The Funicular: Humanity’s Quietly Desperate Uphill Climb by “Correspondent at Large, Altitude Varies” From the cliff-hugging cars of Valparaíso to the sweat-soaked rails of Hong Kong’s Peak Tram, the funicular is the planet’s most honest confession: we are tired, we are late, and gravity has won again. While diplomats haggle over carbon targets and billionaires…
Turkey vs Serbia: When Two Middle Powers Decide to Throw Elbows in the Balkan Playground By the time you read this, the latest diplomatic “flare-up” between Ankara and Belgrade may have already been memory-holed by the next algorithmic outrage. Still, for those keeping score on how small, proud nations weaponize history, the Turkey–Serbia spat is…
Malcolm Gladwell, the Canadian-born pop-intellectual with the hair of a startled alpaca and the delivery of a bedtime-storyteller who moonlights as a management consultant, has managed to export a very particular brand of reassuring explanation to every corner of the globe. From Lagos traffic jams to Tokyo bullet-train lounges, airport bookstores still stack The Tipping…
Beyond the Gates: How the World’s VIP Rope Became a Geopolitical Fault Line By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Over the Pacific, Seat 47B For centuries, “beyond the gates” meant pasture land, graveyards, or the occasional dragon. Today it’s where the planet’s real decisions are made: the velvet-roped lounges of Davos, the blast-proof checkpoints of COP summits,…
UMass Lowell: How a Former Textile Trade School Quietly Became the Canary in Global Higher-Ed’s Coal Mine By Our Man in the Commonwealth, Nursing a Dunkin Cold Brew and Existential Dread LOWELL, Massachusetts—Somewhere between the rust-red brick of a repurposed mill and the aggressively optimistic glass of a new “Innovation Hub,” the University of Massachusetts…
Paris—In the age when a TikTok of a cat sneezing can upend the Dow Jones, the curious case of LaMonica McIver has become the latest proof that geopolitics now behaves like a drunk algorithm. McIver, a city-council president from Newark, New Jersey—population smaller than a Shanghai subway car—has been elevated by the gods of cable…
The United Nations has climate summits, Davos has its alpine power brunches, and the global poor have… MrBeast. Somewhere between the two-billionth view and the latest video in which he cures 1,000 blind people with the casual flourish of a man ordering dim sum, Jimmy Donaldson has quietly become the most influential foreign-aid program the…
PARIS — In a world where geopolitical alliances crumble faster than a croissant in July, one American export has managed to retain diplomatic immunity: Hailee Steinfeld’s face. The 27-year-old singer-actress-emoji-enthusiast has quietly become the soft-power equivalent of an aircraft carrier, bobbing along the 24-hour news cycle projecting cultural hegemony without ever firing a shot—unless you…
After a week in which global headlines ping-ponged between genocidal drones, collapsing democracies, and whatever new cryptocurrency Jesus was minting this month, the name Jasveen Sangha arrived on the world’s front pages like a polite cough at the end of a bar fight. Most readers outside California first encountered her in the grainy federal mugshot:…
Man of Tomorrow: A Species Still Learning to Tie Its Own Shoelaces By Our World-Weary Correspondent in Residence Geneva – While the rest of us were doom-scrolling through inflation charts and wondering whether our passports will expire before the next coup, the United Nations quietly unveiled its latest white paper: “The Man of Tomorrow: A…
From the Ruins of the American Empire, a Six-Stringed Consolation Prize Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk | 12 June 2025 Paris—It is 2 a.m. on the Rive Gauche and the bistros have finally run out of rosé. Somewhere between a tab of questionable MDMA and a heated debate on whether NATO still exists, a busker breaks…
Marvel’s Angela: How a Forgotten Spawn Sidekick Quietly Conquered the Global Imagination By A. S. de Winter, International Cultural Correspondent Somewhere between a NATO summit and the latest crypto scandal, the planet’s collective id decided that what it really needed was a six-foot-tall, platinum-haired Valkyrie-lawyer who can audit your taxes and then split you in…
