Lucid: The Word the World Pretends to Understand While Hitting Snooze By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Jet Lag and Existential Dread Lucid, adj. — clear in expression or thought; rational; easily understood. A lovely, optimistic scrap of Latin that somehow survived the fall of Rome, two world wars, and an internet full of conspiracy theories…
Deestroying: The Global Art of Making Nothing From Everything Paris, 03:42 a.m. local time – Somewhere between the Seine and the 24-hour pâtisserie that will eventually outlive us all, a city worker in a hi-viz vest is feeding another perfectly functional park bench into an orange shredder. The bench was installed last spring. It will…
Jennifer Garner and the Geopolitics of Nice: How America’s Sweetheart Became a Soft-Power WMD By our correspondent in the neutral wasteland between Hollywood and reality PARIS—While the Northern Hemisphere frets over ballistic missile tests and the Southern Hemisphere drowns in micro-plastics, the United States has quietly deployed its most destabilizing weapon yet: Jennifer Garner. Not…
**The Global Rashee Rice Reckoning: How One Grain Became the World’s Most Overachieving Carbohydrate** In the pantheon of foods that have accidentally conquered the world, rashee rice sits somewhere between quinoa (the grain that made Bolivian farmers unable to afford their own lunch) and avocados (the fruit that funds Mexican drug cartels). This particular strain…
Toronto, the city that can’t decide whether it’s New York with healthcare or Cleveland with delusions, has become the world’s polite laboratory for the question: “What happens when global capital, global talent, and global anxiety all collide in a place where the sidewalks apologize for your own bad mood?” From an international vantage point—say, a…
Mumbai: A City-Sized Metaphor for the Planet’s Nervous Breakdown By Dave’s Foreign Correspondent-at-Large, still jet-lagged from the last red-eye Mumbai, formerly Bombay, currently “Beta Test for the Apocalypse,” doesn’t so much welcome visitors as it frisks them for loose change and existential dread. Step off the plane at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International—Terminal 2, where the…
Rio de Janeiro—population 6.2 million, GDP roughly the size of Slovakia, and the only city on Earth where a sunrise over Guanabara Bay competes for attention with a sunrise over a favela’s rooftop militia—has long served as global shorthand for “paradise with caveats.” The caveats, of course, are what keep foreign correspondents in gainful employment:…
Paris, May – Somewhere between the baguette crumbs and the drone debris, the Franco-Ukrainian pas de deux has entered its third year, and the orchestra is still tuning the same dissonant chord. On the surface, Emmanuel Macron plays the dashing understudy to Volodymyr Zelensky’s blood-spattered lead, pledging Mirage jets, long-range missiles, and—because this is France—an…
Italy vs Estonia: A Mediterranean Opera Meets a Baltic Ballad—And the World Watches the Encore By Dave’s Locker Global Affairs Desk ROME—Picture the scene: on one side, a boot-shaped colossus that once taught the planet how to conjugate love, war, and pasta. On the other, a country whose population could fit inside a single Roman…
Romania vs. Canada: A Bloodless Cold War Over Maple Syrup, Mici, and Existential Dread By Ileana Drăghiciu, Bucharest Correspondent-at-Large The world’s attention has been trained on flashpoints with better lighting—Gaza, Kyiv, the South China Sea—but quietly, in the fluorescent glow of hotel conference rooms and trade-fair booths, Romania and Canada have been circling each other…
Emma Reynolds is not famous, yet her name has begun to surface in the kind of hushed, late-night Slack channels where risk officers and cyber-insurance brokers trade gallows humor about the end of civilization. To the wider world she remains a footnote, but footnotes, as any historian will tell you, are where the devil hides…
Jason Manford: The Comedian Who Accidentally Became a Geopolitical Weathervane When the first missiles landed in Kyiv last February, global Twitter feeds briefly synchronized around a single, improbable question: “What would Jason Manford do?” The query, posted by a bored Ukrainian conscript from a Lviv bomb shelter, trended in 42 countries within hours—not because Manford…
