Ofsted Unleashes ‘New Framework’ – World Watches in Mild Panic By Our Correspondent in an Undisclosed Café, Somewhere Between Heathrow and Existential Dread LONDON—Yesterday, in a conference room scented faintly of instant coffee and impending judgment, Ofsted unveiled its latest inspection framework. Across the planet, education ministers from Seoul to São Paulo leaned forward like…
Sinaloa Cartel Arrests: A Global Game of Whac-a-Mole Where the Mole Has a Swiss Banker By the time Mexican marines politely invited Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Joaquín Guzmán López to leave their private jet in El Paso last Thursday, the price of cocaine in Rotterdam had already dipped 8 % and the peso had…
**Shin Bet: The World’s Most Efficient Neighborhood Watch with a License to Kill** While the rest of us were busy arguing about privacy settings on social media, Israel’s Shin Bet has been quietly perfecting the art of knowing what you had for breakfast before you’ve finished digesting it. Welcome to the international gold standard of…
The Barclays Center, that rust-colored coliseum squatting at the crossroads of Flatbush and Atlantic, has never really been about basketball. From the moment its weathered-steel carapace rose above Brooklyn’s brownstone quilt, it was clear the structure had higher ambitions than merely housing a mediocre NBA franchise. Today, as ticket prices outpace inflation in most emerging-market…
**Skegness: How a British Seaside Town Became the World’s Cautionary Tale** The world has its share of glamorous destinations—Paris, Tokyo, the Maldives—and then there’s Skegness, Lincolnshire’s crown jewel of managed expectations. While international headlines obsess over Dubai’s latest artificial island or Singapore’s newest infinity pool, this modest North Sea outpost has quietly become something far…
The Paper Shield: How Constitutions Became the World’s Most Popular Fiction Genre By our correspondent in the departures lounge of a failing republic GENEVA—While you were binge-watching constitutional crises on mute in the airport bar, 195 countries were quietly updating their national origin stories. The product? A tidy 800-word PDF that promises to turn blood-soaked…
Martin Sheen: The Accidental Statesman Hollywood Never Ordered By Dave’s Locker International Bureau Picture the scene: a war-fatigued planet, circa 1982, tuning in to watch a fictional U.S. president fling his jacket over a chair and wonder aloud whether the Doomsday Clock came with a snooze button. The actor behind that Oval Office catharsis was,…
Doha, Qatar – a city where air-conditioned stadiums sit like chilled mausoleums in the desert, monuments to the idea that money can, in fact, buy you shade. From the vantage point of anyone who’s ever queued for a visa or waited for a delayed budget flight, Qatar is less a country and more a well-financed…
Jerry O’Connell, the American actor whose career trajectory has careened from precocious child star to genial television fixture, is hardly the sort of person one would expect to find at the center of a geopolitical Rorschach test. Yet, as streaming algorithms colonize living rooms from Lagos to Lahore and late-night talk-show clips ricochet across Weibo…
Doha’s Unruly Child: Al Jazeera, Twenty-Eight Years of Making Friends and Enemies in Equal Measure By our correspondent who once spent three weeks in a Cairo hotel room watching AJ Arabic on mute just to watch the wallpaper move. In the beginning there was the BBC World Service, and it was…British. Then, in 1996, Qatar—a…
Naomi Watts: A 21st-Century Export More Stable Than Most Currencies By Our Correspondent in a City That Used to Have Reliable Wi-Fi Every era gets the blonde it deserves. The 1950s gave us Grace Kelly, a Hitchcock ice-sculpture who retired into royalty—quaint, like cash that still clinked. The 1980s coughed up Madonna, a self-propelled IPO…
Elizabeth Gilbert, the American author whose passport now contains more stamps than an Italian post office, has become the de-facto cartographer of the modern soul’s grand tour. Ever since she dragged 10 million readers through the trattorias of Rome, the ashrams of India, and the rice paddies of Bali, her memoir “Eat, Pray, Love” has…
