
The World According to Auntie: Why the BBC Still Matters (and Still Gets Yelled at by Everyone) By the time the Greenwich pips finish pipping, the British Broadcasting Corporation has already been accused of colonial nostalgia, metropolitan elitism, and—on a slow Tuesday—ruining the nation’s tea by running a story about oat milk. Such is the…
The Spy Who Never Retired: How James Bond Became the Last Remaining Global Soft-Power Superpower By Our Man in Geneva with the Hangover When the credits rolled on *No Time to Die* in 2021, MI6’s most flamboyant employee technically ceased to exist in the continuity—blown to a respectful, socially-distanced mist somewhere off the coast of…
A Flock of Duggar-Lites Takes Flight: The Global Aftershocks of ‘Bringing Up Bates’ Going Off-Air By L. Marlowe, International Cultural Correspondent Dateline: Istanbul, 03:17 a.m. local—because insomnia is the only truly universal language. For the uninitiated, Bringing Up Bates was the Appalachian answer to a question nobody outside the contiguous 48 had ever thought to…
Somewhere in a nameless bar in Manila, a Korean hedge-fund analyst, a Nigerian logistics broker, and a retired FARC accountant are watching the same pixelated stream of the New York Yankees’ box score. None of them have ever set foot in the Bronx—they couldn’t pick Aaron Judge out of a police lineup—but the flickering digits…
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…
