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…
Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, Is the Last Global Fairy Tale Standing—And That Should Terrify Us All By Our Correspondent in Self-Imposed Exile from Several Commonwealth Realms Somewhere between the collapse of the British pound and the collapse of British politics lies Catherine, Princess of Wales—still smiling that serene, orthodontically perfect smile while the rest…
Melania Trump: The World’s Most Expensive Sphinx Finally Speaks—Sort Of By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent, currently self-medicating with Slovenian wine in an undisclosed Balkan café The global press corps collectively dropped its lukewarm espresso this week when Melania Trump—international woman of mystery, former catalogue sphinx, and current resident of a gilded Florida mausoleum—stepped back into the…
Lucy Lawless and the Fine Art of Global Iconoclasm by “Roving” Rodrigo Valdez, filed from the last decent bar in Auckland that still serves journalists on expense accounts Auckland—Somewhere between the 1998 Asian financial crisis and the 2023 global polycrisis, the planet decided it needed a six-foot Kiwi warrior princess to explain the concept of…
The Mountain State’s Weekly Mirage: How West Virginia’s Lottery Became a Global Parable of Hope and Desperation By Dave’s Locker International Desk If you squint hard enough from the right altitude, the West Virginia Lottery looks like a modest civic ritual: $1 tickets, pastel scratch-offs, and the nightly televised drum-roll that temporarily distracts 1.8 million…
Generation Z: The Planet’s First Global Cohort Learns to Live on the Ashes of Optimism By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Jakarta and Johannesburg If you want to meet Generation Z in the wild, skip the TikTok montages and try the overnight bus from Nairobi to Kampala. You’ll find them trading memes about climate collapse in…
Mozambique’s fisheries minister is weeping into her morning espresso. The yen just hit a 34-year low. Somewhere in Lagos a data-center hums loud enough to drown out the muezzin. And yet, on every continent, a certain strain of disaffected human is still pressing play on “How Soon Is Now?”—proof that even as the planet overheats,…
Olly Murs and the Quiet Collapse of the Post-Brexit Pop Empire A dispatch from the wreckage of global soft power, with sequins. By the time the first missile fragments rained down over the Red Sea, Olly Murs was somewhere above the Persian Gulf in seat 3A, rehearsing falsetto runs for an Abu Dhabi brunch crowd…
Mamdani: A Name That Travels—Sometimes with a Passport, Sometimes Without By Our Man in Every Terminal Lounge If you say “Mamdani” in a faculty club in New York, you’ll summon a polite nod to Mahmood Mamdani, the Ugandan polymath whose books on colonial ghosts and post-colonial hangover are heavier than the guilt in an IMF…
