Louise Minchin: How One Woman’s 3:40 a.m. Wake-Up Call Echoes from Kyiv to Caracas By our correspondent, still jet-lagged in Terminal 2 In the grand geopolitical casino, where chips are measured in oil pipelines and rare-earth minerals, Louise Minchin’s decision to step off the BBC Breakfast sofa last autumn might look like spare change sliding…
RAW in the Streets: How Monday Night’s Spandex Diplomacy Travels the Globe By the time the first guitar riff hits in São Paulo, the toast is already burning in Lagos, and a bleary-eyed accountant in Mumbai is wondering why his VPN just died. WWE Raw, that weekly three-hour carnival of suplexes and soap opera, has…
The Curious Afterlife of Robert Howard on a Planet That Keeps Reinventing Barbarism By Our Special Correspondent in the Global Cynics’ Lounge Let us begin with a confession: typing “Robert Howard” into any search engine is like tossing a flaming skull into a barrel of cultural gasoline. Half the planet thinks you mean the Texan…
Drive, the noun, not the verb, has become the planet’s most over-caffeinated export. Every continent now manufactures its own boutique strain—Silicon Valley’s jittery hustle, Shenzhen’s 996 martyr complex, Lagos’ “hustle culture” with matching Spotify playlist, Berlin’s ironic start-up sloganeering delivered over oat-milk flat whites. We are, all seven point nine billion of us, trapped in…
If Earth were a half-finished jigsaw puzzle abandoned on a coffee table, New Zealand would be the pristine piece still in the box—edge intact, colors un-smeared, quietly wondering why everyone else looks so dog-eared. To the rest of the planet, Aotearoa is the last kid picked for dodgeball who turns out to be annoyingly good…
**Balkans Roulette: Why the World Still Keeps One Nervous Eye on Serbia** BELGRADE—Walk the length of Knez Mihailova on any given afternoon and you’ll witness the full, glorious contradiction that is modern Serbia: teenagers in Supreme hoodies filming TikToks against 19th-century facades, pensioners feeding pigeons next to a Nike store, and—if you linger long enough—some…
**The Global Phenomenon of Amanda Holden: Britain’s Export of Manufactured Celebrity** In the grand theater of international fame, where nations compete to produce their most marketable cultural ambassadors, Britain has gifted the world Amanda Holden—a woman whose career trajectory suggests that perseverance, strategic positioning, and the ability to cry on cue during televised talent shows…
If you type “Russian” into a search bar in 2024, the autocomplete suggestions read like a fever dream: “Russian oil price cap,” “Russian war crimes,” “Russian salad dressing – still safe?” Somewhere between the sanctions and the dill, the word itself has become a geopolitical Rorschach test: what you see tells the world exactly where…
Adam Driver and the Global Cult of the Unlikely Leading Man By Dave’s Locker Foreign Correspondent (currently self-exiled in a Reykjavik basement) PARIS—Somewhere between a NATO summit and the collapse of the third streaming platform this week, the planet decided its most bankable export is a 6-foot-3 former Marine with the gait of an irritated…
The planet has always been a messy chessboard, but lately it feels as though someone upended the pieces, set the board on fire, and then demanded we keep playing. From the Black Sea to the South China Sea, from the Sahel to the Amazon, the refrain is the same: one battle after another, each marketed…
Merseyrail: How a 75-Kilometre Northern English Toy Train Became a Global Metaphor for Low Expectations By Our Correspondent in Exile, currently drinking instant coffee on a bench outside Liverpool Central In the pantheon of world transport, Merseyrail rarely sits beside the Shinkansen, the Paris Métro, or whatever fever dream Elon Musk is digging under Miami…
**The Global Report Card: How Ofsted Became the World’s Favorite Educational Punching Bag** While American parents fret over Common Core and Finnish educators smugly sip coffee atop PISA rankings, Britain’s Ofsted inspectors have quietly become the international gold standard for educational anxiety. From Shanghai to São Paulo, education ministers now dream of their own miniature…
