Glenn Close, the woman who has made a career of staring into the abyss until the abyss politely asks for an autograph, turns out to be our most reliable global barometer of how spectacularly we’re failing as a species. From her perch in whatever time zone currently hosts the nearest film festival jury, she has…
DORTMUND—Population 588,250, latitude 51.5136° N, longitude 7.4653° E—looks, at first glance, like the kind of place cartographers label with a shrug: “somewhere in the Ruhr.” Yet the city has improbably elbowed its way onto the global stage with the subtlety of a pickpocket at Davos. Its weapons? A football club whose yellow wall of ultras…
The Fall of the Try-Guys’ Golden Boy: Ned Fulmer’s Infidelity Scandal as Global Metaphor By the time the news reached a jet-lagged crowd at a rooftop bar in Singapore, the bartender—an economics PhD moonlighting for fun—was already using Ned Fulmer’s implosion as shorthand for the West’s broader credibility crisis. “One minute you’re the wholesome ‘wife…
Brentford v Aston Villa: A Microscopic Battle in the Theatre of the Absurd It is 15:00 BST on a Saturday that could, in theory, be spent hiking the Dolomites or finally reading the small print on your mortgage. Instead, 17,250 humans cram into a West London suburb that smells faintly of diesel and existential dread,…
Adam Schiff: The Last Man Standing Between Global Order and Reality-TV Geopolitics By Our Correspondent Somewhere East of the Potomac When Adam Schiff strides into a Brussels think-tank these days, the room quiets the way it once did for Kissinger—except the wine is biodynamic and the audience is doom-scrolling TikTok under the table. To much…
Juventus vs Borussia Dortmund: A Timeline of Two Empires Pretending Everything Is Fine By “Il Conte” Malatesta, Senior Continental Misanthrope 1993 – The Cold War Is Over, So Let’s Fight Over Midfield The first UEFA Cup final between these two continental super-brands lands in the same year Bill Clinton is learning the saxophone and the…
**The United Nations: Humanity’s Most Ambitious Group Project That Refuses to End** In the grand theater of international relations, where nations perform an eternal ballet of cooperation and competition, the United Nations stands as perhaps humanity’s most expensive and elaborate piece of performance art. Born from the ashes of World War II—because nothing motivates international…
Robin Wright, the accidental oracle of American decline, landed in London last week to promote her latest film and promptly offered the British press a masterclass in how to sound cosmopolitan while selling them their own post-Brexit melancholy back to them. The woman who once embodied the icy perfection of a Beltway power-wife now drifts…
The Oklahoma Supreme Court Rides Again—This Time Without a Global Posse By Our Man in the Cheap Seats, Still Recovering from the Last Judicial Rodeo OKLAHOMA CITY—While the rest of the planet was busy arguing over submarine deals, algorithmic revolutions, and whether the Arctic will finish melting before your next mortgage payment, the Supreme Court…
Villareal: The Tiny Spanish Town That Accidentally Became a Global Metaphor By Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk If you type “Villareal” into a search engine from Lagos, Lagos state or Lagos, Portugal, you’ll be offered two distinct destinies: a sun-bleached Mediterranean municipality of 51,000 souls, and a yellow-submarine-themed football club that just fired its fifth…
Ranvir Singh, the British-Indian newsreader who has spent the last decade waltzing across the UK’s breakfast sofas with the unflappable poise of a diplomat at a food fight, has suddenly become an international talking point. Why? Because in a world where credibility is measured in retweets and geopolitical stability is decided by whatever a billionaire…
Puerto Rico: A Tiny Island Teaching the World How to Be Precariously Important By Dave’s Far-Flung Correspondent, nursing a Medalla on a balcony that still lists slightly after the last hurricane From the air, Puerto Rico looks like a misplaced semicolon in the Caribbean sentence, a speck of land so close to Venezuela that it…
